Growing up, as I recall, the otherwise festive Christmas holiday season held forth the dreadful prospect of wrestling with a box full of Christmas tree lights.

Ignoring the fact that it's cheaper and easier to replace them each year, perhaps as a matter of honor and tradition, it had become my family's policy that no new tree lights would be purchased until every attempt had been made to untangle and revive the old ones.

In keeping this tradition, I found myself in the same familiar mess every year as I set out to decorate our house with lights. No matter how carefully I may have coiled and packed them away at the end of the previous year, the many separate strands of lights seemed somehow to have found each other during the off-season and hopelessly entangled themselves. This made me angry, as though they'd deliberately, even spitefully, knotted themselves into a perplexing mass of bulbs, plugs, sockets, and wires.

So, as punishment every year, I dealt with them the same traditional way. I shook them vigorously, hoping somehow that the individual strings of lights would repent and separate themselves from each other. When they didn't, I dived aggressively into the middle of the knot, pulled at it from within, stretched it, embraced its confusion and became a part of it. Eventually, one by one, each string of Christmas lights would somehow drop away from the others, until, at last, mission accomplished! But the achievement was always more by accident than design, and never without my fair share of pain.

Still, primates being what they are, even the tiniest and rarest success will strongly reinforce habitual behavior, the bad habits as well as the good. As I looked with pride at the untangled lights, each individual strand now laying on the floor vanquished and submissive (a few literally broken as well), next year's application of the mindless “shake and hope” method, notwithstanding its obvious stupidity, had been assured.

Breaking with tradition is never comfortable, but, one year, for a change, I deliberately calmed myself down and thought about the problem first. I reasoned that, in years past, I had concentrated too hard on the problem's most obvious in-your-face aspect, that infuriating knot of bulbs and wire. In anger, I had traditionally attacked it, literally, from the inside. This may have felt good, but it got me nowhere. After a lot of shaking and complaining, the problem eventually solved itself, but the solution always took longer, and broke a lot more light bulbs, than it needed to. Looking back, my “tradition” was really just the bad habit of injecting energy blindly into a confused situation, hoping for the best. Eventually, when a solution finally presented itself, it was only at random. A paint shaker could have done as well.

That year, a little deliberation made all the difference. Knots, I reasoned, are best untied from the outside, by first finding the parts of each string that aren't in the knot, the ends, the terminal sockets and plugs of each separate strand. One by one, I found and threaded the ends out of the knot. Gradually, the un-knotted ends became longer and longer, as the knot ─ my problem ─ became smaller and smaller, until, eventually, it was gone.

It was tedious and a little boring pulling those ends out of the knot one at a time. Emotionally, this new approach was less satisfying than shaking and tugging at the knot until it finally learned its lesson and fell loose. Still, for achieving predictable results economically, the systematic start-with-the-ends approach beat my traditional flailing-away-at-the knot method hands-down.

Questions to Consider

• Lewis Carroll famously wrote “If you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there.” What do you think he meant by that?
• How can a  specialist's narrow  point of view cause her to get lost in the “knot” of a problem?
• Privately inventory some of your bad problem-solving habits. What are you doing to break them? Or, do they feel so good to you that you'd rather not?
• When addressing practical issues, counterproductive emotions like anger and pride can feel like reasonable behavior. Why is this? How can we overcome it? How can organizational leadership help?
• Most serious organizational problems begin and end with people. Do angry people intimidate you? Is that why you'd rather avoid them and concentrate instead on the fancy communication technology between them? What important work are you putting off when you do this?
• Urgent problems demand quick, plausible answers. But why stop there? Once things are working again and order has been restored, why not take a little more time to find  the real solution?

Things to Do

• Learn to include creative generalists as well as specialists on your problem-solving teams.
• Meditate for 10 minutes every day. If you can't afford the time, meditate for half an hour.
• Managers: your deep problem solvers, those who find root causes, usually won't be the first to arrive at a solution. Recognize this and learn to wait for them to catch up. You'll be rewarded with better answers.