How to Solve Impossible Problems

By Jennifer Clinehens

No matter your field of expertise, every day you're presented with seemingly impossible challenges. Issues that you or your company can't seem to crack, even after weeks, months, or years of trying.

How do you approach these impossible challenges? Do you have a strategy that you follow, or do you just hold a brainstorming session and hope for the best? Do you tell yourself, "Think harder!" and pray inspiration will strike?

There's a better way to solve problems like these — improve the quality of your thinking. Better thinking, problem-solving, and reasoning are skills. They can be developed through self-examination, learning new frameworks, and expanding our mental models.

Lucky for us, brilliant thinkers, creators, entrepreneurs, and philosophers — people like Elon Musk, Aristotle, Charlie Munger, Issac Newton, Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Frederick Douglass, Maya Angelou, and Henry Ford — have left behind documentation, frameworks, and tools for considering impossible problems.

In "How to Solve Impossible Problems," author Jennifer L. Clinehens (Choice Hacking, CX That Sings) presents 7 such tools to improve our thinking and help us solve what feel like insurmountable challenges. In each chapter she gives specific, actionable advice, real-world examples, and in a free companion course (available February 21, 2022) provides worksheets to help apply each principle.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jennifer Clinehens
• Release date: Feb 18, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201188474

Book preview

How to Solve Impossible Problems

HOW TO SOLVE IMPOSSIBLE PROBLEMS

A GUIDE TO THE THINKING TOOLS OF CEOS, PHILOSOPHERS, INVENTORS, AND BILLIONAIRES

JENNIFER L. CLINEHENS

PUBLISHED BY: CHOICE HACKING LTD

Copyright © 2022 by Jennifer L. Clinehens and Choice Hacking Ltd

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

To Rob, whose love and support makes it all possible xx

CONTENTS

Don’t forget your FREE Companion Course

When you finish reading…

Introduction

I. Thinking Traps That Kill Problem Solving

1. 18 Common Cognitive Biases That Stop You from Thinking Clearly

2. The Danger of a Good Story: How Our Brains’ Love of Narrative Can Undermine Creative Solutions

II. Frameworks for Creative Problem Solving

3. First Principles Thinking

4. Phoenix Checklist

5. Reframing

6. 5 Whys

7. Inversion

8. Lateral Thinking

9. S.C.A.M.P.E.R. Framework

About the Author

Also by Jennifer L. Clinehens

Don’t forget your FREE Companion Course

Thank you!

DON’T FORGET YOUR FREE COMPANION COURSE

While you’re reading, don’t forget to check out the FREE Companion Course, launching February 21, 2022. You can learn more and sign up at GrowthHabitsLab.com/CompanionCourse101

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The free course includes:

Bonus real-life examples and use cases

Bonus video content

Downloadable worksheets for all principles

WHEN YOU FINISH READING…

Thank you so much for buying How to Solve Impossible Problems! I hope you enjoy it.

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If you read the book and like it, please consider leaving a review with your favorite book retailer or Goodreads.

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Reviews are a huge help for self-published authors because it helps us get our books in front of readers we otherwise wouldn’t reach. Thank you!

INTRODUCTION

Every day we’re presented with what seem like impossible challenges. Issues that you can’t crack, even after weeks, months, or years of trying.

How do you approach these challenges? Do you have a strategy that you follow, or do you just think harder and hope for the best? There’s a better way to solve impossible problems — improve the quality of your thinking.

Better thinking, problem-solving, and reasoning are skills. They can be developed through learning new frameworks and expanding our mental models. Lucky for us, brilliant thinkers have left behind proven ways to attack these so-called impossible problems. This book aims to capture 7 of the most effective frameworks, models, and strategies and give you practical ways to apply them to your work.

Why I wrote this book

As I write this introduction, it's early 2022, and the world feels like it's full of big, scary challenges - scientific, medical, agricultural, political, social, ethical, and artistic. It feels like the last few years have been nothing but problem after problem. And while the world is full of smart people the skill of problem-solving isn’t being developed to its full potential.

I remember sitting in a classroom and having a challenge laid down by my teachers. And their only advice or direction was usually go figure it out, when asked how best to approach the problem. Instead of arming students with strategies and processes that could supercharge their efforts, many teachers seemed to think the act of figuring it out was enough. That we would somehow magically invent an effective, efficient, repeatable, and scalable problem-solving process on our own.

It's not that these teachers were insensitive, uncaring, or bad at their jobs. I'm convinced they sent me out into the problem-solving wilderness with few tools, because that's what their teachers and their teacher's teachers had done to them. They believed that leaving problem-solving up to the student meant we'd become more creative, flexible, and independent thinkers. More than likely, no one had modeled problem-solving frameworks, approaches, and strategies for them. Instead, if they figured out a process, they were deemed smart or gifted. But if they had been introduced to systematic problem-solving approaches to begin with they could have saved half the time and gotten twice as far.

For too many, including myself, discovering tools and frameworks for problem-solving was something they had to do independently through trial, error, and discovery.

My problem-solving journey

I've spent my career traveling across different industries, countries, and types of businesses. With every new challenge, I felt like I was reinventing the wheel. So I began searching for ways to attack problems in a more systematic way. I wanted structure, but I also didn't want the process to become so mechanical that it killed my creativity.

For example, the first fifteen years of my career were spent as a professional classical violist. I used problem-solving frameworks to unravel tricky passages or teach a young child to pull a few squeaky notes from a violin. Then as an entrepreneur in the music industry, I used problem-solving to create a new business, brand it, and market it. These challenges were not only creative but also called for a systemic approach to problem-solving, so I could go further, faster. Unfortunately, I was still stuck in figure it out land.

Later, when I worked in corporate innovation and customer experience roles and completed my MBA, I was introduced to more formal ways to breakdown problems using consulting frameworks. But these approaches never addressed the creative side of the problem-solving equation. Before my MBA, I got my master's in creative brand management from the prestigious Virginia Commonwealth University Brandcenter - a practice-focused advertising program - that taught me creative ways to attack business problems without the MBA-standard systems and frameworks (that often led to cookie-cutter thinking).

It was this combination of the logical MBA approach and the more freewheeling advertising approach, that I began to see how systematic problem-solving frameworks could help me find creative solutions faster.

How this book can help you

Being a better problem-solver has lots of benefits. For example, you can advance more quickly at work, start a business, write a novel, or even invent something that improves daily life for the entire planet.  

This book will get you from zero to armed with the very best thinking tools. From those that help you identify the root cause of your problem to those that can help you remix existing solutions into something creative, effective, and