problem solving – My Mental Model

Unsolicited Advice (Part 1)

Back in the day, I had a friend forward me a Harvard Business Review article on sales types. There was an element of sales to our job and he wanted to point out that I fell into the ‘challenger’ category. The challenger would hear the customer out, identify where they had a mental block around the transaction, and then challenge that block. While this was among the most successful approaches, it was not the most common. The person in this position had to be confident in their own expertise, accurate in their analysis of the situation, and willing to tell the customer that they were wrong. In most cases, the customer would hear that they’re wrong, be surprised, and want to know why. This was an opportunity to drop some knowledge on them that could very well influence the sale in a positive direction. This has proven to be one of the the most effective approaches when buying the product or service was genuinely in the customer’s best interest,

But what if your solution is in their best interest, but the person doesn’t want to hear it?

This is what I’ve been running into over the years and I’ve found it rather challenging. I’ve learned that at the core of who I am, I’m a problem solver. If you bring me a problem, there’s a good chance I’m going to try and provide a solution. It’s like a reflex. I also learned that unsolicited advice on how to live one’s life was rarely well received. It didn’t matter if the problem was clear as day, or the solution was tried and true, if they didn’t want to hear it, they didn’t want to hear it.

Perhaps the most classic example I’ve faced is trying to be supportive of a girlfriend who’s facing a problem with an emotional mindset. When men reach out to other men about their problems, they’re usually looking for a solution. From my experience, when a woman reaches out to you with a problem, offering a solution will make the situation worse. There’s a short but highly entertaining and informative YouTube video that speaks to this call It’s Not About the Nail. You have a young couple sitting on the couch and the girlfriend is talking about a pain in her head and the anxiety she has around it. Then a new camera angle shows that there is an actual nail in the girl’s forehead. The boyfriend sheepishly asks if it might be the nail causing all this pain. She snaps at him saying it’s not about the nail. He pushes back saying that the nail in her head might be the cause of all this. She snaps at him again telling him to stop trying to fix everything, that all she needs is someone to listen to her. He tries once more suggesting that what she probably needs is that nail taken out of her head, but she cuts him off and says “see, you’re not even listening now.” He says fine and decides to listen, so she goes on to describe all these symptoms of the pain from the nail. He musters up a, “well that all sounds.. really hard.” She responds with a soft, “thank you.”

I still find this dynamic to be so confusing. I do see value in having someone to talk to about the problems you’re facing, but I also think that you should also be interested in the advice of the person you’ve chosen to confide in. Perhaps it’s based in comfort. When I face a challenging moment, I pay very little attention to how I feel in that moment because I’m focused on overcoming the challenge. Perhaps for some, it’s not about overcoming the challenge but about feeling better. And perhaps for those individuals, telling someone who will nod along, be agreeable, and gives that impression of unconditional support is what helps return you to feelings of safety and comfort.

This has proven itself to be a significant challenge in my life as my two biggest motivators seem to be solving problems and helping others. When I see someone facing a problem, my mind races to a best solution and I’m eager to help them get there. But it seems as though the more I want to help, the less interested they become in hearing what I have to say.

After having been through that ‘Nail’ scenario a few times, it wasn’t difficult to see that if a woman came to me with a problem, it was unlikely that she would be looking for a solution, and more likely to be looking for someone to listen and understand. I also noticed that women, in this context, were far better listeners than men. In one relationship, I said that I might make a better problem solver than her friends, but that I probably wouldn’t make as good of a listener for the same reasons. I suggested that if she just wanted to vent, that her friends were a better option. But that if she was ready to solve a problem, I was always ready to help. She understood, thought it was fair, and I was excited to see how it worked. It worked terribly. She called me in tears one day about her pet having injured himself. I clued in and realized that she was probably looking for someone to listen… so I did my best and I think I did pretty well. Then she calmed down and shifted to asking about some legal issues she was facing from a car accident a couple years ago. So I ask if she’s looking for me to listen, or for solutions to problems. She thanks me for checking in, asked for solutions, and proceeded to lay out the problem. The solution happened to contain an inconvenient truth. She didn’t want to face the fact that she would bear some responsibility for the incident and that there would eventually be consequences. She broke into tears, was upset with me for not being compassionate to her situation, and then decided that she wasn’t ready to hear what I had to say and hung up. A few months after we broke up, she texted me to let me know how much she appreciated those moments and how valuable they were to her in the long run.

It was almost a couple years ago that she sent me that message and it helped me notice something. A big part of what I do is I try to understand the situation in the most honest terms possible. If I see a difference between my understanding of the situation and their understanding of the situation, I’ll try to understand why. In most cases, it seems as though the problem is rather obvious and the solution is rather simple. The difficult part is that it includes a hard truth, an inconvenient fact which they’ll have to face if they are to truly solve this problem. The problem I’ve observed about hard truths is that they challenge your existing beliefs, and it can be much more comfortable to retreat to your existing beliefs than it is to venture into the unknown. And instead of recognizing that this fear, discomfort and anxiety are a result of moving away from the comfort of your beliefs and towards truth and the unknown… you assume the messenger is the one making you feel this way.

I came across a Mark Twain quote recently that speaks to this dynamic and something bigger that we’re all dealing with in some way right now, “It’s easier to fool someone than to convince them they’ve been fooled.”

Business Ideas: An Amazon Mailbox

So I ordered a bunch of stuff from Amazon this year and each time it arrived, same thing happened. My phone rings in the early afternoon and it shows that someone is buzzing at my front door. Since I’m not home and it doesn’t make much sense to buzz a stranger into my building, I don’t. Then I get home and magically, there’s a package waiting for me at my front door, inside the building. I’m not upset… almost a little impressed at their ability to get in.

My building is fairly low-key and everyone keeps to themselves. I don’t think there’s a significant risk of people stealing my package as it sits in front of my door for a few hours but not everyone is so lucky. There are countless videos of people stealing package from door steps, including delivery employees. I’m not actually sure what the rules are around this but we clearly need to find another solution. Enter the Amazon Mailbox.

The idea is that this box would be larger than your average mail box, so that it’s capable of receiving much larger packages. I’m not entirely sure what the optimal size would be. Perhaps a review of the average dimensions of packages shipped would shine some light on that. There’s a good chance that we’d find a stat like 95% of packages are less than 2’x2’x2′. If that’s the case, make it just a bit bigger and offer some XL options for those looking to receive larger packages.

So a giant mailbox eh? Well there should probably be more to it than that. A big mailbox is just going to be a target for theft if there aren’t any security measures. I’m thinking a solid lock that can be opened through an NFC panel. That way a delivery driver can receive a one-time, time-locked code which will allow them to make the delivery. Once the package is in and the door is closed, you’re back to being the only one with the ‘key’. If someone somehow manages to get in with a code that they weren’t supposed to, good chance it’ll contain all the metadata necessary to know who it was.

Good enough? Not quite. In this age, you probably need a security camera. Perhaps one built into the actual mailbox with a birds eye lens that gives you full view of your doorway. If it was motion activated, you could have a recording of every delivery as well as anyone else who was creeping around your front door. In the mobile age, it would be also be nice to have a notification arrive to your phone when your mailbox has been opened so you can quickly check the footage and make sure everything was straight forward.

So where do these things go? If you own a home, there’s probably enough real estate at the front of your house to make this work without too many issues. Maybe it gets bolted to the floor or door. The problem is that E-comm seems to be most heavily used in areas of high urban density. The idea of retroactively installing these things in old apartment or condo buildings seems like an uphill battle. I think there’s good reason to make this a standard in new buildings, but you would probably need some traction first. Hmm…

I’m genuinely not sure if something like this would work but I’ll put it out there. What if you created your own PO box? Rent a space and load it up with as many of these Amazon mailboxes as logistically possible and charge something like $10/mo for a rental fee. You might even get away with having the place fully automated. An NFC panel on the front door could let you in while keeping uninvited visitors out. Load the place up with security cameras and have them tethered into a central security monitoring system with clear instructions around showing up and sorting out the rift-raft when it happens. If you have any issues, just use your app to start a customer service chat.

I can’t help but want to run the numbers for a sec… Lets say a 1000 sqft location and assume these Amazon mailboxes are 2’x2’x2′. Without any room to walk, you could place 500 of these on the floor. Stacked up 6′ high, that’s 1500 mailboxes. Accommodating for walkways, let’s cut that in half and say 750 mailboxes total. 750 @ $10/month would be $7500/month in income. Lower than I would’ve liked. Maybe there’s a way to increase the density here. Maybe there’s a formula that would leave us with an ideal square footage for a location. Either way, the overhead would be extremely low if you could avoid having to staff it. Electric, IT, security… and general corporate overhead. I found an average rate of $23/sqft for retail. Applying that here, we’re looking at about $2300/month in rent. If you could keep monthly overhead for each location under $2500, you have a pretty healthy margin. That said, 750 mailboxes @ $10/month still only amounts to $90,000 in annual revenue. Hardly worth the effort for most. Even with multiple locations, you’d need 12 just to break $1,000,000 in revenue.

But maybe it’s not about modern PO boxes. Maybe that’s the penetration strategy for being able to manufacture and sell these boxes. If you could get people using them and excited about their convenience, it’s only a matter of time until people start requesting them in their homes. If you could get some major property development companies on board, you could have these installed in every new condo tower they build. If the average building has (guessing) 40 units and these boxes come at a cost of $250 each, that’s a $10,000 for every new building that goes up. If you get to the point where most new builds include a ecomm-ready mailbox, that would likely build enough traction for these things to go mainstream. If they go mainstream, e-comm becomes that much more effective (and attractive). If e-comm gets that much more effective and attractive, that many more people will want to buy these boxes.

All speculative, of course… just an exercise in problem solving 🙂

Solutions that Create More Solutions

I was reading a Harvard Business Review article a while back and it was talking about the dynamic of a self-perpetuating business. An easy example is the classic ‘customer first’ strategy:

If you always put the customer first, the customer is always happy and if the customer is always happy, then they’ll keep coming back and every once in a while, they’ll come back with a friend. As more friends become shoppers, the business grows and more locations can be opened to serve more friends. As more locations are opened and the business scales, it can reinvest in itself, ultimately leading to better customer service. And the cycle continues.

Good customer service is a solution to the problem of bad customer service, but it’s also a solution that creates more solutions. There are other solutions that create more problems. Cost cutting can be an example:

Revenues are down so you look to cut costs to maintain profitability. You realize you can fire your top performing employees who are being paid the most, and replace them with new talent who will work for half as much. Next year’s forecasts are now back in line with corporate targets. Solution?

Probably not. Firing your top performing employees is a quick way to decimate your organizational culture and that leads to lower levels of acquisition, retention, and production. It was a solution in that it was able to achieve reduced costs, but it also created a problem by way of significantly reduced revenues over the long-term.

This isn’t a business concept. It’s a universal concept. It persists in the laws of physics as well as in the truths of philosophy, and it’s one which the world desperately needs to understand.

You have the compassionate crowd who actively fight racism with racism, and actively fight against free speech to protect free speech. It won’t work.

You have the intelligent crowd who spend most of their time picking apart bad solutions, and then defer to whatever benefits them personally, lacking the understanding that this is all a collective effort. That won’t work either.

I’m still trying to understand why intelligence and compassion are at odds with one another, because they also share a very significant connection:

The most intelligence decision you can make is a compassionate one, and the most compassionate decision you can make is an intelligent one.

This isn’t neutral territory between the left and the right, this is the guiding star that we should all be following. Compassion is the compass, intelligence is the map.