The Ultimate Problem Solving Model: 1-3-1 Framework

If you're tired of people dropping off their problems for you, you should use this framework. This past week I was at an investors conference and we happened to be sitting in a room full of owners, investors, operators, and they're all part of this peer group that I'm in called YPO. And one of the guys was just saying, look, when people bring their problems to me, I ask them to define the problem. I ask for 3 solutions and I ask them to then define the most viable solution of the 3 that they've defined. Once they've done that, if I feel like I disagree with the most viable solution that they picked, then we'll have a discussion around it and then it'll be more of a brainstorming session. But the key thing here is that you start with this framework first. And when you lead with this framework, the reverse delegation that's happening where people are delegating the problems to you, the pressure of the thinking is no longer on your plate. It's actually back on their plate. It's on them to think about it. And if they're proving that they can't think about good solutions or if they can't come up with good ideas, well then you have to ask yourself, or you have to even ask them, hey, look, I'm happy to help you with this, but at the end of the day, I hired you for this job. If they don't get it at that point, then you need to have a further discussion about the role that they're currently in because they're not cutting it in that specific role or they're not meeting the expectations that you have. And sometimes you just need to train them a little bit on this because they haven't been taught on this process, and that's okay. So they might say, oh, we're not getting enough leads, I'm under a lot of pressure right now. And it's like, okay, well, what are the 3 solutions that you have and what's the most viable one? Doing this exercise, it will get them to then think twice about coming to you with the problems. That's first and foremost. Second, if they're going to keep bringing the problems to you, it will continue to show you how they go about problem solving and how they think. If they consistently bring problems to you and the solutions are constantly not very viable solutions and you've coached them on it over and over and over, It's time to then have a deeper conversation about it. But the worst thing that you can do is to continually solve the problems for them, because if you keep giving them a fish, then they're gonna just keep taking the fish. They're not gonna be self-sufficient. But if you teach them how to fish, then they will become self-sufficient. So I'm not saying leave your direct reports alone. I'm not saying leave them to fend for themselves completely. I'm saying, hey, you want them to do some of the thinking on their own first before they come over to you, before they delegate the thinking to you, because you already have more than enough on your plate and your time is valuable because that's a resource that can never be renewed. And so, by the way, if you're enjoying this, you can check out the mastermind that I do. It's a marketing mastermind for motivated founders. It's called Leveling Up Founders. Just go to levelingup.com/founders. I wanna share a couple of other examples over here of companies that have done this well. You're not gonna be able to scale if you don't do this. It might be very valiant and might feel really good to solve all these problems for other people, but at the end of the day, you're doing the business a disservice by not challenging the people that you hired to think for themselves. And when they're able to think for themselves and you're able to collaborate with them on it, That's great, that's magic, that's beautiful. And remember, you've hired people to take things off your plate, but also to help make them successful. And this framework solves the problem. And I can tell you, I did this morning with one of the developers that we have where I'm working closely with, one of our special projects is around artificial intelligence. And so I was talking to him and he's like, well, you know, I think that this exercise is not the best because it requires a lot of thinking on my plate. I was like, well, yeah, absolutely, it requires thinking on your plate. I mean, do you want me to do all the thinking for you? All right, so now we have my agenda pulled up with my developer. And this is one thing I also do with anyone that has a one-on-one with me. So you can see it says one-on-one with Eric. They have a running one-on-one document where it talks about follow-up items, things that have assigned to them, and also their agenda, things that they want to talk about. So this is the agenda here. And so he brings the issues, okay? Backlinks profile widget status update, testing TLDV versus Firefield.ai. So we're working a lot of different AI things right now. And so now instead of it just being the issue here, ABC. So here's our first option. We can wait some more time, change nothing. B, we can keep optimizing even though there's no traction. And C, switch back to FC, create a better tool and try again. The main thing here is not around the details, but it's more so around here's the issue, here are the 3 things, and then in bold, here is the most viable solution. And when we actually got to the 3rd one over here, we had a little bit of a disagreement. So we wanted to implement single sign-on just for increased security, let's call it, right? And so this is something that we've kind of held off from doing for a while. We've leveraged a lot of other products But it's like, okay, well, we should probably do a single sign-on thing. So the first option he put in was do nothing. The second one was to stick with our 1Password, which is our password manager, and enforce better password habits. The third one is to use Google Single Sign-On. Quite a significant time investment. So this is where we had an impasse and he's like, well, this is going to take some more work to do. And I was like, okay, well, if we are just going to stick with our password manager, what's to stop us from a security breach happening again? Because we've had a security breach before. And he's like, well, you know, nothing. And I'm like, okay, well, who's going to end up solving the problem? Well, ultimately he owned up to it and he's like, you know, to be honest, I just wanted to take the thing off my plate. And he's like, understood what you're saying. So I was like, okay, well, we haven't solved the problem yet. How much time do you think this is gonna take? And being that this is an important but not urgent issue, can you break this out over a couple months? And so what we finally settled on was this might take 10, 15 hours or so, but he might split this over 3 to 4 month period where he spends maybe an hour to an hour and a half a week on it. And that's it, where he doesn't have to necessarily blitz. And so he'll create that time block for himself. But because he provided the 3 solutions and a viable solution, that allowed me to then be able to help a lot more from a coaching standpoint perspective instead of me having to also think through the solution as well. And so hopefully this is clicking for those of you that are leaders in your companies. Those of you that are owners of your companies, you cannot continue to let people delegate back to you. You have to put your foot down and say, this is how it is. If they cannot continue to bring you viable solutions and the way they're thinking about things are a little questionable, then you need to have a deeper conversation about are they the right person in the right seat? And oftentimes they might be the right person, but they might not be in the right seat. And this will then force accountability. If those of you that are thinking about any organization, It's all about people at the end of the day, and you want people that are high caliber. And what better way to test, to continue to vet the caliber of the people that are reporting to you, than to continue to vet their thinking? Because oftentimes we get mired in the day-to-day. They might vent to us, they might bring their problems to us, but this is one of the best things that you can do for your organization if you want to scale. So by the way, if you enjoyed this video, please don't forget to hit the subscribe button, and you can check out the next video over here where we talk about top lessons from interviewing over 400 founders that I've done over the last 10 years, really. So that's it for today, and we will see you later.