Most business issues are approached as problems to solve. But many are better approached as puzzles to assemble.
I was talking recently to Dave Franzetta, a mentor, colleague, and friend. Dave held a number of senior executive positions at Prudential Financial, has written and consulted on succession planning and leadership, and was President of Interchange Associates, where we worked together implementing James Wilk’s Minimalist Intervention approach.
Dave was talking about the overlap between the way he thinks about consulting work and my approaches. He did it by talking about the difference between problems and puzzles.
Problem solving in business is often treated in a way made popular in Kepner and Tregoe’s classic book, The New Rational Manager. They define a problem like this:
- you have a deviation from expected performance
- you don’t know the cause of that deviation.
- the deviation is significant enough that you need to do something about it.
The idea is to find the cause through disciplined questioning, then remove the cause, thus solving the problem. There are multiple ways to approach the questioning: root cause analysis, fishbones, and other variations on the same theme.
This is a very useful way to think. It’s the dominant approach we all use. But it works better for engineering and process fault detection than it does for the kind of complexity you get with both technology and people in the mix.
The problem with approaching situations from the point of view of cause is that there usually turn out to be multiple causes, and that those causes themselves have further causes. You can end up changing a lot of things that don’t really matter.
And it’s very, very easy in a practical human situation for cause to become blame. You’ve seen it: a team frames an issue as a problem, starts looking for causes, and very quickly the conversation turns into who signed off what, who missed what, who should have known. However much one tries to avoid it, the mood changes, but very little else does.
It’s often better, Dave suggests, to think not in terms of problems, but instead in terms of puzzles. In a puzzle, you already have all the pieces, but you aren’t sure how to fit them together. It’s not that there’s somebody who’s to blame for the pieces not fitting together. Blame doesn’t really enter into the metaphor.
Most people find solving puzzles inherently more fun, more engaging, more enjoyable, less of a downer than solving problems. They bring more energy and creativity. The questions shift from, “What went wrong?” and “Whose fault is it?” to “How can we use what we’ve got to get what we want?”
How does this tie in with the Start With What Works approach? Well, I’d already been using the puzzle metaphor without realising it. I’ve often introduced my approach by describing how somebody in one silo has one piece of the puzzle, and somebody in another part of the business has another piece, but they’ve never spoken with each other, or they don’t have the picture on the box.
Talking to Dave brought it to my awareness in a way that’s been very helpful. I’m emphasising it with clients who are finding that it resonates and sets them up for success.
When a business situation demands a response, you have a choice. The moment you frame it as a problem, people start looking for causes – and often for someone to blame. What if it’s actually a puzzle?
© Andy Bass & Dave Franzetta 2026