No matter your field of expertise, every day you’re presented with seemingly impossible challenges. Issues that you or your company can’t seem to crack, even after weeks, months, or years of trying.
How do you approach these impossible challenges? Do you have a strategy that you follow, or do you just hold a brainstorming session and hope for the best? Do you tell yourself, “Think harder!” and pray inspiration will strike?
There’s a better way to solve problems like these — improve the quality of your thinking. Better thinking, problem-solving, and reasoning are skills. They can be developed through self-examination, learning new frameworks, and expanding our mental models.
Lucky for us, brilliant thinkers, creators, entrepreneurs, and philosophers — people like Elon Musk, Aristotle, Charlie Munger, Issac Newton, Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Frederick Douglass, Maya Angelou, and Henry Ford — have left behind documentation, frameworks, and tools for considering impossible problems.In "How to Solve Impossible Problems," author Jennifer L. Clinehens (Choice Hacking, CX That Sings) presents 7 such tools to improve our thinking and help us solve what feel like insurmountable challenges. In each chapter she gives specific, actionable advice, real-world examples, and in a free companion course (available February 15, 2022) provides worksheets to help apply each principle.
Jennifer Clinehens is currently Head of Experience at a major global experience agency. She holds a Master's degree in Brand Management as well as an MBA from Emory University's Goizueta School. Ms. Clinehens has client-side and consulting experience working for brands like AT&T, McDonald's, Adidas, and she's helped shape customer experiences across the globe.
A recognized authority in marketing and customer experience, Ms. Clinehens is the author of "CX That Sings: An Introduction to Customer Journey Mapping", and "Choice Hacking: How to use psychology and behavioral science to create an experience that sings."
If you never heard of cognitive biases, first principle thinking etc. - then this book is a handy introduction. For other folks it's just a summary of the concepts above.