Welcome to The Solutionist Agenda

This started as a set of notes. Many sets of notes, in fact. Let me tell you why.

I work with clients on hard things. I see them for almost no other reason. And so, perhaps the thing we do most often is to work together to develop and deliver solutions.

The development of solutions is mainly a function of talking. Analysing, sure. Evaluating, of course. But in the main, it is an exercise in combining all types of talking until we pull together a plan we are happy to put into action.

But the delivery part of the solution is about more than talking. It is about knowing, with precision, how and when to set into motion those very considered sets of plans we have just done all that talking about. This can be a lot to remember. And remembering how everything was supposed to fit together, in work as in life, is tough.

The solution to the difficulties of remembering is (you might have guessed): notes. But as it turns out, busy people are busy. And notes take time. So where part of my service has always been to try and just help, sometimes the best way I can help is to do their notes for them. What they thought was a good idea. Who might help them land in the way they needed to. Where they wanted to get to, and how they thought they might get there.

A nice, clean, set of resolved approaches to difficult problems that they had felt were useful to them. Or principles that we had discussed that had resonated with them. In note form. No memory required.

Turns out, some clients liked the notes. One or two said I should write them for more people than just the person who happened to be sitting across the table. So here I am, doing exactly that.

That is the whole origin story. No grand plan. A habit that turned out to be worth sharing.

A quick word about who is writing this

I partner with leaders and organisations to help them sort things out. I am a Solutionist. That is the plainest way I can put it.

What does this look like in practice? I work with leaders, teams and organisations on the performance of people under pressure. I work where there is challenge, change or organisational risk. Often all three. I also help leaders formulate the plans and put actions into place to follow through on good ideas that are at risk of slipping quietly away to die. As good ideas are wont to do when the grind of the status quo threatens to be overwhelming.

I hold a Master of Science in Coaching Psychology from the University of Sydney, along with postgraduate qualifications in education and degrees in law and commerce from the University of Melbourne. I am a Member of the Institute of Coaching at McLean Hospital, Harvard Medical School.

I do not like meetings. I think the way things are done should not be an accident. I ask 'why?' often.

I am discrete and resourceful. Most of what I do never gets talked about, which is rather the point.

The one idea underneath all of it

Hard things are hard. This fact should be accepted, but it should not be feared.

Confronted by problems, organisations often equate any activity with useful activity. They are wrong.

Ineffectual first steps to problem solving are not benign. They are exacerbating.

Problems do not get easier because you wait. Action avoidance is about the worst thing you can do. It lets the problem intensify while you tell yourself you are being thoughtful. Sitting with a problem and considering it can feel like work. It can feel like deliberative decision making that supports optimum outcomes. It does not. It is fear based and avoidant behaviour that achieves nothing but toxic delay.

It makes hard things harder.

The Solutionist Agenda is built on a simple premise: that thinking can be made clear, that actions can be made certain, and that outcomes can be delivered rather than merely hoped for. Not through cleverness. Through structure.

Problem solving is not a mystery, it is a method.

And here is the move that changes everything for you: the one I will come back to again and again in these notes.

Most leaders, when something goes wrong, engage with the problem in front of them. They grapple with the thing that is confronting them right now. That feels like the responsible and immediate thing to do. Much more often, it will instead be the mistake that is their undoing.

Because the problem in front of you and the destination you are trying to reach are two entirely different things. And they pull you in different directions. If you start with the problem, you get busy. If you start with the destination, you get somewhere.

Knowing where you need to end up is the fastest way to identify the first, best step to take. Not the first step that occurs to you. The first right one. This is end state engineering, and I would argue it is almost always the better way in. We will spend a lot of time here on it.

What you will actually get

I am not going to write productivity tips. There are enough people doing that, and doing it well.

What I want to give you instead are small, deployable tools for thinking clearly when the situation is anything but clear. The same tools I use with my client. Named, structured, and cut down to a size you can use yourself.

Some of them come with frameworks I have built and tested over years of this work. Two you will hear about often: CIPHER, a way of interrogating a decision across the domains that usually sink it, and TARGET, a way of defining an outcome and executing back from it. Do not worry about the acronyms. They are just handles on ideas, and I will show you how to use them for yourself. You will see some of the way you already work in some of what I will write. That is good. Validation of your current approaches can be just as useful as challenge to them.

Where a good piece of research sharpens the point, I will bring it in. Coaching psychology, decision science, the behavioural work on why even smart organisations freeze in the face of adversity.

But like meetings, I am allergic to jargon dressed up as insight. I will keep the citations in service of the argument, not the other way around.

Expect one piece a week. Short enough to read with a coffee. Substantial enough to use before lunch.

This is for your life, not only your work

One thing I have learned doing this for a living: the frameworks we build for work fit the wrinkles of life surprisingly well.

The leader grappling with a hard conversation at work and the person avoiding a hard conversation at home are doing the same thing, for similar reasons, at similar cost. The executive who cannot name what success looks like and the person who cannot find a validating pathway in life are stuck in analogous predicaments.

So while much of what I write will be framed around leadership and organisations, I would like to invite you to try it on your life too. The stuck relationship. The decision you can't quite resolve. The thing you know you need to do and keep finding reasons not to. Same tools. I will point out the crossover as we go, and I would be glad if you came along for that part of it.

So, come in

If any of this sounds like your kind of thinking, subscribe. It is free, it is weekly, and if you have thoughts along the way, I am very happy to engage.

Next week I am going to take on that big idea properly: end state engineering, and why grappling with the problem in front of you is so often the elegant way to get nowhere.

I am glad you are here. Let us make some hard things clearer, even if not less hard.

Steve

The Solutionist Agenda. Clear thinking. Problems solved.