Employees are faster and more creative when solving other people's problems
telegraph.co.uk
telegraph.co.uk
Which is not to say that there isn't value in asking them. Sometimes their solutions that don't work can be modified into something that does; or their crazy non-solutions can spark some inspiration on my end.
My theory as to what's going on here is that when you are responsible for the solution, you spend a lot of time thinking about what could go wrong, so your thinking gets constrained. When you are solving a problem for someone else, you're thinking is much freer, because frankly you don't give a damn. You are much more likely to come up with a unique, novel solution. You are also much more likely to deliver a solution that is actually disastrous.
My point being: I think there's room for both associated and disassociated thinking. This article seems to think because there was one series of studies showing some benefits of disassociated thinking that disassociated thinking is just straight up better.
One approach for getting your own work done may be to think of your future self. That's who you're doing it for. This also gives less immediacy to the problem in addition to distance. "Older me is going to really appreciate this 3 months from now."
And suddenly I understand why I keep volunteering to help on gnarly little projects that are peripheral to my main job - even though I'm extraordinarily busy.
You can see this phenomenon in the HN comments on pretty much any article about Self Driving Cars. Everybody seems to have an extremely creative solution to some problem, as long as you're willing to ignore all of the inconvenient reality that researchers and corporations actually have to handle.
This is aside from the rubber duck effects[0] of just explaining your problem to someone else.
[0] https://blog.codinghorror.com/rubber-duck-problem-solving/
I actually now use this trick: when I am blocked on a hard problem, or I find myself losing motivation, I imagine someone I would want to impress asking me the exact question, and spend 10s visualizing the scenario. It works!
Your link is a more in depth version of his position. Thx!
- If you succeed, they will be thankful.
- If you fail, well, it's not your problem.
Also, you can let them do the obvious/boring stuff, like bureaucracy.
Did we discover that people are more likely to try to sell solutions that probably won't work if they know that they won't be responsible for actually carrying them out?
What bias is this called again? It's not Texas Sharpshooter is it? Maybe just poor science?
Again, this is not to say the effect does not exist (I personally believe it does) - just that the conclusion does not follow from the evidence.
Nobody should be buying an argument on this sort of basis anymore. The business of selling us some truthy conclusion and thin social psych evidence in favour should be dead.
When solving problems on my own I was reasonably successful, but in class when I found out - or someone mentioned - that a particular problem was extremely difficult and/or no one had managed to do, I do exceptionally well in it.
As for an explanation to this, I have no idea. It maybe has something to do with the fact that if I fail at the difficult problem then a lot of people have seen me fail at it, but that's just guesswork.
Some of the comments below yours seem to be confusing the 2 times the author mentions the dividing of the rope.
The 1st is when he outlines the problem (at the beginning)
>Yet he divides the rope in half, ties the two parts together, and escapes to his freedom.
The 2nd is when the author provides the answer (at the end)
> The answer: he split the rope lengthwise, tied the two halves together and shimmied to freedom.
"Yet he divides the rope in half, ties the two parts together..."
> Which leads to one final question: how exactly did the prisoner with the insufficiently long rope manage to escape? The answer: he split the rope lengthwise, tied the two halves together and shimmied to freedom.
You could maybe unbraid the rope and deconstruct carefully into component threads and reconstruct into two ropes, Banak-Tarski(spell?) style. But that would be quite involved.
That rope example though clearly shows a caveat with that approach. In an ideal, abstract world that solution would work. However, in the real world this solution obviously doesn't work because you can't cut a rope lengthwise without the rope coming undone.
For my own development? Nah, too much work, I'll do it manually (and I happily wasted huge amounts of accumulated time).
Irrational, but true.
Before organizing a whole enterprise around this however it is worth considering how much of our work actually fits into the solvable problem category.
Figuring out what tricks work can help us leverage these behaviors in ways that are useful. And maybe we'll learn how to get the benefits in a more direct manner, intentionally.
If it's not my problem, I'm not preoccupied with the emotional component.