Advice
Stop Overcomplicating Everything: The Art of Simple Problem Solving
Last Tuesday, I watched a team of twelve highly educated professionals spend four hours in a boardroom trying to figure out why their customer complaints had tripled. Charts everywhere. Whiteboards covered in frameworks with names I couldn't pronounce. Someone even mentioned hiring McKinsey.
The problem? Their new phone system was hanging up on people after two minutes.
I discovered this in approximately thirty seconds by calling their customer service line myself.
This is the state of problem solving in Australian workplaces today. We've become so obsessed with sophisticated methodologies and complex frameworks that we've forgotten the most basic truth about fixing things: sometimes the answer is staring you right in the face.
After fifteen years of running <a href="https://www.paramounttraining.com.au/training/creative-problem-solving-training/">creative problem solving training</a> sessions across Melbourne, Sydney, and Perth, I've seen this pattern repeated more times than I care to count. Smart people making simple things complicated because they think complexity equals competence.
It doesn't.
The Mythology of Complex Solutions
Here's my first controversial opinion: 80% of workplace problems can be solved with what I call "primary school logic." You know, the kind of thinking that says if something is broken, you look at what changed recently. If people are complaining, you ask them what's wrong. If a process isn't working, you watch someone actually do it.
But we've been conditioned to believe that real business problems require sophisticated analysis. We reach for Six Sigma when we need common sense. We deploy Lean methodologies when we should just ask "Why is this taking so long?"
I blame business schools, honestly. They've created a generation of managers who think problems are puzzles that need academic frameworks to unlock. My nephew just finished his MBA at Melbourne Business School, and he can quote Porter's Five Forces but couldn't figure out why his coffee machine was making terrible coffee. (The water reservoir was empty.)
The Three Questions That Actually Matter
Forget your DMAIC and your 5 Whys and your fishbone diagrams. When you're facing a problem, start with these three questions:
- What exactly is happening that shouldn't be happening?
- When did this start?
- What's the simplest explanation?
That's it.
The first question forces you to define the problem clearly instead of swimming around in symptoms. The second question gives you a timeline to work backwards from. The third question applies Occam's Razor - the principle that the simplest explanation is usually correct.
I ran a session last month with a Perth mining company whose productivity had dropped by 15% over six weeks. The management team had theories about employee motivation, seasonal factors, supply chain disruptions. Two hours of discussion about root cause analysis techniques.
Then we applied the three questions. What exactly was happening? Shifts were starting 20 minutes later than scheduled. When did this start? Six weeks ago. What's the simplest explanation? Six weeks ago, they'd changed the roster system and nobody had updated the car park access times.
Twenty-minute fix. Productivity back to normal within a week.
Stop Consulting Wikipedia for Everything
Second controversial opinion: Google has made us worse problem solvers, not better. We've become research addicts instead of thinking addicts.
Watch any modern team tackle a problem and within minutes someone's saying "Let me just look up best practices for this." Then they disappear down a rabbit hole of Harvard Business Review articles and industry benchmarking studies.
Here's what I've observed working with companies like Commonwealth Bank (brilliant operational thinking) and Atlassian (masters of systematic debugging): the best problem solvers spend more time observing than researching. They walk the floor. They talk to customers. They actually use their own products.
Research has its place, but it should come after you've exhausted your own thinking, not before you've started it.
The Power of Stupid Questions
In my <a href="https://www.paramounttraining.com.au/training/how-to-handle-difficult-customers/">handling difficult customers workshops</a>, I teach people to ask what I call "stupid questions." Not because they're actually stupid, but because they seem too obvious to ask.
"Why do we do it this way?" "What would happen if we stopped doing this completely?" "Who decided this was important?" "What are we assuming that might not be true?"
These questions feel uncomfortable because they challenge assumptions that everyone has accepted as fact. But assumptions are where most problems hide.
A Brisbane logistics company I worked with was spending $50,000 a month on a reporting system that generated 47 different weekly reports. When I asked the stupid question - "Who actually reads these reports?" - it turned out that 43 of them went straight to digital recycling bins. Nobody read them. They'd been producing them for three years because someone once said they "might be useful."
Cancelled 43 reports. Saved $35,000 a month. Solved a capacity problem they didn't even know they had.
The Danger of Meeting Culture
This might ruffle some feathers, but meetings are problem-solving poison. I've sat through countless workshops where teams spend more time scheduling follow-up meetings than actually fixing things.
There's something about putting people in a conference room that makes them want to make everything more complicated than it needs to be. Maybe it's the whiteboard. Maybe it's the false formality. Maybe everyone feels pressure to contribute something, even when the obvious solution is staring them in the face.
The best problem solving I've witnessed happens in hallway conversations, during coffee breaks, or when someone just walks over to someone's desk and says "This isn't working, what do you think?"
Quick decisions. Immediate testing. Fast iteration.
But we've somehow convinced ourselves that important problems require important meetings with important frameworks. They don't.
Pattern Recognition Beats Analysis
Here's something they don't teach in business school: experienced problem solvers don't analyse differently, they recognise patterns faster. After dealing with hundreds of workplace issues, you start seeing the same problems wearing different masks.
The "communication problem" that's actually a training problem. The "staff motivation issue" that's actually a broken reward system. The "customer service crisis" that's actually a process design failure.
This is why I always recommend bringing in someone from outside your immediate team when you're stuck. Not because they're smarter, but because they haven't been staring at the problem long enough to become blind to the obvious patterns.
I remember working with a Adelaide tech startup whose development team was chronically behind schedule. The founders had tried everything: new project management software, agile methodologies, performance reviews, team building exercises. They were convinced it was a people problem.
It took me about an hour to spot the real issue: their office had terrible acoustics. Open plan, hard surfaces, constant noise. The developers couldn't concentrate. Simple acoustic panels and some quiet zones fixed what six months of management interventions couldn't touch.
The Art of Good Enough
Perfect solutions are the enemy of working solutions. I see this constantly in Australian workplaces - teams that spend weeks crafting elegant, comprehensive fixes for problems that could be 80% solved with a quick workaround.
There's a place for thorough analysis and careful planning. But there's also a place for "let's try this and see what happens."
Some problems don't need solving, they need dissolving. Some processes don't need fixing, they need abandoning. Some systems don't need upgrading, they need switching off.
The <a href="https://www.paramounttraining.com.au/training/root-cause-analysis-training/">root cause analysis training</a> I run always includes a module on "acceptable imperfection." Not every problem needs to be solved completely. Not every process needs to be optimised fully. Sometimes good enough is actually perfect.
A Sydney financial services firm was spending months trying to automate a monthly reconciliation process that took one person two hours to complete manually. The automation project had consumed 400 person-hours and was still six weeks from completion.
We did the math: it would take four years for the automation to pay back the time invested in building it. They cancelled the project and hired a part-time contractor to do the manual work.
Good enough was perfect.
Trust Your Gut (But Verify)
Despite what the data evangelists tell you, intuition still matters. When experienced people say "something doesn't feel right," they're usually onto something important.
The problem is that we've been trained to dismiss gut feelings as unscientific. Everything needs data, metrics, evidence. But pattern recognition often operates below the conscious level. You sense something's wrong before you can articulate why.
The trick is learning to trust your instincts enough to investigate, but not so much that you skip verification. Your gut might tell you where to look, but your brain still needs to do the actual looking.
I was once brought in to help a manufacturing company in Geelong whose quality scores had mysteriously dropped over three months. All the official metrics looked fine, but the plant manager just felt something was off.
Turns out he was right. A key supplier had changed their material composition by 2% - within acceptable tolerances, technically compliant, but just enough to affect the final product. The data wouldn't have caught it for another six months. His experience spotted it immediately.
Stop Trying to Boil the Ocean
Final controversial opinion: most workplace problems don't need solving, they need containing. We've become obsessed with finding permanent, systematic solutions to every issue that emerges.
Sometimes the right answer is "let's just deal with this as it comes up." Sometimes the most elegant solution is having a good process for handling exceptions, not eliminating exceptions entirely.
I worked with a retail chain whose store managers were constantly calling head office about unusual customer requests. The company spent six months developing a comprehensive policy manual covering every possible scenario.
The manual was 847 pages long and nobody read it.
Better solution: train managers to use their judgment and back them up when they make reasonable decisions. Give them principles, not procedures. Trust their brains, not your bureaucracy.
The Reality Check
Problem solving isn't rocket science, but we've made it rocket surgery. We've layered so much methodology on top of common sense that we've forgotten how to think clearly about broken things.
The best problem solvers I know are curious, not clever. They ask obvious questions. They test simple solutions first. They're comfortable with imperfection. They trust their experience but verify their assumptions.
Most importantly, they remember that the goal isn't to demonstrate sophistication - it's to make things work better.
Start there. Everything else is just commentary.
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