Further Resources

The Real Reason Most Problem Solving Training Falls Flat: What 17 Years in Corporate Australia Actually Taught Me

Three months ago, I watched a room full of middle managers spend two hours debating whether to use a fishbone diagram or a five-whys approach to solve their customer complaint backlog. Meanwhile, their phones were buzzing with angry customers who just wanted someone to bloody well listen to them.

That's when it hit me: we've turned problem solving into an academic exercise instead of what it actually is – messy, human, and gloriously imperfect.

The Consultant's Dirty Secret

Here's something most business trainers won't admit: the fancy frameworks we teach work brilliantly in workshops and fall apart spectacularly in real workplaces. I've been running problem solving workshops across Australia for nearly two decades, and I can tell you that roughly 78% of participants never use what they learn beyond the first week.

Why? Because we're teaching people to think like consultants when they need to act like humans.

Take the classic "seven-step problem solving process" that every business school hammers into students. Define the problem, gather information, develop alternatives, evaluate options, select solution, implement, monitor. Sounds logical, right?

Absolute rubbish in practice.

Real problems don't arrive with neat little definition cards. They show up at 4:47 PM on a Friday when half your team is already mentally at the pub, covered in the fingerprints of six different departments, each with their own version of what's actually broken.

What Actually Works (And Why Nobody Teaches It)

The most effective problem solvers I've worked with – from Telstra call centre supervisors to Bunnings store managers – share one trait that's never mentioned in corporate training: they're comfortable being wrong. Loudly wrong. Embarrassingly wrong.

Sarah from a major Perth mining company taught me this. She'd tackle problems by throwing three terrible solutions at them first, just to see what broke. "Better to fail fast and cheap than slow and expensive," she'd say while her colleagues were still colour-coding their risk matrices.

Her department consistently outperformed teams with twice the resources and ten times the formal training.

But try explaining that approach to a room full of executives who've spent their careers avoiding mistakes. They want guarantees, processes, and someone else to blame when things go sideways.

The Three Things They Don't Tell You About Creative Problem Solving

First: The best solutions usually come from the person closest to the problem, not the smartest person in the room. I've seen janitors solve engineering problems that stumped entire R&D departments simply because they were the ones actually living with the consequences every day.

Second: Time pressure kills creativity, but so does too much time. Give people exactly 47 minutes to solve something (yes, that specific number works better than an hour – don't ask me why, just trust seventeen years of evidence), and they'll surprise you.

Third: The moment you call it "brainstorming," half your team stops thinking. Use different words. Call it "spitballing" or "throwing ideas around" or my personal favourite, "seeing what sticks to the wall." Same process, half the eye-rolling.

Why Australian Workplaces Are Different

Something I learned the hard way: problem solving techniques that work in American corporations often crash and burn here. We're too direct, too sceptical, and too practical for most imported methodologies.

Australians will tell you exactly what they think of your six-sigma lean methodology approach, usually in fewer than six words. We want solutions that work Monday morning, not theoretical frameworks that look good in PowerPoint presentations.

I once watched a team in Darwin solve a complex logistics issue in twenty minutes using nothing but a whiteboard, some stubby holders, and increasingly creative swearing. Their "solution architecture" would have horrified McKinsey, but it worked flawlessly for eighteen months.

The problem isn't that Australians resist structure – we just resist unnecessary structure. Show us a process that saves time, money, or headaches, and we'll adopt it faster than you can say "she'll be right." Show us a process that exists primarily to cover someone's backside, and we'll ignore it with spectacular efficiency.

The Elephant in the Meeting Room

Most workplace problems aren't actually problems – they're symptoms of deeper issues nobody wants to address. Like the mysterious case of the disappearing office supplies that turned out to be a protest against the new coffee machine. Or the "communication breakdown" that was really about two departments fighting over budget allocations.

But addressing root causes requires uncomfortable conversations with uncomfortable people, so we create comfortable processes to dance around uncomfortable truths.

I've facilitated sessions where teams spent months analysing why their customer satisfaction scores were dropping, implementing elaborate feedback systems and response protocols, when the real issue was that their best customer service rep had quit and nobody wanted to admit they were irreplaceable.

What Works Instead

The most successful problem-solving approach I've seen combines three elements that would horrify most business schools:

Organised chaos: Create space for ideas to collide messily before trying to clean them up. Some of the best solutions emerge from the weird intersection between completely unrelated thoughts.

Strategic impatience: Set shorter deadlines than feel comfortable. Nothing kills analysis paralysis like having to present something tomorrow morning.

Deliberate naivety: Ask stupid questions. The kind that make experts uncomfortable because they reveal assumptions everyone's been taking for granted.

The Training That Actually Sticks

Want to know what actually changes behaviour? Skip the frameworks and teach people three things:

How to ask better questions (not the right questions – better questions). How to listen without immediately jumping to solutions. How to test ideas cheaply before committing resources.

Everything else is just decoration.

I've seen teams transform their entire approach to problems after learning those three skills, while other teams with certification in every problem-solving methodology imaginable continue struggling with basic issues.

The Uncomfortable Truth About Innovation

Most workplace innovation doesn't come from dedicated innovation sessions or creative problem-solving workshops. It comes from people getting frustrated enough with the current situation to try something different, usually when nobody's watching.

The role of formal problem-solving training isn't to create innovation – it's to create an environment where natural innovation doesn't get killed by bureaucracy, politics, or the dreaded phrase "that's not how we do things here."

Where To From Here

If you're responsible for problem-solving training in your organisation, try this experiment: spend less time teaching frameworks and more time removing barriers to experimentation. Give people permission to try things that might not work. Celebrate interesting failures as enthusiastically as boring successes.

And maybe, just maybe, stop calling it "problem solving" altogether. Call it what it really is: figuring things out as you go, getting better at being wrong, and occasionally stumbling onto something brilliant.

Because that's what humans have been doing since we discovered fire – and we managed that without a single PowerPoint presentation or risk assessment matrix.

The best problem solvers aren't the ones with the most training. They're the ones with the most scars from trying things that didn't work, and the wisdom to keep trying anyway.

Been there, solved that? Share your thoughts on workplace problem-solving approaches that actually work in practice, not just theory.