I often work with businesses to help them break complex problems into smaller, simpler problems that can be solved. Sometimes, though, that doesn't work. Sometimes, the problem just won't break down in any useful way. Sometimes, the problem simply appears intractable. At times like that, I find it's often helpful to remember the advice of President Dwight Eisenhower: when you can't solve a problem, make it bigger.

In other words, increase the scope and size of the problem until you have something you can work with.

Quite often, when a problem refuses to go away no matter what you do, or solving the problem immediately causes a different problem to pop up somewhere else, you're not looking at the real problem: you're looking at chrome or at a symptom of the real problem.

What is chrome? Chrome is the shiny stuff that attracts our attention. It's the tendency to get caught up in details that look important or seem to make sense, but which have nothing at all to do with the problem. For example, at one biotech lab, a particular scientist was having trouble getting a certain experiment to work. This experiment had been designed by another lab. His manager decided that he clearly wasn't putting in enough hours, and the scientist was fired. The next two apparently didn't put in the hours either, as they neither could get the experiment to work. The fourth was on the verge of not putting in enough hours when it turned out that the tools they were using were flawed. The discovery came from a completely different lab. The experiment didn't work because it couldn't be done as designed. Had management not been so focused on the hours being worked, the chrome, they might have stepped back and actually identified the real problem.

The symptoms, on the other hand, alert us to the problem but are not the problem. Fever, sore throat, aching joints are all symptoms of the flu, but are not the flu. Treating any of those symptoms might make you feel a little better in the short run, but can leave you flat on your back very quickly. At one company, the apparent problem was getting members of a team to work together on a fairly complex problem. The company wasted a great deal of time and money on ineffective team building exercises and some sort of "manager assertiveness" training.

The trick was to create a bigger problem. The lack of team agreement was merely a symptom. As we made the problem bigger, we found a number of other symptoms, including a leader who couldn't delegate, a team that refused to work if their manager wasn't present, and significant confusion over priorities and strategy.

"But asked them point-blank if they understood!" one manager protested to me. Yes, he'd asked them. And they honestly believed that they understood. Unfortunately, each one understood something different.

That, too, was a symptom of the problem.

It was only when we put all these symptoms together that we were able to start identifying the real problems and develop a strategy to solve them. The solution required changes to the hiring process, how managers in the company were trained, how they interacted with their teams, and how teams made decisions.

Sound expensive? Not compared to what the problems were costing the company in employee turnover, customer refunds, lost revenue, and missed opportunities. The solution paid for itself ten times over just in the first year.

When the problem is too small, the insignificant details end up taking all of our attention. It's only when we make the problem big enough that we can see all the moving pieces that we can actually do something about it.

Take a look at those problems that just won't go away. Start off the New Year by making them bigger until you can get rid of them.

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