stories on problem solving

21 Good Picture Books to Teach Problem and Solution

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Read mentor text picture books to teach problem and solution text structure. Understanding the problem and solution story structures improves comprehension and helps readers make informed predictions. (As well as helping children see the creative possibilities in problem-solving!)

Of course, almost all stories have a problem and a solution –with the exception of a concept book. So really, you can search out problem and solution examples in any book, whether it’s fiction or nonfiction.

When children learn what to expect in a problem and solution story, not only will they be able to predict solutions, but they will also be better able to write their own problem-solution stories. I started teaching this early to my young kids, well before they were school-age because we want our children to become problem solvers. That is an important life skill!

While many picture books model the narrative story structure of problem and solution, these are my favorites to use with kids both at home and in the classroom.

PRINTABLE LIST

problem and solution picture books mentor texts

Mentor Text Picture Books to Teach Problem and Solution

Problem Solved! by Jan Thomas When Rabbit sees his messy room, he learns that he has HIS OWN PROBLEM SOLVING PORCUPINE! Which seems good at first. But, it turns into a disaster. Because to clean up the blocks, the porcupine flushes them down the toilet. And to clean up his shirts, he feeds them to the goldfish. How can Rabbit get rid of his not-very-helpful problem-solving porcupine?

A House in the Woods by Inga Moore Little Pig’s den becomes filled with friends, but once Moose arrives, the den collapses. Oh, no! Problem. What will they do to find a solution? Together, the animals build a new house in the woods big enough to fit all the friends.

Enigma by Graeme Base Bertie needs to find the missing magic show props that have disappeared from his grandpa’s retirement home. Each performer tells him what’s missing. Readers help find the items in the illustrations so that Bertie can find the culprit. Like all his books, Base excels in his detailed illustrations.

7 Ate 9: The Untold Story by Tara Lazar, illustrated by Ross MacDonald 6 bangs on Private I’s door for help! Because there’s a rumor that 7 is eating other numbers because apparently, 7 ate 9. YIKES! But did 7 really eat 9? Pitch perfect tongue-in-cheek number and word humor will crack you up throughout this suspenseful, funny problem and solution story. (Also on: Best Picture Book Mysteries .)

The Brownstone by Paula Scher, illustrated by Stan Mack The Bear family is ready for hibernation but first, they need to figure out what to do about the noise problem. Their solution? All the animals work together to shift apartments so that everyone finds the best apartment for their specific needs. You’ll love the message and illustrations.

Pigeon P.I. by Meg McLaren What a unique and delightful mystery story! A little canary asks Pigeon P.I. (private investigator) to help her find her missing friends. Then the canary goes missing, too. It’s up to Pigeon to solve the missing bird mystery. The author writes in the style of the old detective shows– punchy with short sentences. The illustrator captures the details, giving kids clues to notice as they read.

One Word from Sophia by Jim Averbeck, illustrated by Yasmeen Ismail This picture book is a great way to teach kids summarizing and word choice as well as a problem-solution text structure! Sophia really wants a pet giraffe for her birthday. As a result, she sets out to convince her family, starting with her mother, a judge. However, Mother says that Sophia’s argument is too verbose. As a result, Sophie tries fewer words with Father. But he says her presentation is too effusive. Sophia continues with each family member until she reaches her last-ditch attempt and says the one word that works: PLEASE.

No Boring Stories! by Julie Falatko, illustrated by Charles Santoso When a cute little bunny tries to join a group of animal storytellers (mole, weevil, crab, and babirusa), the group doesn’t want to add her to their brainstorming group. As the animals continue their story plans with relatable characters, an inciting incident, rising action, climax, and…. Only the group gets stuck with the ending. That’s when bunny reveals that she likes making up weird (not boring) stories. The group realizes that the bunny has the perfect ending idea. Reluctantly, they agree that she can be part of the group. At least until a “ bunch of adorable frogs and puppies show up next week… ” This book shows plotting as well as the creative strengths of writers working together.

That Fruit Is Mine! by Anuska Allepuz This is a charming problem and solution story about learning to share and the power of working together. You’ll crack up watching the elephants’ many failed attempts to get delicious-looking fruit off a tree while simultaneously watching a tiny group of mice work together to get the yummy fruit, too. The problem is getting the fruit but only one animal group succeeds in a solution. Who do you think it will be? Great for prediction! (Also on: Picture Books That Teach Cooperation .)

Great, Now We’ve Got Barbarians! by Jason Carter Eaton, illustrated by Mark Fearing Mom says that if the boy doesn’t clean his room, he’ll get pests . . . which the boy thinks aren’t all that bad, right? However, things go downhill when barbarian “pests” start arriving. Because they eat everything, use his toys to clean out their ears, and steal blankets and pillows. So there is only one thing to do — CLEAN up his room. It’s a predictable but funny solution with the perfect forgot-to-clean-up twist at the end.

Walrus in the Bathtub by Deborah Underwood, illustrated by Matt Hunt The worst thing about this family’s new home is the walrus in the bathtub. And walrus songs are very, very loud. It’s a big problem. The family tries lots of clever things to get the walrus to leave the bathtub but with no success. So they decide to move. Again. That’s when the walrus shows them his list — “ How to Make Your New Family Feel Welcome ” — which, surprisingly, includes all the things that annoy the family. It turns out the walrus was just trying to be nice. As a result, the family stays with a few *new* rules. This story will make you want your own walrus in a bathtub.

The Thingity-Jig by Kathleen Doherty, illustrated by Kristyna Litten Wordplay, problem-solving, and persistence! One day Bear finds a Thingity-Jig (aka. a couch), which he thinks is wonderful as a sit-on-it, jump-on-it thing. He asks his friends to help him carry it home but they’re too fast asleep, so Bear figures out some ideas to do it himself. He makes a Rolly-Rumpity! Which is a pack-it-up, heap-it-up, load-it-up thing. That isn’t enough to move the Thingit-Jig so Bear makes something else — a Lifty-Uppity. And then, a Pushy-Poppity. And at daybreak, he arrives back at home where his friends are waking up, with his special Thingity-Jig. Bingity…Bing…Boing…Bear falls asleep.

Someday is Now: Clara Luper and the 1958 Oklahoma City Sit-Ins by Olugbemisola Rhuday-Perkovich Clara advocated for justice and equality during a time when Black people weren’t permitted the same rights as white people. As a teacher, she inspired her students to believe that change was possible. Clara and her students went to the Katz drugstore and asked to be served — even though the store didn’t serve black people. She and her students returned day after day despite people yelling and throwing food. Eventually, the Katz store relented and started to serve people of all races. Clara and her students finally could enjoy a Coke and a burger without trouble.

Wangari’s Trees of Peace by Jeannette Winter Based on the true story of Wangari Maathai, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, read how Wangari helped her country of Kenya whose forests were all but destroyed. She started planting trees which started a movement motivating other people to plant trees as well. This is an example of how narrative nonfiction book can also teach the plot structure of problem and solution .

Battle Bunny by Jon Scieszka and Mac Barnett, illustrated by Matt Myers When Alex gets a silly, sappy picture book called Birthday Bunny, he picks up a pencil and turns it into something he’d like to read: Battle Bunny. An adorable rabbit’s journey through the forest becomes a secret mission to unleash an evil plan–a plan that only Alex can stop. Not only does this mentor text model problem and solution, but also voice and revision.

When Pigs Fly by James Burke One day, an exuberant pig declares that he will fly. His sister observes with disbelief and horror as one attempt after another fails. The brother pig is so disappointed that he decides to give up. That’s when his sister comes up with an idea — something he hasn’t tried before that will help her brother fly — a pretend airplane. The pigs’ expressive illustrations are absolutely perfect as is the message of persistence despite failure.

Piper and Purpa Forever! by Susan Lendroth, illustrated by Olivia Feng Most stories have a problem and a solution but this story is a great example showing a little girl’s ability to creatively problem solve with a beautiful solution to her problem. Piper loves her beloved purple sweater, Purpa, and is so sad when she grows out of it. Will she be able to keep her sweater somehow?

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Melissa Taylor, MA, is the creator of Imagination Soup. She's a mother, former teacher & literacy trainer, and freelance education writer. She writes Imagination Soup and freelances for publications online and in print, including Penguin Random House's Brightly website, USA Today Health, Adobe Education, Colorado Parent, and Parenting. She is passionate about matching kids with books that they'll love.

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All storytelling is about problem-solving

“Stories are like mental flight simulators; they allow us to rehearse problems and become better at dealing with them.” —Heath, Chip and Dan (2007). Made to Stick .

Context, problem, solution

All storytelling is about problem-solving.

All stories are context; problem; solution. That’s it. And they occur in that order.

This is true for anecdotes told in seconds and grand narrative multi-series TV dramas. Context, problem, solution. Repeat.

But there is more! Storytelling is not just about problem-solving, it is also our primary mental tool for solving problems.

In 1716, Christopher Bullock wrote, “‘Tis impossible to be sure of anything but death and taxes. ” That is true, but we can make a broader, more powerful statement. It’s impossible to be sure of anything except problems (of which death and taxes are just two of the many we face).

Problems are inevitable. And problems are solvable. 1

Facing and solving problems is a pretty good description of life and business.

When you understand the problem-solving nature of stories, it becomes obvious why we love them so much. And when you see how to use stories for problem-solving, you will have a secret code to solve any problem before you.

Problem-solving with story is an all-purpose, money-making, timesaving, status-building, enjoyment tool. It is a meta-skill!

When I graduated with an electrical and mechanical engineering degree back in the 1980s, my first job was running electrical survey instruments in oilwells, so the oil company could know whether they had discovered oil.

It’s a basic fact of the oil industry that oil is not found in touristic, pleasant locations. And so, I was stuck on rigs in the jungles of Sumatra, offshore East Malaysia, and on the frozen seas of Northern China.

If my survey instruments failed, as they often did, an oil rig and an impatient company man were waiting for me to fix them—at a waiting cost of one million dollars per day.

My job was continuous problem-solving. If you asked me what an engineer does, I would say, “An engineer solves problems.” But I did not think about or understand storytelling at that time.

With the perspective of hindsight, I now appreciate how I learned that complex, high-pressure job. I learnt from the stories of my colleagues.

Each time we returned to base from a rig, the engineers would get together and share stories of problems encountered and overcome. Each story was a mental simulation of how to overcome future problems. A simulation with mental playback—or play forward to other possible solutions.

They were not just technical stories, but stories of how to behave, how to manage people, how to succeed, and how to avoid failure. We loved those stories.

You might be thinking, ‘ It’s not that simple… ’ ; storytelling is not really about problem-solving, it’s about entertainment, human connection and emotions, or something else. Let me provide some examples.

A tornado rips through Kansas, and Dorothy and her dog, Toto, are whisked away in their house to the magical land of Oz [context]. Dorothy must find her way home [problem]. She meets three friends, has lots of adventures, and eventually finds her way home [solution]. The three friends have problems too (no brain; no heart; no courage), which they solve along the way—stories within a story.

Nelson Mandela grew up in South Africa while the country was racially divided by the system of apartheid [context]. He became an activist, seeking equal opportunities and rights for black South Africans [problem]. He was jailed for 27 years but inspired change through his writing and communication. In 1994, he became the first black prime minister of a united South Africa [solution].

In 1937, Benjamin Franklin was proposed to become Clerk of the General Assembly for Philadelphia [context]. An influential rival spoke out against his nomination [problem]. Franklin knew it would be beneficial for him to become closer to this rival, so he sent him a note asking to borrow a rare book. The rival was surprised but agreed to send him the book. Franklin thanked him, and over time kept asking for other books, and the two built a comradeship [solution].

In contradiction to the title, I tell fifty stories in my book Seven Stories Every Salesperson Must Tell . Last night, I went through the story index in the book and found context, problem, and solution in each one. Every story in the book is a problem-solving story.

Sequence is crucial

Note that the sequence is crucial! If you miss the sequence, it is not a story , and you lose all the benefits.

In 1996, when I started as a salesman in Norway, I made the mistake of just telling my clients the solution. Solutions on their own, out of context, are merely claims that are difficult to process. Put the solution in a story, and magic happens.

With context , the listener can imagine themselves in the story. As a problem is described, they can guess at possible solutions and then delight in the final solution , as if they were the one that solved it.

Business applications

When you understand and appreciate that stories are about problem-solving, and you notice story’s problem-solving power, you can seek out examples for all types of business problems, such as:

How to build trust with another person;
How to inspire a team;
How to help a client change;
How to close a deal;
How to get the right behaviour from a team;
How to get new ideas;
How to grow a company;
How to implement a new strategy…

It goes on and on. Endless, solvable problems. Solvable with stories. Context, problem, solution.

It takes (enjoyable) practice to master storytelling, but the more you learn, the more you will realise how fundamental story is to business and life.

You will not only learn to tell stories, but also to seek out the stories of your clients, partners, and colleagues. Storytelling and story listening go together as a matched set.

Happy storytelling.

1 David Deutsch (2011). The Beginning of Infinity .

Mike is an expert facilitator and story consultant who has helped numerous national and international companies, across many industries, to tap into story-powered sales. He is also the author of the international bestseller Seven Stories Every Salesperson Must Tell . Connect with Mike on:

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Become a Better Problem Solver by Telling Better Stories

One of the biggest obstacles to effective decision-making is failure to define the problem well. Invoking the power of narrative and a simple story structure can help ensure that teams are solving the right problem.

Developing Strategy

Alex Nabaum/theispot.com

Like many companies at the end of 2021, a small European precision toolmaker was having trouble hiring and retaining talent. The executive team had a solution: Create a more attractive social space to encourage informal collaboration. But when the head of human resources presented the plan to the board (which included one of this article’s coauthors), the directors were puzzled. They didn’t know what problem the redesign was supposed to solve.

In retrospect, their confusion was understandable. The executive team had not spelled out the extent of the company’s recruitment challenges or made clear the link between the social space and attracting talent. Rather than seeking approval for the new space, they should have been discussing the best way to make the company a more attractive place to work or, more broadly, how to assemble the talent they needed given the expanding competition for talent across industries.

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This is a familiar pattern we have encountered in our teaching and executive consulting. In the face of complex problems and strategic decisions, executives often choose the wrong problem to solve. They focus on symptoms instead of causes, base their thinking on false assumptions and artificial constraints, and overlook key stakeholders. The answer, we have found, is to change the way the problem is defined. By doing so, business leaders can significantly expand their universe of alternatives and identify radically better solutions.

Seeking Problem Solvers

To find better answers, it is necessary to ask better questions. This is called problem framing . Often neglected, this initial step in the decision-making sequence sets the trajectory for generating alternative options. It is critical for two reasons: It can reveal new possible solutions, and it avoids wasting time, money, and effort on half-baked ideas.

In our study of more than 700 international executives, 60% identified poor problem formulation as one of the two most prevalent barriers to effective problem-solving in their organizations. (The other is insufficient stakeholder engagement.)

An effectively framed problem is simple to understand, which may explain why executives often underestimate the effort that good problem formulation requires.

About the Authors

Arnaud Chevallier is a professor of strategy, and Albrecht Enders is a professor of strategy and innovation at the International Institute for Management Development (IMD) in Lausanne, Switzerland. They are the coauthors of Solvable: A Simple Solution to Complex Problems (FT Publishing, 2022). Jean-Louis Barsoux is a term research professor at IMD Lausanne.

1. D. Kahneman, “Thinking, Fast and Slow” (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), 79.

2. S. Finkelstein, “ Don’t Be Blinded by Your Own Expertise ,” Harvard Business Review 97, no. 3 (May-June 2019): 153-158.

3. L. Ross, D. Greene, and P. House, “The ‘False Consensus Effect’: An Egocentric Bias in Social Perception and Attribution Processes,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 13, no. 3 (May 1977 ): 279-301.

4. S.F.C. Schulz-Hardt, A. Brodbeck, A. Mojzisch, et al., “ Group Decision-Making in Hidden Profile Situations: Dissent as a Facilitator for Decision Quality ,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 91, no. 6 (January 2007): 1080-1093.

5. “ Logitech International Q3 FY08 Earnings Conference Call Transcript ,” Seeking Alpha, Jan. 20, 2008, https://seekingalpha.com.

6. M. Wilson, “ Logitech Quadrupled Its Profits — With One Big Design Idea ,” Fast Company, Sept. 20, 2017, www.fastcompany.com.

7. “ Logitech International SA CEO Hosts Annual Investor Conference (Transcript) ,” Seeking Alpha, May 24, 2013, https://seekingalpha.com.

8. M. Stettner, “ Why Logitech’s CEO Fires, Rehires Himself ,” Investor’s Business Daily, Dec. 30, 2020, www.investors.com.

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Using Storytelling to Boost Problem Solving Skills

Introduction

Problem solving skills involve finding solutions to obstacles encountered in various situations. The ability to solve problems is highly valued in different professional settings. People with superior problem-solving skills tend to be efficient, highly productive, and effective problem solvers.

Problem-solving skills are essential for the modern workforce and daily life. They enable us to make better decisions, improving our relationship with work, family, and friends. Organizations and individuals frequently invest resources in developing and improving their problem-solving abilities.

Storytelling has gained tremendous popularity in recent years and has become an efficient problem-solving approach. Narratives have been utilized for centuries to connect individuals, cultures, and communities. Storytelling is a technique that enables us to make sense of the world around us and presents problems in a contextualized way that are memorable and sustainable.

Storytelling can be a powerful tool to develop, maintain, and enhance problem-solving skills. It links creativity, critical thinking, and analytical skills with an engaging experience that helps shed insights on complex problems. The following sections explore the benefits of using storytelling to improve problem-solving skills.

What is Storytelling?

Storytelling is the art of conveying a message or information through a narrative. It is a form of communication that has been around for thousands of years, dating back to ancient civilizations. At its core, storytelling is about engaging the audience and captivating them with a story.

Storytelling is not just for entertainment purposes. It has been used for centuries to teach and educate people about morals, values, history, and culture. Storytelling can be used to inform, inspire, and influence people.

The Benefits of Using Storytelling

Storytelling has numerous benefits, which is why it has stood the test of time. Here are some of the advantages of using storytelling:

Engagement: Stories are more engaging than facts, statistics, or data. When people are told a story, they are more likely to connect with the information and remember it.
Retention: Studies have shown that people are more likely to remember information if it is presented in a story format. Stories help to create a mental image that helps the brain to retain information better than dry facts.
Emotional Connection: Stories have the power to create an emotional connection with the audience. Emotions help to reinforce memories, which means that people are more likely to remember information that made them feel a certain way.
Inspiration: Stories can inspire people to take action or think differently. When people hear a story about someone overcoming adversity or achieving their goals, it can motivate them to do the same.

Overall, storytelling can be a powerful tool in communication, education, and problem-solving. By harnessing the power of storytelling, individuals can improve their problem-solving skills and become more effective decision-makers.

The Link Between Storytelling and Problem Solving Skills

Using storytelling techniques can have a profound impact on problem solving skills. When we hear stories, we are able to engage with the characters, think about the plot and the various scenarios that the characters encounter. This helps us develop our creativity and analytical thinking, which are critical skills in problem solving.

Research has shown that storytelling can help in many ways, including:

Emotional connection : Storytelling can help create an emotional connection between the listener and the storyteller. This helps the listener to be more invested in the story and hence, more likely to think deeply about it.
Understanding complexity : Stories can help convey complex ideas and situations in a simple and engaging way. This makes it easier for the listener to grasp complex ideas and think about different scenarios.
Fostering imagination : Stories can stimulate the imagination and help the listener in generating multiple ideas and solutions.

Using storytelling gives a different perspective when analyzing problems. Storytelling fosters an attitude of curiosity, creativity, and open-mindedness that can be invaluable when facing complex challenges. For example, when addressing a customer service problem or designing a new product, it can be helpful to think of the scenario as a story with different parameters and constraints. By leveraging storytelling, it is possible to identify various scenarios that could arise, and develop appropriate responses or solutions.

Storytelling has been successfully used by organizations to improve their problem-solving skills. For example, many companies use scenario-based exercises to teach employees how to think critically and develop a variety of solutions to problems. In these exercises, employees work through different scenarios, discussing the potential outcomes, and different ways of resolving any issues. This process encourages people to think creatively and consider different perspectives while also refining their problem-solving abilities.

In conclusion, storytelling can be a potent tool for improving problem-solving skills. Through storytelling, individuals can develop their creativity, analytical thinking, and develop empathy, which are all critical skills required for problem solving. The power of storytelling can help in a wide range of scenarios, from customer service issues to designing new solutions or products.

How to Use Storytelling to Improve Problem Solving Skills

If you want to improve your problem solving skills using storytelling techniques, here are some tips to help you get started:

Identify the Problem You Need to Solve

Before you can start telling stories, you need to identify the problem you want to solve. This can be a complex challenge or a simple issue that needs to be addressed. Once you know what problem you need to tackle, you can start thinking about how storytelling can help you solve it.

Create a Story Around the Problem

Once you have identified the problem, you can begin to create a story around it. Think about the characters involved, their motivations, and how they might approach the problem. You can use real-life examples for inspiration or create a fictional story to make it more engaging.

Use the Story to Generate Ideas and Solutions

Once you have a story, you can start to use it to generate ideas and solutions. Try to think of different ways the story could end or how the characters might react to different situations. By doing this, you may come up with creative solutions to the problem at hand.

Share the Story with Others

Once you have developed your story and generated some ideas and solutions, share it with others. Get feedback from colleagues, friends, or family members and see if they can offer any new insights or perspectives. By sharing your story, you may be able to get others to think about the problem in a new way.

Practice Storytelling

Like any skill, storytelling takes practice. The more you practice storytelling, the better you will become at it. Try to tell stories that engage people and keep them interested. You might find that you start to develop a knack for storytelling that you can apply to other areas of your life.

Storytelling can be a powerful tool for improving problem solving skills. By creating engaging stories around problems, you can generate ideas and solutions that you may not have come up with otherwise. Use the tips above to get started with storytelling in problem solving situations, and you may find that you have a new approach to solving old problems.

In conclusion, storytelling serves as an effective tool for improving problem solving skills. By engaging in narrative techniques, individuals can view problems in new and inventive ways and craft effective solutions. With a clear definition of problem solving skills and the benefits of storytelling, readers have gained a fundamental understanding of the importance of implementing storytelling tools in problem-solving processes.

By understanding the link between storytelling and problem solving, readers can apply the skills inherent in storytelling to their own problem-solving endeavors. The examples provided serve as inspiration for using storytelling methods and can be adapted for a range of situations. The tips on implementing storytelling provide a clear and concise summary of how readers can integrate storytelling in their problem solving processes.

In today’s fast-paced and ever-changing world, creativity and analytical thinking have become necessary skills for success in countless fields. Harnessing the power of narrative through storytelling can help individuals boost their problem solving skills and approach situations with fresh, innovative solutions. In sum, using storytelling to improve problem solving is a beneficial and powerful tool that readers are encouraged to explore.

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A Beautiful Solution

A father was engrossed in his work while his little daughter constantly distracted him in an attempt for him to make him play with her. To keep her busy, the man tore a page of a printed map of the world from a magazine into pieces and asked her to go to her room and put them together to make the map again. The daughter was very young, and he was pretty sure that she would take hours to get it done.

The father was surprised when he saw his little one coming out of the room with a smile and the perfect map within a few minutes. The stunned man asked his daughter how she could solve the puzzle so quickly.

“ Daddy, there is a woman’s face on the other side of the paper. When I made a face perfectly, I got the map right.”, replied the young girl.

Moral: There is always the other side to whatever you experience in this world. Whenever we encounter a challenge or a puzzling situation, look at the other side. You will be surprised to see different approaches to tackling the problem.

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Problem-Solving: The Unsung Hero of Every Story

The fable of The Crow and the Pitcher teaches that necessity is the mother of invention.

I can take stories apart into pieces and explain how every piece works. But sometimes, doing that can cause us to lose sight of the big picture. When all those pieces are put together, what are we looking at? What are stories, and what is their purpose?

After looking at how each piece works, it’s difficult to ignore that their workings neatly line up to support the same conclusion: stories are how we teach each other to solve problems. Or, similarly, how not to solve them.

Of course, this isn’t their only purpose. We can assign as many purposes to stories as we like. But it looks like problem-solving is what they are designed for, and when we’re writing, that matters.

Why Problem-Solving?

To understand how important it is for us to communicate about problems, let’s talk about crows. Studies are now showing they may be as smart as apes . Intelligence in animals follows a clear pattern: the most intelligent animals are also the most social.

Crows live in large groups, and they have complicated calls they use to signal to one another, calls we don’t fully understand. But studies at the University of Washington have shown that not only can crows recognize people who have previously done them a bad turn, but they can also teach other crows to recognize these miscreants. A crow will scold someone they have no personal experience with.

Crows are well known for one clever trick in particular: In some places, they drop nuts at intersections, wait for cars to run the nuts over, and then retrieve the cracked nuts when the light turns.

Now let’s imagine one crow told another crow about this clever solution.

Crow: One day, I was really hungry, but the only food I could find was these nuts. The shells on them were so hard I couldn’t get them open, no matter how hard I pecked at them.

Crow Friend: What did you do?

Crow: I realized that if I couldn’t get them open, I would need to get something bigger and stronger than me to do it instead. So I left one on the road and waited until a car ran over it.

Crow Friend: Did it work?

Crow: Yeah! The shell broke, and I swooped in to grab the nut as soon as the traffic died down. After that, I had no problem with hunger.

It’s easy to put this clever survival solution by a crow into story format, because it has all the necessary ingredients for a story. There are built-in stakes to whether a crow manages to get a meal, and dropping the nut on the road is obviously a clever deduction turning point . Then the crow is rewarded for its cleverness by abating its hunger.

And if a crow were telling this story, it would obviously benefit other crows to listen . Maybe that’s why we humans find stories so engrossing. Communication professionals of all stripes work to weave stories into their content. Businesses develop their origin stories to improve their marketing and PR. Journalists find personal stories to bring important issues to life. And teachers tell stories to help students remember lessons.

It’s amazing how many people emphasize they’re storytellers, even though that’s not strictly their job.

How Tension Draws Us to Problems

If we want to remember essential lessons from our fellows, we first need to identify them. What distinguishes information our lives may depend on from all the trivial things people say every day?

First, survival information addresses a serious problem. In the case of the crow with the nut, that concern is hunger and therefore starvation. These stakes are what separate a problem from a mere character goal . If, instead of opening a nut, the crow came up with a clever way to find pretty red ribbons, that wouldn’t be an important survival tip. It also wouldn’t make for a compelling story.

Second, the problem has to be hard to solve. If every crow could open any nut by pecking at it, there would be no need for a clever solution. No matter how many times I hear that life hack about opening a banana from the bottom, I do not care because I have no problem opening bananas from the top.

Both of these factors are requirements for tension : a feeling of uncertainty and concern that storytellers evoke to draw in audiences. Tension also has two other requirements: attachment, which indicts emotional investment in the outcome, and urgency. The crow’s nut story also fulfills these requirements. We obviously care whether we go hungry, and we can’t put off eating for long. Altogether, this means the indicators of an important problem create tension, and then tension draws audiences in.

As storytellers, we have to continually invent tough and important problems. In some ways it’s not that different from making crosswords for the newspaper, except the puzzles we invent are much closer to home. Instead of asking our audience to find a five-letter word related to rain, we ask how the protagonist might attend an interview and a parent-teacher meeting at the same time. It’s the stuff our nightmares are made of, except we’ve come up with plausible ways for the protagonist to end up on stage without their pants.

Once we accomplish that, our task only gets harder.

The Protagonist Should Always Be Solving Problems

A common plotting mistake is thinking the protagonist can just walk on stage and do anything. They can have a nice touching conversation while they recline and sip their cup of tea. But that’s not true.

Your protagonist exists to work on solving problems. All the time.

This is easy to miss because problems and problem-solving come in so many forms and touch on so many subjects. Think of our crossword. I could ask for a niche word that requires the puzzle solver to understand anatomy, astronomy, or history, but regardless, that knowledge is all a means to the same end: solving a puzzle.

Similarly, a protagonist who’s desperately unhappy could try to solve this by having a touching conversation with their friends, by winning a medal that makes their parents proud, or by facing their fears. These are very different activities, but what matters is that they are all a means of solving a problem.

Of course, we have a name for this in storytelling: conflict. But this name is sadly inadequate, incapable of expressing the full diversity of problem-solving activities.

Instead, it’s more accurate to say the protagonist has to struggle to solve tough problems. A common mistake that weakens conflicts is making problem-solving too easy. Remember, people need lessons in how to crack a tough nut, not how to peel a banana. In my sample crow story, the crow first described how pecking couldn’t break the shell — then they came up with their solution. Similarly, the harder a crossword is to solve, the more valuable the solution becomes and the more rewarding it is to solve it.

But as long as the protagonist struggles to solve a problem, changing what they are doing is the key to making your story about anything. Are you looking for an excuse to rant about growing tomatoes? That’s fine; just invent a problem that gardening might solve. Are these magical tomatoes that cure illness?

After we make the protagonist struggle with our problem, the next part is the hardest of all.

Your Solution Should Not Only Work but Be Teachable

Once you’ve invented a problem so thorny the protagonist is getting tangled and cut everywhere, you have to solve it somehow. It’s a constant magician’s trick where there’s nowhere a bunny could hide, yet you keep pulling them out of your hat. This requires careful balance.

If you have problems getting bunnies out of your hat, you may shy away from letting your protagonist struggle. That’s because once the protagonist faces a big challenge, you won’t know how to get them past it. Thankfully, this logistical issue can be solved with a little practice and observation. Of course, unique solutions are always fun, but the truth is most stories have similar conflicts that can be solved in similar ways. Take notes on some of your favorite stories – just don’t copy any one story too much. You’ll get there.

Conversely, if we become too eager to impress, we may tell our riveted audience that we’ll pull an elephant out of our hat even though that’s not possible. This is what happens when our problems are so difficult there simply is no solution with sufficient believability. Storytellers who do this benefit from planning ahead so they know what solutions they can pull off and what they need to make those solutions plausible.

So now let’s say you manage to make an incredibly difficult problem but still find a credible way for the protagonists to solve it. That’s great, but if you want to wow your audience, there’s still one thing missing.

The purpose of the story is to teach your audience how to solve problems or how not to. That means the solution has to be something that they could repeat in the same situation .

The neat trick of dropping nuts on the road has been repeated by crows in multiple locations. Similarly, if your protagonist finds the Dream Eater’s secret weakness, well, now your audience knows what to do if they ever face a Dream Eater. Luckily for us, the intellectual knowledge that Dream Eaters don’t exist doesn’t matter as long as you make it feel like they do.

This is why a protagonist can’t win simply because they are better at fighting. Instead you have to include why they are better at fighting so the audience could get good at it too. Maybe the secret is working really hard, being humble, or pushing past your fears.

Alternatively, you might warn your audience against steps that lead to failure. Steps that could be very tempting. They’d better not accept the Dream Eater’s offer to make their dreams come true; it will end in tears!

Any Unnecessary Step Must Go

Let’s go back to our storytelling crow. Imagine the story went like this:

Crow: One day, I was really hungry, but the only food I could find was these nuts with shells I couldn’t crack.

Crow: First, I did an unhappy dance for a day while the other crows watched. Second, I left a nut on the road and waited until a car ran over it. It did the trick. The nut broke, and I feasted!

Part of this story feels out of place, so much so that I would expect the rest of the conversation to go like so:

Crow Friend: Okay, but was that unhappy dance really necessary? It sounds like you could have skipped that part and still cracked the nut.

Crow: You know, I hadn’t thought of that — I’ll try it without the dance next time. Honestly, the dance wasted a lot of time.

Our stories work just like this. Any element that isn’t necessary to solving the problem or failing to solve it feels extraneous and pointless. That’s because the whole point is the necessary steps to cracking that nut.

Audiences are so sensitive to this that they get impatient if it doesn’t look like the material is relevant — even if it is.

Crow: So I did an unhappy dance…

Crow Friend: Is that important? Can you get to how you cracked the nut already?

Crow: It is important! If I hadn’t done the unhappy dance, I wouldn’t have met another unhappy crow that was mourning a cousin hit by a car. That’s how I thought of the solution.

This principle is called movement or, alternatively, momentum. Every step has to take the protagonist closer to solving the problem. And if it doesn’t appear that way initially, we need to do something to address that.

Problem-solving is not the only thing that makes a story entertaining. We have other methods of drawing the audience in, such as novelty and attachment . But without problem-solving, events don’t feel like a story anymore. So if you’re a storyteller, you’re also a creative problem-solver.

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Comments on Problem-Solving: The Unsung Hero of Every Story

But … but … the unhappy dance is so important!

Great advice again!

I think speaking of a problem that needs solving instead of a conflict – even though that’s the more common word used – is a good idea. A lot of people immediately think of action or fighting or violence when you say ‘conflict’ – and then claim that a story doesn’t need that. ‘Problem’ is a much more neutral word. A problem can be ‘grown awesome tomatoes to cure a magical illness’ just as well as ‘slay the black spider-dragon of the cursed mountain,’ even though the solutions to the problems are vastly different.

Perhaps that happy dance is needed to close the vale before demons can break through and invade the mortal world? One can only imagine. It just so happens that stories involving demon invasions tickle my imagination right now.

I agree with your main point, but I’d phrase it slightly differently. It’s not so much that the reason we read stories is to teach ourselves something new. Rather, there’s a part of our brains that enjoys the challenge / reward cycle of learning and problem solving, and a story lets us experience that cycle vicariously. Seeing a character succeed makes the reader feel good not because we’re saying, “Oh, good, I learned a new thing” but because we’re invested in the character and experiencing that rewarding feeling along with them.

Episode 84: Storytelling For Problem Solving

A conversation with denise withers, founder and story coach at denise withers..

“I firmly believe that culture is essentially just a collection of stories that define how we think and how we behave. In a very simple organizational example, if you’re sitting in a meeting and somebody speaks up to question what their boss says and their boss tells them to shut up, that’s a story that everybody’s going to remember, everybody’s going to file away in their own story database and that story is going to define the way they behave and it’s going to influence whether or not they decide to speak up the next time in a meeting. And so you can come up with all the nice sayings that you want about how your organization works, but it’s the stories that we tell each other, it’s the stories that we see, it’s the stories that we experience that we actually internalize and remember and use to guide our decisions and our behaviors going forward.” – Denise Withers

In this episode of Control the Room, I had the pleasure of speaking with Denise Withers about her journey becoming a Story Coach and helping leaders drive change. She shares the importance of developing your Narrative Intelligence to improve our abilities to learn, solve problems, and make sense of the world. We then discuss stories’ influence on culture, change initiatives, and leadership development. Listen in to learn more about why we need to think beyond just telling stories and start noticing the problem the story is solving.

Show Highlights

[2:10] How Denise Got Her Start As A Story Coach

[9:30] How To Use Story To Learn, Solve Problems, And Make Sense Of The World.

[16:20] How To Use Story In Change Initiatives.

[30:00] How To Use Backcasting To Free Up Resources.

[39:00] Helping People Think Beyond Just Telling Stories

Links | Resources

Denise on Twitter

Denise on LinkedIn

About the Guest

Denise Withers has spent the last 30+ years helping leaders use stories to drive change, through her work as an award-winning filmmaker and certified coach. Working with clients across sectors, she’s inspired millions of people to take action on issues like climate change, clean energy, and equity, through channels from Discovery to the UN.

About Voltage Control

Voltage Control is a change agency that helps enterprises sustain innovation and teams work better together with custom-designed meetings and workshops, both in-person and virtual. Our master facilitators offer trusted guidance and custom coaching to companies who want to transform ineffective meetings, reignite stalled projects, and cut through assumptions. Based in Austin, Voltage Control designs and leads public and private workshops that range from small meetings to large conference-style gatherings.

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Full Transcript

Douglas: Welcome to the Control the Room Podcast, a series devoted to the exploration of meeting culture and uncovering cures for the common meeting. Some meetings have tight control and others are loose. To control the room means achieving outcomes while striking a balance between imposing and removing structure, asserting and distributing power, leaning in and leaning out, all in the service of having a truly magical meeting. Thanks for listening. If you’d like to join us live for a session sometime, you can join our weekly Control the Room Facilitation Lab. It’s a free event to meet fellow facilitators and explore new techniques so you can apply the things you learn in the podcast in real-time with other facilitators. Sign up today at voltagecontrol.com/facilitation-lab.

If you’d like to learn more about my new book, Magical Meetings, you can download the Magical Meetings Quick Start Guide, a free PDF reference with some of the most important pieces of advice from the book. Download a copy today at voltagecontrol.com/magical-meetings-quick-guide. Today I’m with Denise Withers, story coach for the planet. Denise helps leaders use stories to solve tough problems and create narrative change. She’s also the author of the book Story Design: The Creative Way to Innovate, and the host of the podcast Forward: How stories drive change. Welcome to the show, Denise.

Denise: Thanks so much for having me. I’m really excited about our conversation.

Douglas: I am excited as well. I’ve been looking forward to this for a while. Picked up the book. Gosh, it’s been a while. I think we first spoke, it’s been months now and we’re finally here doing the recording, so really looking forward to digging in. So far my conversations with you have been really, I would say, inspiring. I know we’ll probably go even deeper now, so really looking forward to it.

Denise: Yeah, that’s great. There’s so much you can do with stories. We could talk for hours.

Douglas: Absolutely. I guess before we get into kind of more current events, I’d love to hear how you got your start in the work of story design.

Denise: Yeah. I guess I started back in the ’80s. I studied radio and television arts and I ended up becoming a documentary filmmaker for about 20 years. I was really lucky in my career that I launched my career just a little bit before all the specialty cable channels started out in Canada, if anybody remembers cable, and Discovery Channel had just gone on the air. So they were really hungry for content. So I was quite lucky to be able to get hired by a lot of the different shows on Discovery Channel and spent 20 years doing documentaries on everything from life and space to endangered species, to topics like HIV/AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa. It was literally, it really was the best job in the world. I was traveling around the world, learning all kinds of new things and really helping leaders and organizations spread the word about the good work they were doing and make a change.

It all kind of came crashing to a halt around 2001, 2002 when reality TV took off. That just changed the business model for television and they weren’t really interested in documentaries anymore. So I tried reality TV for a year or so and I really just couldn’t do it. I literally woke up one morning and said, “This is no way for a grown-up to make a living,” and I walked away from TV. I ended up going to grad school, a new program here in British Columbia, Canada, focused on interactive arts and technology. This was when digital media was really starting to take off. I thought it was going to look at how we use different kinds of media, video versus audio, for different kinds of learning, because I really loved the learning part of the work that I’d been doing.

But what I discovered was at the time, nobody was talking about this thing called engagement that was second nature for us in television. If you didn’t make your program engaging, people would change the channel and the show would get terrible ratings and you’d be out of a job. So I ended up doing a Master of Science on what engagement is, how it works. So looking at the cognitive science behind it, the behavioral science, the developmental psychology, and then really exploring how do you put that all together? Are there ways that you can actually design media or design experiences to be more engaging? I ended up developing a set of guidelines for how you do that.

Ironically, it turned out that the most powerful tool we have for engagement is story. And so as part of that research, I started exploring this concept of narrative intelligence. I also was exposed to the idea of design, which now it’s really popular this idea of design thinking in business as a problem solving framework. That’s when it really all came together for me. I realized that what I’d been doing during my documentary work was really this thing called story design where you have basically a communications problem or an education problem that you need to solve and you design a story to solve that problem. The process I was using as a creative was very similar to the process that organizations and businesses and entrepreneurs are using in design thinking.

When I graduated, I ended up doing quite a lot of work in the post-secondary world because that’s where design thinking was really starting to take off. I spent the next few years really weaving together all of these tools. So everything from storytelling, design thinking, strategic foresight, appreciative inquiry, behavioral economics. Starting to bring all those things together to say, how can we change the way that we design solutions to problems? So how can we change our approach to change? That’s really what I’ve been doing for the last 15 years. So really it’s led into this movement to go beyond just using stories as a way to influence people and as a framework for communication to using stories as a way to learn and solve problems and make change.

Douglas: That’s an amazing story in itself. I think maybe the one thing that blows my mind the most is the epiphany that reality TV is really the thing you can point to as the reason why the television documentary really took a dive. From my personal experience, I remember it but I can’t say that I pointed to that one cause, but it makes so much sense in retrospect.

Denise: Yeah, it was quite clear reality TV appealed to the demographic that the advertisers wanted whereas documentaries appealed to an older demographic. The younger demographic spends more money. Anybody who thinks that the networks care about content is fooling themselves. The networks are in the business to make money. So if they could produce reality TV cheaper and get the demographic that the advertisers wanted, then they were going to be all over that. So yeah, we really got kicked to the curb quite quickly.

Douglas: And it’s not surprising that you didn’t find much passion in the reality TV space because it’s really a void of many stories.

Denise: Well, yeah, I would argue that. I mean, I’ve got one of my best friends is an editor on Survivor and she’s the best storyteller I know. She is a master at taking all of the stuff that’s filmed in the course of an episode of Survivor, which doesn’t have a story to it, it’s just a whole bunch of stuff that happened. Her expertise is in taking all of that and finding a compelling story to tell. So I wouldn’t say that it doesn’t have a story but there’s no room for a writer-director, which is what I was in the classical sense in that genre.

Douglas: That is fascinating the point that the story’s almost fabricated from all these threads that were kind of collected versus documentary style’s more around like showcasing the story that’s kind of already there.

Denise: Yes. And in fact, it’s actually a great metaphor. The work that she’s doing on Survivor is actually a great metaphor for what our narrative intelligence does. So narrative intelligence is really our natural ability to learn and solve problems from stories. When you think about intelligence, emotional intelligence, or linguistic intelligence, intelligence is all about the ability to analyze patterns in a specific domain like math or language, or sports and learn and solve problems from those patterns.

And so when you think about the way that our brain works, we get bombarded with random bits of information all the time and what our brain does, what our narrative intelligence does is it organizes all those bits of information into the pattern of a story with a problem, a quest for answers and a solution. And then it packages that and that’s how we make sense of the world. Everything that happens to us, that’s actually how we make sense of it. And so as an editor on Survivor, she’s doing the same thing. She’s taking all these random bits of information and she’s organizing them into a story so we can make sense of what’s happening in that situation.

Douglas: It also reminds me, when you’re talking about these patterns that we’re basically identifying and applying these models of the world that we know about or that we’ve learned, it reminds me of our pre-show chat and how you were talking about how cultures contain stories and being a part of culture means that you kind of are part of these stories or you identify with these stories and they can influence the way you see the world. It seems fairly similar these kinds of cultural stories or these stories that are aligned with the cultures and these patterns and models that we pick up through disciplines as well.

Denise: Yeah, absolutely. I firmly believe that culture is essentially just a collection of stories that define how we think and how we behave. In a very simple organizational example, if you’re sitting in a meeting and somebody speaks up to question what their boss says and their boss tells them to shut up, that’s a story that everybody’s going to remember, everybody’s going to file away in their own story database and that story is going to define the way they behave and it’s going to influence whether or not they decide to speak up the next time in a meeting. And so you can come up with all the nice sayings that you want about how your organization works, but it’s the stories that we tell each other, it’s the stories that we see, it’s the stories that we experience that we actually internalize and remember and use to guide our decisions and our behaviors going forward.

Douglas: As you were saying that, something really just emerged for me. Then you reinforce it further with these words like internalized and remember, stories can be a memory device. People talk about like memory palace planting these things that we want to remember in these visual kinds of spaces in our mind. But also stories can be a way of remembering things, the way we tell a story and the way we repeat that story. I know my mom has these stories about me being a seven-year-old that she likes to tell over and over and over again and it’s a way of remembering. Those are the things that you don’t forget because you kind of internalize them and you tell them.

Denise: Yeah, absolutely. Again, my working hypothesis is that we keep absolutely everything we know about the world in packets of stories in our own personal story database. And so that’s how we remember everything. And so the implications of that are actually huge because that means that stories are actually the source of all of our knowledge, our creativity, and our innovation. And then the piece that goes along with that, what we’re seeing, the neuroscience of stories is coming a long way because we’re getting all these advances in medical imaging and that kind of thing. What we’re learning is that the more often you tell a story, whether you tell it aloud or you tell it to yourself, the more deeply sort of “wired” or rooted it gets. That’s one reason why it’s so hard to make change.

When somebody starts a change initiative, whether it’s within an organization or it’s personal, I’m going to run five miles every day, or it’s social, we’re going to get everybody to switch over to electric cars, typically what we do is we think that we’re starting with a blank slate. We just look ahead to the future and we say, “This is the story that I’m going to create. I’m going to be a runner. I’m going to be an electric car owner.” What we forget is that people are already telling themselves stories about that situation. We’re not starting with a blank slate. And those stories are typically very deeply ingrained. And so the only way that you are going to get them to change their behavior is to replace the story that they’re telling themselves with one that they like better, one that shows them the path to a better future.

This is why we’re failing to get people to take action on things like climate change because the stories that we’re telling are all stories of sacrifice and loss. They’re not better stories. They don’t offer us a better future. So we’re not going to give up our old stories about I like my car, I like my warm house, I like my 30-minute shower. We have to reframe the way we try to change the climate narrative. We have to figure out what people actually really want more of and then design the solutions. This is where it gets into change design, design the solutions that they actually really want and will adopt. They’re not going to do it just because it’s the right thing to do.

Douglas: It reminds me too of some research that I’ve seen around resistance to change and how it’s tied into identity. Identity is just stories that we’re telling ourselves about who we are and who we believe we will be in the future. And if this change is coming along that makes us think that we’re not going to be the same way or be that same person that we always knew to be or always wanted to be, that can be really hard for folks and if they’re not willing to change that story or see how it might unfold differently or if we don’t confront that, then it’s going to be really difficult to actually see the actual change through.

Denise: Yeah, absolutely. When you think about it, a lot of the work that I do is one-to-one coaching. So narrative coaching at an individual level for change makers and for leaders. That’s exactly it, who are you now and who’s the person that you want to be, and what’s the journey that you need to undergo to become that person, and identity is a really strong part of that. It’s really fascinating to me to see, once people start to step into a new identity, change happens really fast.

Quite often, we see this a lot in coaching, if somebody says, “I want to be the CEO, I want to be the CEO.” You say, “Okay, well, what’s stopping you from being the CEO right now?” And they list 10 things that they think are stopping them from being a CEO right now. In reality, those are just stories that they’re telling themselves. They could actually start to be a CEO of their own company right now. There’s very few actual, real barriers. The biggest barriers, as you say, are the way that they see themselves right now. They tell themselves they have to do all of these things before they can be somebody different when the fact is you can actually start to be somebody different right now.

Douglas: I love that. I think in one of our earlier chats, I wrote down this notion of be the person you want to be. And so reframing the story, you’re giving yourself permission to do it.

Denise: Absolutely. That’s a really nice way to put it. You give yourself permission to do it. And again, we don’t realize that the stories we tell ourselves are typically our biggest barriers. They’re the things that hold us back.

Douglas: I also remember you saying that in your one-to-one coaching that you craft a change story with them. It sounds like that’s what you were describing here with this kind of workaround what is it that they want to do and how they reshape that. So I guess I’m curious how that looks when someone’s crafting the story. What does that entail?

Denise: Yeah. A change story is really, it brings together several different forms of stories that people call different things. So it’s a leadership story, it’s a future story, it’s a pitch story, and it’s based on kind of everything I’ve learned over the last five to 10 years. What I’m realizing is we hear a lot about you need to tell your story, you need to tell your story. That work is often focused on telling the story of what you’ve done in the past. What we’re actually seeing is that people are more drawn to the story of where you’re going. If you want to lead change, you need to be able to tell people the story of where you’re leading them, why it matters and how it’s going to make their life better. And within that, you do need to absolutely include why you’re the right person to be able to do it, which includes some of what you’ve achieved in the past.

But people are less interested in what you’ve done in the past and more interested in where you’re going in the future. So what I ended up doing was looking at different story models and putting together my own story structure that I call this change story. And so it really, I think there’s eight steps to it. One of the things it does to it, it also tries to weave you through the emotional flow of the journey where you have highs and lows. So you start out with there’s a problem. You’re struggling, whatever it is that you’re struggling with, but things don’t have to be this way. And then it moves right into the vision. Just imagine how much better life could be instead of where you are with your struggling.

So what’s stopping you, and then you get into obstacles. You’re being held back by limiting stories that you’re telling yourself about what is and is impossible. And then that’s where you really come in with your solution, which in classical storytelling is the magic gift. So you have the power to change whatever it is that’s stopping you with this magic gift and be able to make your future reality. And then this is where more of the pitch piece comes in. You remind people that it can be scary to make change. Making change like this can be scary. How do you know you can do it?

And then you move into courage or strengths, which is, if it’s individual coaching, well, you’ve done it before and you look at examples of how you’ve done it before. Or if you’re trying to get somebody to follow you, well, the reason we know we can do it is because here’s all the things that I’ve done before as a leader. And then you wrap up with reminding them of the urgency, why they need to take action now, really how crappy their life is right now and how much better it could be if they would just make this one change. And then you end with a call to action.

I love it. It has some parallels to some of the stuff from Nancy Duarte around the way the world is and the way the world could be as far as really good framing for presentations, but it’s so much more personally actionable.

Denise: Yeah. It absolutely includes, Nancy Duarte came up with that framework by analyzing some of the most powerful speeches of our time like Martin Luther King. One of the speeches that I love is JFK talking about going to the moon. It’s an example that I use quite a lot when I’m trying to help people under the power of vision. In his speech, he rallies people by saying Russia’s kicking our butt and if we can be the first ones to the moon, I guarantee that we’re going to become the technological leaders of the world. And so he sets this great challenge, we’re going to win the race to the moon. He has no freaking idea how they’re going to win the race but he tells the story to inspire a nation to go out and do it.

He didn’t spend 10 years figuring out the solution to the problem and then come and tell the story. He started with the story of this is what we’re going to do and galvanized a nation to get there. That’s the power of bringing story right up to the beginning of your change design cycle. You don’t leave it until the end when you want to just communicate, you bring it right up to the front. And so the work that I’m doing now with organizational clients is we are using this change story framework to design the change initiative itself, to design the change strategy itself. And so what happens is once you finish your strategy, you’ve also got your story that’s ready to go to bring other people along with you.

Douglas: Well, that makes so much sense because it reminds me of how a lot of companies, they hear about OKRs and they think, “Oh, wow, that’s going to be a silver bullet for us. We’ll adopt OKRs and we’ll have a really straightforward strategy and it’ll be aligned and we’ll be so much more successful.” And as Christina Wodtke so eloquently points out, OKRs are a strategy deployment vehicle, they’re not a strategy definition vehicle. And so while the stories can be really powerful, if there is no vision, if there’s no dream to anchor it, then it’s not going to be nearly as galvanizing. So it makes sense that you would start there and bring your clients to a point where they have that focal point to rally everyone around.

Denise: Yeah. The most important piece of this is that you develop the change story with the people that you’re trying to get to change. I’m just going to come back to climate because that’s where I’m doing a lot of my work right now. The vision that we’ve been trying to sell is this vision of a green future where everybody’s driving electric cars. And again, that in itself is not compelling. And so what we did, I’m working with the municipality here in Canada right now, we actually went out and we did story research. So we collected stories from the people that we want to change to find out, what do they want more of in their life? What’s holding them back? What are they really struggling with? Then we use that to craft a vision that they really want that also gets us to zero emissions.

So the things that they’re struggling with like they want to… This is a suburban community, so they want to stop commuting. Nobody wants to spend four hours a day in their car. They want more time with their families. They want to save money. They want to be able to spend more time in nature. So how do we craft a climate solution that creates that vision for them, that makes that their reality, and also reduces their emissions? Now that’s something they’re going to get behind. They’re not going to support it because it reduces emissions, they’re going to support it because it gives them the life they want.

Douglas: That’s amazing. It shows that tie back to the design thinking or just the kind of understanding the problem that we’re solving before we even begin to think about the approach.

Denise: Yeah. I think this is where the storytelling community, professional storytelling community has really kind of done itself a disservice because over the last 20 years or probably longer, stories have been positioned as this magical tool to convince people, to influence people, to sell them on ideas. What that’s made people think about it, I can have a crappy idea but if I have a great story, people will buy it anyway. What I’m saying is, especially when we start to talk about social and environmental change, that’s not working. We have to stop trying to sell crappy ideas. This is where the design thinking piece comes back in. We actually have to use stories to design better solutions, and then you don’t need the really slick million-dollar story to sell it because it’s a good solution and it will sell itself.

Douglas: So how does strategic foresight come into the work you do? You mentioned that earlier. I’m a big fan and think it’s super cool and not enough people are doing it. I’m just kind of curious how it actually shows up in the work that you’re doing around maybe climate.

Denise: Yeah. It shows up. Well, again, if you look at this change story, it shows up in two spots there. It shows up in the vision piece. Well, it shows up in the problems too. The problem, the vision, and the solution. So looking at trends, what are the trends that we’re faced with? How can they inform the solution that we develop? How can they inform the vision of the future? And how can they help us better understand the problem that our audience is struggling with? Not a climate example but a healthcare example, I was working with an organization that served a large south Asian population and we were trying to look ahead to say how are we going to change our care model so that we can engage this population better because it was a really big gap between the needs of the population and the care that was being provided.

So I actually ran kind of a future workshop for them where I brought in all the trends that we were starting to look at and I created several scenarios for them about possible futures for this region of the province that I live in. So the solutions included things like what happens if there’s an earthquake? What happens if we have all autonomous vehicles because a big part of the population drive for a living? What happens if the way that we all live changes where we’re not living in multi-generational houses and things like that? It was fascinating for me to bring in everybody that included urban planners and to see the shock on their faces when they started to think about the fact that the future, even just a few years down the road, is going to be different than it is right now.

We were able to bring in those trends. I look a lot of the World Economic Forum. They have great data available on what’s going on in trends, but we have a really hard time envisioning the future. We typically think of the future as looking exactly like today. And so I find that strategic foresight, bringing in the trends, helping clients play around with those trends and connect them to what they’re seeing in their own lives is a really nice way to get them to start to break free of the past and the current situation that they’re in and really let loose to imagine a better future.

Douglas: Super cool. I’m curious to come back to the model here that you have, which is the Story Specs and the story being comprised of the problem, the quest, and the resolution. I’m curious when you are helping people craft stories about their future, how does resolution show up in a story about the future?

Denise: Yeah, that’s interesting. That Story Specs model is, it’s really a simplified version of the hero’s journey because I find the hero’s journey is just way too complex for anybody, including me, to work with. So it really boils down to, it’s really story kind of boiled down. Typically if you’re talking about a story in the past, when you start to try to capture or understand the story, you do it in a linear way. So you start with, what was the problem you were trying to solve? What were all the things that you tried to do to solve that problem, so what was your quest, and how did the story end? And typically stories really only end in one of three ways; you succeed, you fail or you die trying.

The difference though is when you’re starting to think about a future story, you actually start with the end and then reverse engineer from there. So it is a different approach from a design perspective in working with clients. And quite often, even though in design thinking you often start it with what’s the problem that we have to solve, I find more and more these days I’m actually starting with, well, what’s the vision? What’s happily ever after? Where do we want to actually end up, and then how do we reverse engineer from there?

Douglas: Interesting. And I’m curious, once you do that, do folks then take a more kind of explorative approach to thinking about how they decompose the pieces that get them on that journey?

Denise: Yeah. I don’t know if it’s a more explorative approach but I do find it frees them up. One of the truths of design thinking for me has always been problem definition is absolutely the hardest part. And by starting with the future, you’re kind of shifting the problem a little bit and moving it into the future. But once you get clear on what it is you really want, like you get really crystal clear, a vision of where you want to go, figuring out how to get there really isn’t that hard. Like that’s never been the thing that stopped us. Typically what stops us is that we’re trying to solve the wrong problem or we don’t really know what we’re trying to create, why it matters. And so that’s the bulk of the work that I end up doing is really trying to clarify those things. It’s that Einstein quote. What is it? If I had an hour to save the world, I’d spend the first 59 minutes trying to figure out what the problem is.

Douglas: Yeah. Figure out all the right questions to ask. It’s like so good. Yeah, I love that. I think you’re so right. The problem is often so misunderstood or people struggle how to articulate it. And so moving into that visionary piece, especially if it truly is visionary work, if we’re talking about like what’s the next feature or what’s the next market we’re going to go into, maybe an explorative approach where we research and learn and gather might make sense, but I love this backtracking. It’s similar to how you might just take a big project and decide, hey, what’s the deadline for these little pieces? Well, when does it all need to be done, and let’s work our way backwards. It’s like that backwards design piece.

Denise: Yeah, exactly. Some people call this backcasting, I just reverse engineering. It’s all kind of the same thing for me. But the other reason that I really love it is quite often, again, clients come in and they’ve got this laundry list of things that they have to achieve on their project. Most of the time, 80% of the stuff on their laundry list turns out to be irrelevant. If you start with what you really need to have by the end, it changes the way that you design your solution and a lot of the stuff that’s on that list can quite often fall off. The beauty of that is, it often frees up resources for you to do other things or invest more deeply in the most important areas.

Douglas: Another note that I wrote down was around because you mentioned the word engagement and I was thinking about connection and how stories create connection and alignment. The JFK story that you told is 100% around alignment and connection like people were focused and galvanized on this common mission. I think that’s super powerful when we think about change efforts inside organizations.

Denise: Absolutely. You need to have everybody moving in the same direction. There’s a great little anecdote that goes with JFK piece, which is apparently a few years later he was visiting one of the NASA facilities and stopped to talk to a janitor in the hallway and said, “Tell me what you do here.” The janitor looked at him and said, “Well, Mr. President, I’m helping to put the first man on the moon.” You don’t get better alignment than that.

And so, again, the reason I say you want to develop your strategy as a story is it also gives you space to help everybody who needs to be involved in your story figure out what character they are. What role do they have to play? Are they Frodo? Talking about Lord of the Rings, are they Frodo? Are they the hero? Are they Aragorn, a supporter? Are they Gandalf? Are they the wizard? What role do they have to play? People really need that clarity and that understanding and coming back to identity, that sense of belonging. I’m part of this group, I have a really important contribution to make. It’s crystal clear to me why I belong and why this organization needs me.

Douglas: It’s interesting, unrelated to what you were just telling me but it just jogged a memory of mine of a client that we were working with. Their story that they were telling themselves around this problem and around this project was so heavily laden with their internal jargon and their brand identity that they didn’t really understand the story, because this Brandy word, I’m trying to be vague here, but this Brandy word meant different things to different people, especially as they applied it to the context of this project. And so a lot of the work that we were doing was helping to unpack it and like, wait, hold on, let’s remove the metaphor and let’s remove the fancy marketing shin and just get down to some real words around what we’re talking about. I’m just wondering if that’s ever come up in your work with stories because it seems like the jargon was getting in the way of good storytelling.

Denise: Yeah. Details always get in the way. And so one of the first things that I do with clients is we build the bullet point story. So if the change story has eight steps to it, there’s like one bullet for each step and you can tell that story in one minute. You have to be able to do that first to get really clear on what matters. And again, that’s where a lot of the stuff that doesn’t matter falls off and frees you up. One of the biggest barriers to change is all the baggage that we bring into it. So if we can drop that baggage as we kind of cross the threshold into the new world and the new identity and the new situation that we want to go into, now we have resources, we have energy, we have mental space to really focus on where we want to go as opposed to where we’ve been and all this stuff that we think is important and really isn’t.

Douglas: That reminds me of a funny thing a mentor once told me. He said, “Don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story.” He wasn’t telling me to lie or fib or make stuff up, but I think that my tendency was just to lay the facts on them so much that like, or to be so specific about what it was. He was like, “Is that going to catch people’s emotions and minds and imagination?” Like, give them fuel to be excited about this thing.

Denise: Yeah. It’s interesting. So my research into engagements back in grad school revealed that actually, the biggest factor in getting and keeping people’s attention was creating like a gap or a challenge for them, basically inviting them into solving a problem, because we’re just wired for that. And so once you invite them to solve a problem, they’re going to stay engaged for as long as that problem remains unsolved. And then as soon as it’s solved, the engagement ends.

Douglas: Well, that reminds me of Cunningham’s law. Have you heard of this?

Douglas: How do you learn anything on the internet? You post the wrong answer because everyone wants to tell you you’re wrong. It’s also a great way to get children engaged. If you point at something that’s clearly not an elephant and you say that’s an elephant, then they want to tell you that’s not an elephant, you’re wrong.

Denise: Right. Yeah.

Douglas: I guess as we’re kind of nearing an end here, I wanted to just hear from you what your advice would be for someone who’s wanting to get their start. What’s a good first step to start working in this area of story design?

Denise: Yeah. I think the easiest thing actually is to go out and do some really small, really simple narrative analysis or story collecting and analysis just so you can start to get a sense of how powerful it is. And so you can pick a question or a problem that you’re dealing with and go out and even just talk to three or five people may be outside your regular circle and get them to tell you a story about it. So let’s say you’re trying to get people in your office to recycle more. So you go out and you talk to people outside your office and you ask them to tell you stories about recycling, like how did they get started recycling? What’s the best recycling experience that they’ve ever had? Where have they seen great recycling done?

When you collect stories like that, even just if you get three or four stories, your narrative intelligence is naturally going to start to analyze the patterns in those stories and look for themes and look for commonalities. That’s where you can start to get great ideas that fuel innovation. If you’d only ever do this within your circle, you’re not going to get fresh ideas that way. You’re just going back to culture. You’re just going to reinforce the stories that you’re already telling yourselves. So that’s one way to get started is just go out and collect stories about a specific thing that you’re trying to work on outside of your regular circle and kind of start to learn what other people have to say.

The other thing you can do is next time you’re planning something, whether it’s a strategy or a program or even just a meeting, try actually planning it as a story using that really basic structure of what’s the problem we’re trying to solve? What are two or three that we think we need to do to solve it? And what’s our vision of success, what would happily ever after look like? And then build on that and say, who are the characters that we need to do this with us? What roles would they have to play? What superpowers do we need them to bring in?

And then look at what are some of the potential obstacles? Who are the bad guys that we’re going to have to fight? What are some of the potential barriers that we’re going to have to come up against? I think you’ll find that it’s a great tool for alignment for whoever’s working on the thing that you’re planning. And it’s also going to be a great tool for helping you both be creative and then share your ideas with other people and get them engaged.

Douglas: Awesome. Sounds like great advice. Let’s kind of bring things to an end here. And as we do, I’d love to give you an opportunity to leave our listeners with a final thought and maybe share a little bit of information around how they can find your work and the book, et cetera.

Denise: Yeah. The final thought I think is to really start to think beyond just telling stories and really start to focus on identifying and listening to and analyzing and processing stories. And as you do that, every time you hear a story, try to figure out what the problem in that story is. What’s that person trying to do? What are they trying to achieve? What problem are they trying to solve? That’s really, it’s not just going to beef up your narrative intelligence, it’s also going to make you a much better critical thinker and designer because you’re going to develop your problem definition skills.

So I think looking beyond what the hype is telling us in terms of everybody should be a storyteller, because that just makes us a whole lot of talkers with nobody listening, and really spend some time focusing on developing your listening, your story, listening to your story analysis skills and see what you can learn from that. In terms of where to find me, you can find me across social media. You can find me on my website, which is denisewithers.com, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, kind of all over the place. Most active on LinkedIn I think. And I’ve also got a TED Talk that should be available as of March 2022.

Douglas: Awesome. And we’ll have links in the show notes so you can just click straight through. Definitely check this stuff out. It’s so good. Denise, it’s been such a pleasure chatting with you. Really, really great stuff.

Denise: Well, thanks so much. I love talking about this stuff. If anybody has any questions, I really encourage them to reach out. I’m always happy to hear what people are doing. It’s a great learning experience for me to see how people are using their narrative intelligence and their natural ability to learn and solve problems with stories.

Douglas: Awesome. Thanks again for joining the show.

Denise: Thank you. Have a great day.

Douglas: Thanks for joining me for another episode of Control the Room. Don’t forget to subscribe to receive updates when new episodes are released. And if you want more, head over to our blog where I post weekly articles and resources about working better together, voltagecontrol.com.

Embrace Discomfort to Adapt to New Ways of Working

Host Douglas Ferguson interviews Dr. Rebecca Sutherns, a 27-year facilitation veteran and author of "Elastic Stretch Without Snapping or Snapping Back." She discusses her initial discomfort with group work, its impact on her career, and the significance of effective group processes. The episode covers group dynamics across life stages and how structured interactions improve efficiency and minimize awkwardness.

Empowering Leaders For Sustainable Change

In this episode of the Facilitation Lab podcast, host Douglas Ferguson interviews Eddie Jjemba from the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Center. Eddie discusses his work in making African cities resilient to climate change and his journey into environmental education. He shares his experiences in facilitation, including the importance of adapting to diverse cultures and contexts. Eddie also talks about the financial barriers to facilitation training in Africa and how the Red Cross is addressing this issue. The conversation also covers the use of games in facilitation, the process of designing meeting agendas, and the future of facilitation in the context of climate change.

Impactful Facilitation Techniques for Building Multicultural Teams

In this episode of the Facilitation Lab podcast, host Douglas Ferguson talks with Roselle, Global Head of Quality Training and Optimization for Concur Expense Audit and Capture Services at SAP. They discuss the importance of facilitation in the workplace, with Roselle sharing her journey and experiences in leading diverse teams. She emphasizes the value of connecting people, understanding multicultural dynamics, and having a growth mindset. Roselle also shares her approach to meetings and the importance of debriefing. She expresses her passion for creating safe, inclusive spaces and her plans to build a facilitation community within her team.

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Short Stories

Why is my life full of struggles?

Problem solving | inspirational story.

A short story on Problem solving and how to deal better with your difficulties and problems.

A rich man, every night, pray the same prayer to God. He repeats his prayers again and again on a daily basis. In his words, he would ask, “God, please do one favor for me, at least one favor — and I have been asking this my whole life. As clearly as I know, I am the most unhappy man on the earth. Why have you made my life full of problems? I am ready to exchange my difficulties with anybody else, anybody will do — just let me exchange my troubles with somebody else. I don’t ask for bliss. Can’t you give me only this single opportunity to exchange my worries with somebody else? This is not much!”

And one night while he was in a dream he saw God. A heavenly voice came from the high above saying, “Gather all of your miseries into bags and bring them to the temple hall.”

So the whole town packs their miseries into big bags and they bring them to the hall. This man has a big-time: “So the time has come! It seems something great is going to happen!”

He rushes with his bundle. On the way, he finds others also are rushing.

By the time he reaches the hall, he becomes afraid, very afraid, because he saw people are carrying bigger bags than his. People that he had always seen smiling in beautiful clothes and always saying nice things to each other, and they are carrying bigger bags!

He starts becoming a little hesitant whether to go or not to go, but he has been praying for his whole life, so he says, “Let us see what happens.”

They enter into the hall. The voice says, “Put your bags around the hall.” They put their bags, and the voice says again, “Now you can choose any bundle that you like.”

And the miracle of miracles happens: everybody rushes to his own bags!

This man also rushes so fast towards his own bag, afraid that if somebody else chooses it then he will be at a loss. Everybody has chosen his own bags, with great relief and they are all happy, carrying their bags back to their homes. Even the man who prayed for his whole life just to exchange his miseries is very happy, for the simple reason that “Who knows what is in the other’s bags? At least we are aware of our own problems. And we have become accustomed, we have become adjusted to our difficulties.”

Moral of the story:

Problem solving is always better than exchanging it with others, At least you understand your problems and difficulties, now or then, you are going to find the solution to it. Just stay grateful for what good you have.

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National Center for Pyramid Model Innovations

We Can Be Problem Solvers!

Scripted story to help children understand the steps to problem solving. Includes problem scenario cards to help children practice finding a solution to common social problems.

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Giant Story Problems: Reading Comprehension through Math Problem-Solving

Resources & Preparation
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Related Resources

This lesson focuses on reading comprehension skills as they apply to mathematics story problems, as well as on written and verbal mathematics communication skills. Working as a class, students read a story problem and answer a series of questions designed to bring out the essential points of the problem. Students then draw a picture on chart paper showing the details of the story problem. They write both an equation and a sentence to represent the problem. Finally, students repeat the process with new problems, working in small groups to create posters using images, text, and mathematical equations to represent a story problem.

Featured Resources

Sample Giant Story Problems : Use these sample problems for groups to solve.

From Theory to Practice

David and Phyllis Whitin talk about the value of writing in the mathematics curriculum in chapter one of Math Is Language Too: Talking and Writing in the Mathematics Classroom . They state that mathematics and language are both "ways for learners to make sense of their world" and that "writing and talking are ways that learners can make their mathematical thinking visible." One of the most concrete examples of mathematics as language is in the reading and solving of story problems. Story problems depend on reading comprehension skills for the development of successful problem-solving strategies. Having students collaborate on story problems gives them the opportunity to learn by talking, collaborating, and sharing ideas as they compare pictures, words, and numeric symbols for consistency. The Principles and Standards for School Mathematics, by The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, includes communication as a mathematics tool for all levels of learners and suggests collaboration as especially beneficial for young learners. Further Reading

Common Core Standards

This resource has been aligned to the Common Core State Standards for states in which they have been adopted. If a state does not appear in the drop-down, CCSS alignments are forthcoming.

State Standards

This lesson has been aligned to standards in the following states. If a state does not appear in the drop-down, standard alignments are not currently available for that state.

NCTE/IRA National Standards for the English Language Arts

1. Students read a wide range of print and nonprint texts to build an understanding of texts, of themselves, and of the cultures of the United States and the world; to acquire new information; to respond to the needs and demands of society and the workplace; and for personal fulfillment. Among these texts are fiction and nonfiction, classic and contemporary works.
3. Students apply a wide range of strategies to comprehend, interpret, evaluate, and appreciate texts. They draw on their prior experience, their interactions with other readers and writers, their knowledge of word meaning and of other texts, their word identification strategies, and their understanding of textual features (e.g., sound-letter correspondence, sentence structure, context, graphics).
10. Students whose first language is not English make use of their first language to develop competency in the English language arts and to develop understanding of content across the curriculum.
12. Students use spoken, written, and visual language to accomplish their own purposes (e.g., for learning, enjoyment, persuasion, and the exchange of information).

Materials and Technology

General classroom supplies (chart paper, colored markers, white construction paper, glue, crayons, and pencils)

Sample Giant Story Problems

Preparation

Prepare several appropriate story problems beforehand, either by using a large word-processing font or by writing them by hand. Story Problems should be on individual pieces of paper so that each group will receive only one story problem, and so that each group receives a different problem. More story problems can be written by the teacher, photocopied and enlarged from workbooks, or found online.
Prepare heterogeneous groups, balanced with student strengths according to problem-solving, drawing, and writing skills.

Student Objectives

Students will

participate in a shared problem-solving activity.
collaborate in small groups to develop a problem-solving strategy.
use drawings, words, and equations to model solutions to story problems.
effectively and clearly explain their problem-solving strategies to other students.
write about and reflect on their problem-solving strategies.

Session One

Post chart paper on the wall and gather students together near it. Inform them that they will work together to solve a math story, and that later they’ll work in groups to solve their own.
Start with a completely blank chart paper so that students can see the entire process.
What is this story problem about?
How many [subjects/objects] are there to begin with?
What is happening to these [subjects/objects]?
As students identify the information, highlight or underline the information that will be needed to solve the problem.
When important words and numbers have been highlighted, work through the story problem item by item to create a drawing that models the story. Have students volunteer to do the drawings on the chart paper. All pertinent information should be illustrated. For example, in a story problem about three people who have four cookies each, the drawing would show three people, each with four cookies. Any details will be up to the students doing the drawing.
When the drawing is finished, review with students the language of the story problem and compare it to the drawing, checking for accuracy: "Does this picture show what it says in the story?" Ask for an equation or number sentence that will show what the drawing says and which will solve the problem. If a student suggests an incorrect equation, write it on the board (not on the chart paper) and ask students to tell why it will or will not work. When a student states a correct equation, compare it with the drawing, then have him or her write it under the drawing with a marker after other students agree that the equation will work.
Ask students to find the actual question in the story problem that needs to be answered: "What does this story want to know?" Read it aloud. Ask for a complete sentence that answers the question. When a sentence has been agreed upon that includes specific information (e.g., the subject's name, the numbers involved, the items' names, etc.), have a student write the sentence under the equation, using conventional capitalization and punctuation, and writing all numbers as words (i.e., instead of writing "20" a student would write "twenty") to facilitate correct spelling of number words.
Review all parts of the chart, and leave it posted for Session Two. Samples of student work can be found at Giant Story Problems .

Session Two

glue problem on paper
read story problem
underline important words
write equation
write sentence
Have students get into groups. Each group will need one sheet of white construction paper (12x18), crayons, writing materials, and one story problem. (Every group should have a different problem.) If desired, assign each group a leader whose job it would be to make sure everyone in the group is participating.
While students work to solve their story problems, circulate among the groups to ask questions and make sure everyone is participating in the process. If students are having difficulty, try to ask leading questions rather than give them specific help with a strategy. If it appears that students are using an inappropriate strategy, help them refer back to the language of the story problem. As they work, let them know that they will be sharing their work with the class.
When all groups are finished, have students share their posters with the whole class, explaining their drawing by referring to their story problem, and telling why their mathematical solution will work to solve the problem.
How did drawing a picture help you solve the story problem?
What was the most interesting thing about this lesson?
Display all the Giant Story Problems on the wall.
Have students meet in groups to write their own story problems, then have the groups exchange problems to solve.
Have students practice spelling number words at FunBrain .
Prepare additional "giant" story problems to keep in a basket for students to work on at a math center or during choice time.
Photocopy "regular-sized" story problems from workbooks, cut them up individually, and put them in a basket for students to choose from. These can be used by individual students using the same procedure as "giant" story problems, but on regular-sized paper.

Student Assessment / Reflections

Teacher observation of whole group participation.
Teacher observation of small group participation.
Student explanations of their strategies.
Quality of student group work.
Quality of individual student follow-up work, including clarity of ideas and details in written work.

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Comprehensive Interview Guide: 60+ Professions Explored in Detail

26 Good Examples of Problem Solving (Interview Answers)

By Biron Clark

Published: November 15, 2023

Employers like to hire people who can solve problems and work well under pressure. A job rarely goes 100% according to plan, so hiring managers will be more likely to hire you if you seem like you can handle unexpected challenges while staying calm and logical in your approach.

But how do they measure this?

They’re going to ask you interview questions about these problem solving skills, and they might also look for examples of problem solving on your resume and cover letter. So coming up, I’m going to share a list of examples of problem solving, whether you’re an experienced job seeker or recent graduate.

Then I’ll share sample interview answers to, “Give an example of a time you used logic to solve a problem?”

Problem-Solving Defined

It is the ability to identify the problem, prioritize based on gravity and urgency, analyze the root cause, gather relevant information, develop and evaluate viable solutions, decide on the most effective and logical solution, and plan and execute implementation.

Problem-solving also involves critical thinking, communication, listening, creativity, research, data gathering, risk assessment, continuous learning, decision-making, and other soft and technical skills.

Solving problems not only prevent losses or damages but also boosts self-confidence and reputation when you successfully execute it. The spotlight shines on you when people see you handle issues with ease and savvy despite the challenges. Your ability and potential to be a future leader that can take on more significant roles and tackle bigger setbacks shine through. Problem-solving is a skill you can master by learning from others and acquiring wisdom from their and your own experiences.

It takes a village to come up with solutions, but a good problem solver can steer the team towards the best choice and implement it to achieve the desired result.

Watch: 26 Good Examples of Problem Solving

Examples of problem solving scenarios in the workplace.

Correcting a mistake at work, whether it was made by you or someone else
Overcoming a delay at work through problem solving and communication
Resolving an issue with a difficult or upset customer
Overcoming issues related to a limited budget, and still delivering good work through the use of creative problem solving
Overcoming a scheduling/staffing shortage in the department to still deliver excellent work
Troubleshooting and resolving technical issues
Handling and resolving a conflict with a coworker
Solving any problems related to money, customer billing, accounting and bookkeeping, etc.
Taking initiative when another team member overlooked or missed something important
Taking initiative to meet with your superior to discuss a problem before it became potentially worse
Solving a safety issue at work or reporting the issue to those who could solve it
Using problem solving abilities to reduce/eliminate a company expense
Finding a way to make the company more profitable through new service or product offerings, new pricing ideas, promotion and sale ideas, etc.
Changing how a process, team, or task is organized to make it more efficient
Using creative thinking to come up with a solution that the company hasn’t used before
Performing research to collect data and information to find a new solution to a problem
Boosting a company or team’s performance by improving some aspect of communication among employees
Finding a new piece of data that can guide a company’s decisions or strategy better in a certain area

Problem Solving Examples for Recent Grads/Entry Level Job Seekers

Coordinating work between team members in a class project
Reassigning a missing team member’s work to other group members in a class project
Adjusting your workflow on a project to accommodate a tight deadline
Speaking to your professor to get help when you were struggling or unsure about a project
Asking classmates, peers, or professors for help in an area of struggle
Talking to your academic advisor to brainstorm solutions to a problem you were facing
Researching solutions to an academic problem online, via Google or other methods
Using problem solving and creative thinking to obtain an internship or other work opportunity during school after struggling at first

You can share all of the examples above when you’re asked questions about problem solving in your interview. As you can see, even if you have no professional work experience, it’s possible to think back to problems and unexpected challenges that you faced in your studies and discuss how you solved them.

Interview Answers to “Give an Example of an Occasion When You Used Logic to Solve a Problem”

Now, let’s look at some sample interview answers to, “Give me an example of a time you used logic to solve a problem,” since you’re likely to hear this interview question in all sorts of industries.

Example Answer 1:

At my current job, I recently solved a problem where a client was upset about our software pricing. They had misunderstood the sales representative who explained pricing originally, and when their package renewed for its second month, they called to complain about the invoice. I apologized for the confusion and then spoke to our billing team to see what type of solution we could come up with. We decided that the best course of action was to offer a long-term pricing package that would provide a discount. This not only solved the problem but got the customer to agree to a longer-term contract, which means we’ll keep their business for at least one year now, and they’re happy with the pricing. I feel I got the best possible outcome and the way I chose to solve the problem was effective.

Example Answer 2:

In my last job, I had to do quite a bit of problem solving related to our shift scheduling. We had four people quit within a week and the department was severely understaffed. I coordinated a ramp-up of our hiring efforts, I got approval from the department head to offer bonuses for overtime work, and then I found eight employees who were willing to do overtime this month. I think the key problem solving skills here were taking initiative, communicating clearly, and reacting quickly to solve this problem before it became an even bigger issue.

Example Answer 3:

In my current marketing role, my manager asked me to come up with a solution to our declining social media engagement. I assessed our current strategy and recent results, analyzed what some of our top competitors were doing, and then came up with an exact blueprint we could follow this year to emulate our best competitors but also stand out and develop a unique voice as a brand. I feel this is a good example of using logic to solve a problem because it was based on analysis and observation of competitors, rather than guessing or quickly reacting to the situation without reliable data. I always use logic and data to solve problems when possible. The project turned out to be a success and we increased our social media engagement by an average of 82% by the end of the year.

Answering Questions About Problem Solving with the STAR Method

When you answer interview questions about problem solving scenarios, or if you decide to demonstrate your problem solving skills in a cover letter (which is a good idea any time the job description mention problem solving as a necessary skill), I recommend using the STAR method to tell your story.

STAR stands for:

It’s a simple way of walking the listener or reader through the story in a way that will make sense to them. So before jumping in and talking about the problem that needed solving, make sure to describe the general situation. What job/company were you working at? When was this? Then, you can describe the task at hand and the problem that needed solving. After this, describe the course of action you chose and why. Ideally, show that you evaluated all the information you could given the time you had, and made a decision based on logic and fact.

Finally, describe a positive result you got.

Whether you’re answering interview questions about problem solving or writing a cover letter, you should only choose examples where you got a positive result and successfully solved the issue.

Example answer:

Situation : We had an irate client who was a social media influencer and had impossible delivery time demands we could not meet. She spoke negatively about us in her vlog and asked her followers to boycott our products. (Task : To develop an official statement to explain our company’s side, clarify the issue, and prevent it from getting out of hand). Action : I drafted a statement that balanced empathy, understanding, and utmost customer service with facts, logic, and fairness. It was direct, simple, succinct, and phrased to highlight our brand values while addressing the issue in a logical yet sensitive way. We also tapped our influencer partners to subtly and indirectly share their positive experiences with our brand so we could counter the negative content being shared online. Result : We got the results we worked for through proper communication and a positive and strategic campaign. The irate client agreed to have a dialogue with us. She apologized to us, and we reaffirmed our commitment to delivering quality service to all. We assured her that she can reach out to us anytime regarding her purchases and that we’d gladly accommodate her requests whenever possible. She also retracted her negative statements in her vlog and urged her followers to keep supporting our brand.

What Are Good Outcomes of Problem Solving?

Whenever you answer interview questions about problem solving or share examples of problem solving in a cover letter, you want to be sure you’re sharing a positive outcome.

Below are good outcomes of problem solving:

Saving the company time or money
Making the company money
Pleasing/keeping a customer
Obtaining new customers
Solving a safety issue
Solving a staffing/scheduling issue
Solving a logistical issue
Solving a company hiring issue
Solving a technical/software issue
Making a process more efficient and faster for the company
Creating a new business process to make the company more profitable
Improving the company’s brand/image/reputation
Getting the company positive reviews from customers/clients

Every employer wants to make more money, save money, and save time. If you can assess your problem solving experience and think about how you’ve helped past employers in those three areas, then that’s a great start. That’s where I recommend you begin looking for stories of times you had to solve problems.

Tips to Improve Your Problem Solving Skills

Throughout your career, you’re going to get hired for better jobs and earn more money if you can show employers that you’re a problem solver. So to improve your problem solving skills, I recommend always analyzing a problem and situation before acting. When discussing problem solving with employers, you never want to sound like you rush or make impulsive decisions. They want to see fact-based or data-based decisions when you solve problems.

Next, to get better at solving problems, analyze the outcomes of past solutions you came up with. You can recognize what works and what doesn’t. Think about how you can get better at researching and analyzing a situation, but also how you can get better at communicating, deciding the right people in the organization to talk to and “pull in” to help you if needed, etc.

Finally, practice staying calm even in stressful situations. Take a few minutes to walk outside if needed. Step away from your phone and computer to clear your head. A work problem is rarely so urgent that you cannot take five minutes to think (with the possible exception of safety problems), and you’ll get better outcomes if you solve problems by acting logically instead of rushing to react in a panic.

You can use all of the ideas above to describe your problem solving skills when asked interview questions about the topic. If you say that you do the things above, employers will be impressed when they assess your problem solving ability.

If you practice the tips above, you’ll be ready to share detailed, impressive stories and problem solving examples that will make hiring managers want to offer you the job. Every employer appreciates a problem solver, whether solving problems is a requirement listed on the job description or not. And you never know which hiring manager or interviewer will ask you about a time you solved a problem, so you should always be ready to discuss this when applying for a job.

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Problem Solving Games, Activities & Exercises for Adults

Here is our list of the best problem solving games, activities and exercises for adults.

Problem solving games are activities that require players to use critical thinking skills to solve puzzles. Example activities include escape rooms, Sudoku, and murder mysteries. The purpose of these exercises is to sharpen reasoning and decision-making skills in group settings and to do team building with employees.

These activities are a subset of remote team games , found in problem solving books , and are similar to team puzzles , team building brain teasers and team riddles .

This article contains:

team building problem solving activities for employees
free problem solving games for adults
virtual problem solving activities for students
group problem solving activities
problem solving team builders

Here we go!

List of problem solving games & activities

From word and number puzzles to role-playing games, here is a list of inexpensive and free problem solving team builders that help groups practice the art of critical thinking and compromise.

1. Espionage! (Team Favorite)

For an exciting game of social deduction, check out Espionage! This thrilling experience will put your team’s wits and instincts to the test.

Espionage! offers the following:

a 90-minute session led by an experienced host
undercover teams of agents and spies
challenging puzzles, tasks, and maneuvers
team conversations to help uncover secret identities

The best part is we will bring all the necessary game materials to your preferred location. If you are interested in boosting communication and critical-thinking skills within your team, then consider Espionage!

Learn more about Espionage!

2. Art Heist: The Vanishing of Van Gogh (Hosted)

You can turn your team into skilled detectives with Art Heist: The Vanishing of Van Gogh! In this captivating mystery, participants will locate the stolen artwork, The Bedroom .

Key features of this experience include:

a 90-minute adventure led by a world-class host
detailed puzzles, clues, and mysteries to unravel
trails of evidence and hidden secrets
group discussions to find the art

Additionally, you can include a cocktail kit to spice up your event. Through Art Heist, you will enhance your team’s ingenuity and problem-solving skills!

Learn more about Art Heist: The Vanishing of Van Gogh .

Get our free team building toolbox

icebreaker games
bingo cards

3. War of the Wizards (Popular)

With War of the Wizards, teams roleplay as minions of powerful wizards to vanquish forces of evil. Participants will play thrilling games and go on a quest to restore harmony to the realm!

War of the Wizards offers the following:

a 90-minute journey guided by a distinguished host
immersive storytelling that transports players into a magical realm
engaging activities like world-building, role-playing games, and storytelling
opportunities for forming alliances, facing challenges, and going on quests

Through the power of imagination and teamwork, your team can overcome tasks and participate in an epic fantasy battle. To improve communication and bonds, include War of the Wizards in your agenda!

Learn more about War of the Wizards .

Sudoku is one of the most popular free problem solving games for adults. The objective of this game is to fill each box of a 9×9 grid so that every row, column, and letter contains each number from one to nine. The puzzle makes a great team challenge. To play Sudoku on Zoom, screen share the game board. Then, turn on the annotation features. Using the add text functions, participants can fill in the numbers on the grid.

We made a starter puzzle you can use in your next meeting or virtual team bonding session:

Here are more online Sudoku puzzles .

5. Crossword puzzles

Crossword puzzles are word games that ask players to fill in words based on clues. Words interconnect, and players must think critically about the surrounding words to select the right phrase for the space.

You can use an online crossword puzzle maker to create a custom puzzle. Here are a few themes you may want to consider:

teammates’ tastes and interests
company knowledge and history
industry terms and trends

Or, create a miscellaneous puzzle just for fun.

We made a sample puzzle you can use for your game:

To complete puzzles during online meetings, you can use the share screen function and add text through annotations.

Or, subscribers can play the New York Times’ daily crossword puzzle virtually . Dictionary.com also offers a free daily online crossword puzzle .

Check out more vocabulary games .

6. Online Escape Rooms

Escape rooms are timed games that get groups working together to solve puzzles. Traditionally, players enter a locked room and must complete all puzzles in an hour or two to unlock the door. However, groups can also play escape rooms online.

Digital escape rooms typically come in one of two forms: in a Zoom room and led by a host, or in a choose-your-own adventure format via Google Forms or websites. To play escape rooms virtually, enter a video meeting and follow the prompts, or screen share the Google Form and work out the puzzles together.

Check out our full list of online escape rooms .

7. Murder Mysteries

Murder Mysteries are story-based games that ask players to take on the roles of suspects or detectives while trying to identify a killer. These games often involve reading lines from a script, searching for clues, and occasionally solving puzzles to get hints.

These games make participants pay attention to conversations, analyze other characters’ behavior, and search for hidden meaning in the script. Players must use their powers of observation and logic to unravel the mystery.

Check out our list of Zoom murder mystery games .

8. Treasure Hunts

Treasure hunts are scavenger hunts with intention. While virtual scavenger hunts often ask players to collect random items, treasure hunts require participants to locate clues that lead to other prompts and hints. The game typically ends with players finding a treasure or solving a mystery, sometimes both.

The treasure hunt can have a specific theme such as secret agent missions or a hunt for pirate treasure, or you can run a more general hunt. Teammates can either compete simultaneously via Zoom call, or can play the hunt on an app individually and compete to beat each other’s scores.

Check out our list of treasure hunt apps .

9. Poem or story challenge

Most team building problem solving activities for employees revolve around science, math, and logic. Poem/story challenges rely on writing skills and are sure to appeal to the language lovers on your team.

Each player receives a limited word bank to use to create a story or poem. Then, players have a few minutes to craft their pieces. Afterward, everyone reads out or screen shares their creations.

Here are a few word challenge activities you can do remotely:

Found poems or stories : Participants make poems or stories out of words they find by visiting websites, searching emails, glancing out the window, or taking a walk or drive around the neighborhood.
Random word generators : Teammates use a random word generator to populate a word bank, and must use each word in the poem or story.
Poetry magnets : Group members make poems using poetry magnets. You can send poetry magnet sets to employees and assemble the verses on a cookie pan during a Zoom call. Or, teammates can play with poetry magnets online .
Page poems: Participants receive one page of a book or magazine, and must make a poem or story by blocking out other words so only the chosen text remains visible. This activity is part storytelling, part art, since story crafters can illustrate the pages as part of the design.
Ransom note stories or poems : Players cut out letters from magazines and must form new words to make poems and stories. Or, players can receive a mix of random letters, form words, and run the text through a ransom note generator .

These activities are suitable for teams and individual players.

10. Moral challenge

Some problems are ethical rather than factual. Moral judgment plays just as important a role in the decision-making process as technical prowess. Players can flex their moral problem-solving skills by tackling ethical dilemmas or social puzzles.

Here are some social problem solving games online:

Moral machine
Scruples – the game of moral dilemmas
Morality play

To play these games, either download the apps, or pull up the website and then screen share the prompts. These games are best played when discussed as a group, because the more belief systems and opinions, the harder an issue is to resolve. These exercises provide practice for real-life conflict resolution.

You can find similar challenges on our list of online personality tests .

11. Frostbite

Frostbite is a group game that hones team leaders’ communication skills while sharpening teammates’ listening and cooperation skills. The premise behind the game is that a group of explorers gets caught in a snowstorm and must build a shelter. Frostbite has paralyzed the leaders’ hands and snow-blinded the rest of the team. The leader must give the team instructions to build a tent that can resist arctic winds.

To play Frostbite, each teammate wears a blindfold. Then, the leader gives directions. Once the structures are complete, players turn on a fan to test whether tents can withstand the wind.

Frostbite is usually an in-person game, however you can also play virtually. In the remote version of the game, teammates construct tents out of cards and tape, while the leader surveys the scene on screen.

This exercise demonstrates the challenges of leading remotely, as teams need to operate with minimal oversight or supervisor observation. Therefore, instructions need to be clear and direct to be effective.

Check out more team building games .

12. Virtual Hackathons

Hackathons are events where participants have a set amount of time to design and pitch a new product or solution. This type of event originated in the programming world and is often used to create new apps, however you can apply the game to any industry or school subject.

Virtual hackathons are online versions of the event. Teams enter the competition, then work with each other via virtual meeting software or remote work communication platforms to design the solution. At the end of the competition, teams pitch ideas to a panel of judges and a winner is decided.

To run a virtual hackathon, first announce the theme of the event and collect sign-ups. So that no teams work ahead, hint at the general idea of the issue, and only explain the precise problem when the event begins. Then, give teams anywhere from a few hours to a few days to complete the project.

Discover more virtual hackathon ideas .

13. Improv games

Improv games are excellent problem solving activities. These exercises force participants to think and respond quickly to keep scenes moving in a logical and entertaining way.

Here are some good problem solving improv games:

Banned words : Performers cannot say certain words. Scene partners will conceive of situations that encourage the actors to use those words, and the actors must find alternatives, such as using synonyms or taking the scene in a new direction.

Scenes from a chat : Audience gives a suggestion for a scene, and players act the scene out. Though it’s a fictional and often ridiculous scenario, actors must react to the situation and solve the problem in order for the scene to end.

Miracle cure : Miracle cure is a quick-moving exercise that follows a simple format. One player declares, “I have a problem.” Another player responds, “I have a….[random object.]” The first player then replies, “great! I can use the [random object] to….” and describes how they will solve the problem.

Check out more problem-solving improv games .

14. Spaghetti Tower

The spaghetti tower is a classic team building game. Participants gather uncooked spaghetti and marshmallows, and must construct the tallest freestanding tower.

During the in-person version, players must construct one tall freestanding tower. However, for the virtual version of the game, players construct individual towers. You can send groups to breakout rooms for the build, then reconvene in the main room for judging. Teams are judged on three main factors: number of towers, height, and uniformity.

This version of the game not only tests the structural integrity of the tower, but also consistency and quality control. This exercise teaches teams to align and collaborate remotely, and produce a consistent product even when far apart.

15. What Would You Do?

What Would You Do? is a simple situational game that challenges participants to react to different circumstances. To play this game, read prompts one by one, and then ask participants to respond with gameplans. You can use the polling or raise hand feature to vote for the best option.

Here are some problem solving scenarios for adults or kids to use in the game:

Zombies attack and you have to find a place to hide.
You are at the zoo and the animals escape. Which one do you try to corral back into the pen first?
After waiting in line for hours, someone cuts in front of you last minute. The person appears to be visually and hearing impaired, and doesn’t notice your protests. An official announces that due to diminishing supply, this individual will be the last in line to be served.
You are eating a meal with important clients and/or your partner’s parents, and you want to impress. The individuals make you a dish that does not fit within your dietary restrictions, but you do not speak the same language and cannot explain why you do not want to eat.
An imposter has infiltrated the organization, who looks, speaks, and behaves exactly like you. How do you convince your peers that you are the original?

For similar dilemmas, check out this list of Would You Rather? questions.

16. Desert Island Survival

Desert Island Survival is a game that challenges players to prioritize. The premise is that players have been stranded on an island, and must decide what order to perform survival steps.

Here are the possible actions:

Set up shelter
Explore the island
Try to signal for help
Make weapons for self-defense
Build a raft to escape the island
Start a fire
Choose a group leader
Search for other survivors

All group members must agree on the order of the steps. Players should explain the reasoning for the order of each step while ranking the actions.

Another version of the game involves players receiving a list of 15 to 20 items, and selecting five or so to bring to the island. You can also vary the location of the game, substituting remote islands for destinations like outer space or the distant past.

17. Choose Your Own Adventure

Choose Your Own Adventure stories enable readers to determine the outcome of the story by making decisions. Each action has a consequence that takes the tale in a different direction. Participants can try to guess how the story may unfold by talking through the different choices. When completing the activity in a group setting, the majority of the team must agree on an action before moving forward in the story.

There are a few ways to facilitate these activities online:

Play an online role playing video game
Watch an interactive movie like Black Mirror: Bandersnatch
Read from a Choose Your Own Adventure book on Zoom
Click through a Choose Your Own Adventure platform
Create your own story using a Google Form

Whichever way you choose to do the exercise, you can use the screen share feature in your virtual meeting software so that listeners can more easily follow along.

18. MacGyver

MacGyver is a show where the hero escapes sticky situations by improvising tools out of unlikely materials. For example, in one episode the hero makes a telescope out of a newspaper, magnifying lens, and a watch crystal.

To play MacGyver, you can either list three to five objects participants can use, or challenge players to use items that are within arms reach.

Simply state a desired end result, such as “a way to open a locked door,” or “a getaway vehicle,” and then ask teams to explain what they will build and how they will build it. To make the activity more collaborative, you can give teams five or ten minutes in breakout rooms to strategize and design a prototype.

19. Dungeons & Dragons

Dungeons & Dragons is a roleplaying game where players pretend to be magical figures and creatures. One player serves as the dungeon master, who guides the game, while the other players pick characters and make decisions to move the story forward. Upon choosing a course of action, players roll a twenty-sided die to determine whether or not the plan succeeds. The game is story-based, the possibilities are nearly limitless, and truly creative problem solving options arise. Also, since gameplay is mostly verbal, Dungeons & Dragons is an easy activity to do over Zoom.

Here are the basic rules for Dungeons & Dragons .

20. Pandemic

Pandemic is a game that pits players against the forces of nature in a race to contain and control disease outbreaks. At the beginning of the game, each player receives a role such as containment specialist or operations expert. Participants must carry out the duties of their roles by choosing appropriate actions. Pandemic is a great game for groups because each team member has a clear part to play, and players must collaborate and work together instead of competing against each other.

To play the game online, you can use a Pandemic game app , or talk through the exercise while one attendee moves and displays pieces on the board.

Note: The subject of this game might hit too close to home for some players, considering recent history. You can find games with similar mechanics that deal with different subject matter, such as Forbidden Island.

Check out more team building board games .

21. Model UN

Model UN is one of the best virtual problem solving activities for students. This exercise casts participants in the role of international diplomats who must negotiate to solve realistic problems. Each player assumes the role of a country ambassador and must form alliances and propose solutions to solve crises.

Here are some sample Model UN scenarios:

Human rights violation by powerful country
Food shortage
Disease epidemic
Technology privacy violations
Civil war branching into surrounding countries
Natural disasters

Depending on the size of the group, participants either take on the part of an entire government of a country, or play a certain role within the government. To carry out the activity on Zoom, players can take turns giving speeches, message other countries privately via the chat, meet in breakout rooms to form alliances or have more intimate discussions, and use the polling feature to vote on propositions.

If politics does not resonate with your group, then you can alter the exercise by applying the same activity structure to a different theme, such as the Justice League, movie characters, business board members, or reality TV stars.

The main purpose of the exercise is to research, talk through problems, and compromise. As long as these elements are present, then the specifics of the setup do not matter.

There are many types of problem solving activities for adults. You can do online problem solving games, which require a different skill set than in-person problem solving. For instance, communication must be much clearer and more abundant when group members are far apart and unable to demonstrate or pick up physical cues.

Though many problem solving games include props and in-person elements, there are many games you can play together online. These exercises work well as educational tools as well as team bonding accelerators. Upon completion, participants are likely to feel a sense of accomplishment and increased confidence. These games are also great practice for real life conflict resolution, creative thinking and team building.

Next check out this list of connection games , this collection of crime-solving games , and this post with conflict resolution games .

We also have a list of the best decision making books and a list of team building problems for work .

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FAQ: Problem solving activities

Here are common answers to questions about group problem solving activities.

What are problem solving games?

Problem solving games are challenges that ask players to think critically and use logic to overcome issues or answer riddles. Examples include sudoku, murder mysteries, and spaghetti towers. These games are also known as “problem solving exercises”, “problem and solution games” and “group problem solving activities.”

What are the best problem solving games for groups?

The best problem solving games for groups include online escape rooms, moral challenges, and improv games.

What are some good problem solving team building activities for students?

Some good problem solving activities for students include crossword puzzles, choose your own adventure stories, and model UN.

How do you play problem solving games online?

The best way to play problem solving games online is to join a video call meeting to talk through the issue. Using the screen sharing and digital whiteboard features helps participants visualize the problem more clearly. Breakout rooms give teams the chance to discuss the issue more intimately.

Author: Angela Robinson

Marketing Coordinator at teambuilding.com. Team building content expert. Angela has a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing and worked as a community manager with Yelp to plan events for businesses.

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71+ Free Social Problem-Solving Scenarios

Do you have kiddos who struggle with their social problem-solving skills? Teach your students the simple process of how to solve a problem along with having them review how well their solution worked or didn’t work.

Learning to problem solve is an essential skill that is used not only throughout childhood but also into adulthood. Social problem solving is the ability to change or adapt to undesirable situations that arise throughout our day. On a daily basis, a child will encounter social problems that they will need to solve. Anything from arguing with another student, to hurting a friend’s feelings, to having a difficult conversation, or working with others.

Start with Small Problems

Many of the “problems” children encounter are often small problems which the child may be over-reacting to, such as wanting a different coloring crayon or wanting to be first in line, however, these small problems are still very real to the child. Practicing problem-solving with these small problems can be a great learning opportunity. Children can practice problem-solving with a small problem which can help them learn how to handle bigger problems in the future.

Problem Solving Importance

Social problem-solving skills are critical to a child’s social interactions, personal and professional relationships. A child’s ability to handle change, cope with stress, and handle challenges improves with a child’s ability to successfully solve social problems.

The ultimate goal is that the child will be able to solve social problems all on their own, but until they can independently solve a problem they will need to learn how to communicate and self-advocate to positively solve their problems.

Students with Autism Problem Solving

Students with autism and other social challenges need to learn to problem solve as well. These social problem-solving skills will help them throughout their childhood and into their adulthood. Children can be taught how to problem solve through a guided process of breaking down the problem and using simple steps to solve the problem. Learning specific steps to problem-solving can allow children to remember how to solve a problem when they become overwhelmed or stressed. Although learning to solve a problem independently can take some time and practice it is well worth the investment to have a child who can eventually solve most social situations in a positive manner on their own.

Make Problem Solving Easier with this Freebie!

Download yours today to get started.

Problem Solving Form

Teach your students the 4 steps to becoming a social problem-solver.

Identify the problem. For instance, start by having your student identify the social problem.
Create three solutions. Also, have your student come up with three different solutions that they could use to solve the problem that they identified.
Identify the consequences. Then, identify the consequence for each individual solution.
Pick the best solution. Lastly, have your student identify which of their three solutions is the best choice Then have your student put into words why they think that solution is the best solution.

What we learnt about solving problems is don't freak out, if one thing doesn't work , try something else out. And work together as a team. #melthammathsweek #MELTHAMPUPILVOICE @problemsolveit pic.twitter.com/iVm1Im4Aue — yr6melthamce (@yr6melthamce) February 4, 2019

Problem Solving Review Form

After your students go through the social problem-solver have them use the social problem-solving review form.

What happened. For instance, after your student tried their solution have them explain what happened next.
Review the results. Also, have your student identify whether or not their solution got them the results they wanted.
Use this solution again. Furthermore, have your student identify whether or not they would use this solution again in the future to solve the same or similar problem.
What would you do differently? Finally, have your student explain what they would do differently if they didn’t get the results they wanted or if they wouldn’t use that solution again in the future.

71+ Social Problem Scenarios + 6 Blank Scenarios

Use the 71 social problem-solving scenarios to have your students get great experience practicing how to solve a social problem. Also, included are 6 blank scenarios. Then laminate them so you can use them over and over again. Therefore, create social problems that the student experiences and needs help solving.

Wordless Video teaching Problem Solving

Watch this super cute wordless animation with your students and have them discuss the problem they see and how to best solve the problem.

Use this as a fun practice example to get your students started towards learning how to problem-solve.

Demonstrate Through Modeling

Model and discuss empathy. First and foremost, children need to understand how another person might be feeling in a given situation in order to become a good social problem solver. The student needs to learn how to “stand in someone else’s shoes” for a little bit. One way you can work on this skill is during the reading time you can focus on how a particular character in the story might be feeling. Ask questions, such as, “How do they feel right now? How would you feel in that same situation? Why do you think they feel that way?”, etc.
Model problem-solving skills as the teacher. When you are faced with a problem you can solve the problem by thinking aloud for the students to hear how you solve a problem. You can state the problem, then come up with possible solutions, then identify the possible consequences to each solution, then pick and explain why a solution is the best option. For example, you could say, “I was hoping to take the class outside for a stress walk around the track before the reading test, but the problem is that it is raining outside. I could still take you outside, but then you will get wet, or we could walk the halls, but then we’d have to be really quiet because there are other classes learning, or we could just skip the walk and take the reading test, but then you might not do as well on the test. I think based on all of those solutions the best solution will be to walk the hallway, but you guys will have to promise to be quiet so that we don’t disrupt other classes. Modeling the problem-solving process can be very helpful for the students to watch, observe, and later implement themselves.

Teach Communication

Have students communicate how they are feeling . Teaching your students to share their emotions in a respectful way can improve their ability to problem-solve. Have students use an “I” sentence frame, such as, “I feel _____ (insert feeling word) when _____ (identify what made you feel that way).” For example, “I felt sad when Jackson broke my favorite pencil” or “I was mad when I wasn’t picked to be first in line. “This way students can communicate how they are feeling using honest and open communication. Teaching students to appropriately communicate their emotions can help solve some social problems from the beginning.

Encourage Independency

Encourage your student to problem solve. If your student is struggling to problem solve independently encourage them to do so using open-ended questions, such as “How could you fix this problem?” “What would be a fair solution?” “What would happen if you used that solution?”, etc.
Let the student try to problem solve independently. Give your students the space to try and solve their own problems using the guided strategies. Try not to come running to their rescue for every little problem. Some problems are small and a great opportunity for the student to learn and practice. If an adult does all of the problem solving for a student then what are they really learning. Give your students the time and space they need to practice solving small problems on their own. Of course, if it is a bigger or more serious problem then have an adult help guide the problem-solving process.
Tell an adult. Remind your students that there are still some problems that are too big for them to solve on their own and that it is okay to get help from an adult to solve big problems. For example, if the student doesn’t feel safe, someone is being hurt physically or emotionally, or if they tried to solve a problem independently but it didn’t work and they need help. Let them know that it’s okay to tell an adult.

Teach How to Disagree and How to Make Up

Discuss how to disagree respectfully. Remind your student that they won’t always agree with their teacher, friends, classmate, or parents and that’s okay. Even the people we like might have different opinions, interests, and likes than we do. However, even if we disagree with someone we should still treat them with respect. Treating someone with respect means to not call them names, ignore them, yell or hit them. It means that you do try to create solutions that both parties can agree with and to apologize when we hurt others’ feelings.
Role-play how to make up. Practice in everyday life how to make up after a social problem .

Get your free social problem solver today!

I hope you and your students love this freebie!

Students are really having to stretch their brains today. It's @NSPCC #NumberDay and @problemsolveit are challenging Y9 and 10 to solve the escape room boxes. It's not as easy as it looks! The promise of a few sweet treats for the winners seems to be helping though! pic.twitter.com/AxRRJnJIv2 — CongletonHS (@CongletonHS) February 2, 2018

Have your students use task card scenarios to help them identify how they and others might feel in different social scenarios. Be sure to discuss the problem, identify possible solutions, identify the consequences of those possible solutions, and then based on those consequences pick the best solution. Make social problem-solving a game by telling the students that they are social detectives and that it is their job to use what they know about social rules to help them identify the possible and best solutions. Start practicing today with 71+ free social problem social task cards! Do your students need more practice? Be sure to check out my other freebie for 31 wordless animated videos to teach problem-solving and so much more.

Get More Problem Solving Time Saving Materials

Next, be sure to check out the following time-saving materials to continue to teach your students how to solve their social problems in addition to this freebie.

Weekly Social Pragmatics Homework

Weekly problem-solving. Send home a weekly homework page that includes a problem-solving scenario plus an idiom and a conversational practice scenario.

Restorative Justice Problem Solving Flip Book

Restorative justice graphic visual. Use this graphic visual to help your student restore a social relationship after a social problem.

Self-Advocating Role-Play Scenarios

Self-advocating in high school. Teach your high schoolers the process to self-advocate for what they need.

5th-12th Grade Life Skills Problem Solving

Life skills problem-solving. In addition, this life skills differentiated bundle includes a problem-solving lesson plan.

I recommend you read Problem Solving Wheel: Help Kids Solve Their Own Problems , 61+ Free Fillable SLP Planner Pages 2020-2021 , 430+ Free Multisyllabic Words List Activity Bundle , or 432+ Free IEP Goal Bank to Save You Time posts because they include freebies as well and who doesn’t want more freebies!

Got questions? Leave a comment. Let’s chat!

Monday 30th of January 2023

Hello! I have entered my name and email twice (yesterday & today) to receive to 71+ Free Social Problem-Solving Senarios, but I have not received anything yet. Not even an email back to mine in order to subcribe. Thanks for your help! Tracy

Melissa Berg

Tuesday 31st of January 2023

Hi Tracy, Thanks so much for reaching out! Sorry about that. We went ahead and sent you an email with the PDF attached. Wishing you all my best, Melissa

Problem Solving Skills

Tuesday 30th of August 2022

I truly love your site. Excellent colors, theme and writing. Thanks for sharing.

Laura Ricca

Monday 11th of April 2022

Tuesday 12th of April 2022

Hi Laura, I'm glad you found this resource helpful. Melissa

Modified Mental Health and Suicide Prevention - Speech Therapy Store

Monday 11th of May 2020

[…] 71+ FREE SOCIAL PROBLEM-SOLVING SCENARIOS […]

Problem Solving Wheel: Help Kids Solve Their Own Problems - Speech Therapy Store

Monday 4th of May 2020

[…] 71+ Free Social Problem Solving Task Cards Scenarios […]

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Using story to solve social problems.

How narrative intelligence can help everyone design solutions and generate useful data.

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By Denise Withers Sep. 17, 2013

Last week I was in a meeting with a dozen leaders of social agencies and enterprises, exploring options for a joint event in the coming year. Though the group was keen, we didn’t have a facilitator, and the conversation wandered. An hour later, we still hadn’t identified a goal for the event or even clarified why we wanted to do it. So I threw one of my favorite questions out to the table: “What would ‘happily ever after' look like to you if we made this happen?”

The query drew several smiles—and brought the discussion into sharp focus. Within a few minutes, we’d shared our desired future stories and identified a small set of guiding criteria to use as planning goals going forward.

This idea of applying a story framework to strategic planning is a new-school take on old-school ways. A relatively simple approach, it has the advantage of making problem-solving tangible and accessible. People like to frame their challenges in terms of good guys, bad guys, and happily-ever-afters; it’s familiar, intuitive, and comforting. And there’s a good reason for that. It’s called narrative intelligence.

An emerging concept, narrative intelligence is ill defined and unfamiliar to many. Through my graduate research, I came to understand it as our innate ability to analyze, learn from, and remember information and experiences as stories. Others, such as artificial intelligence expert Michael Mateas at UCSC, use the term more specifically to refer to technical capabilities in computer-generated storytelling. Though definitions vary, the biological evidence for such intelligence is compelling and well described by Kendall Haven in his book Story Proof: The Science Behind the Startling Power of Story .

Are you enjoying this article? Read more like this, plus SSIR's full archive of content, when you subscribe .

The basic idea is that we are exposed to information in story format from the time we are born. This causes our brain to establish and fortify neurological pathways that lead us to develop an ability to use story structure to process incoming information. So we learn from a young age how to think in terms of problems, quests, and solutions—the basic story structure I discussed in my previous post . As we develop these pathways, researchers suggest that we also improve our math and logic abilities. Over a lifetime, we each develop our own unique story “library”—a sort of human database of our life experience that we use for solving problems.

When we come across a problem, we subconsciously start to analyze it and ask ourselves, “Have I run into a problem like this before?” If the answer is yes, we go searching through our mental database and retrieve the solution to the problem, which is filed in the form of a story from earlier in our life. If the answer is no, then we go off on a quest to develop new knowledge and skills that will help us solve this problem. Once we have a solution, we file the new story away, adding it to our database.

Given that we all have this ability to analyze and unpack complex situations as stories, what would happen if we reversed the process of story deconstruction—and used our narrative intelligence to construct or design solutions to problems through a story framework? Then we could really start to tap the power of story in innovative ways.

The process of story design, as practiced by established writers, is quite similar to strategic design and other “design thinking” processes. In fact, all design processes are essentially methods to solve problems. So why not use the intuitive framework of story as a problem-solving process for challenges such as strategic planning? Inspired by the Business Model Canvas , I developed a Story Canvas as a tool to do just that. A relatively simple template, the Story Canvas functions as both a dashboard, and a guide for planning and solving problems.

This spring, I put the Story Canvas to the test with seven social entrepreneurs who are part of an Innovation Hub in Vancouver, Canada, run by the ISIS Research Centre at the UBC Sauder School of Business. All were struggling with complex challenges, including pricing, customer development, and scaling up. The goal of our work was to use the canvas as a story framework to analyze their situations and zero in on their core problems. (Defining the problem clearly is an essential step in design but impatient planners often skip it.)

After spending less than an hour with the canvas, one of the entreprenuers discovered that she didn’t have a pricing problem (as suspected). What she had was a disconnect between her value proposition and service offering. Once she’d clarified this, she was then able to use the canvas framework in a relatively agile, risk-free way to map out a plan for alignment.

Clearly, this kind of story design process won’t replace or compete with established strategic tools. However, experiences like this show that it can offer an intuitive planning framework that makes it easier for us to wrangle and resolve complex challenges.

The scientific method itself is actually a problem-solving process that mirrors story design. When you describe the way a research project unfolded, you tell a story, complete with a problem (hypothesis), quest (methodology), and solution (findings). When we listen to this story and analyze the quest, we can learn a great deal.

In fact, this is where we find story’s greatest potential to drive innovation: story data. If every story contains knowledge about how a problem was solved, then imagine what we could learn by analyzing stories about specific topics in a methodical way. We’d be able to leverage the resulting story intel to create a powerful platform for change that’s agile, affordable, and accessible. I’ll dive into that in my next post.

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Solving the looming retirement crisis means thinking differently about aging, economist says

It's time to start thinking differently about aging, according to a new book.
Andrew J. Scott coined the term "evergreen economy" to describe how older people's quality of life can be improved.
"We've never invested enough in old age, because we never thought we'd get there," he said.

Life expectancy soared in the first two decades of this century, World Health Organization data shows — and that's posing challenges for some rich countries.

People tend to underestimate their chances of living to 75, according to a report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, meaning they often don't save enough cash for retirement .

That's putting strain on the pensions system , fueling labor-market shortages , and forcing health workers and scientists to reckon with the massive rise in cases of age-related diseases such Alzheimer's and dementia.

Andrew J. Scott, a professor of economics at the London Business School, believes the steps governments, companies, and individuals take to address an aging population will be one of the defining issues of the 21st century.

"Clearly, climate change is a huge issue, AI is now an obsession about how we can adapt and change our future, but we never talk about adapting to aging," he told Business Insider in a recent interview.

"We've never invested enough in old age, because we thought we'd never get there, and now we will."

'Evergreen economy'

Scott, whose 30-year career as an economist has taken him from Oxford to Harvard to a stint as an advisor to the Bank of England, lays out his mission statement for rethinking aging in a new book called " The Longevity Imperative ."

He calls for a transition to an "evergreen economy," based on channeling the world's aging population to address inequality and boost growth.

Governments can help by investing in preventive health initiatives such as trials of anti-dementia drugs, he told BI, while companies that allow flexible working patterns and stamp out ageism can also help keep older people employed and productive.

But individuals also have a role to play, according to Scott, who points to the surge in popularity of weight loss drugs such as Ozempic, Gen Z drinking and smoking less , and the rise of trends like the retire wealthy movement as signs that people are starting to realize they'll live longer and need to take better care of both their health and finances.

"How we look after our health, our finances, our skills, and our relationships has become crucial because the data suggests we're now likely to become very old, and that's never been the case before," he said.

Aging anxieties

"The Longevity Imperative" arrives at a time when increased life expectancy is starting to affect some of the world's largest economies for the first time.

Italy's population is rapidly aging, with over-65s already making up 37% of the workforce, according to data from the Institute for International Political Studies. That figure is expected to swell to a staggering 65% by 2050, per the think tank.

Meanwhile, nearly 30% of people in Japan are over-65s — enough to make it the world's oldest population, according to the World Economic Forum. That could leave Japan battling chronic labor shortages in the future, economists warn.

The US population is still growing and relatively young, largely due to high immigration levels . But many older Americans face a bleak future, with about half the nation's over-65s earning less than $30,000 a year, per the Census Bureau's population survey.

The looming retirement crisis underlines the need for a rethink on aging, Scott told BI.

"Policies like raising the Social Security age are missing the point," he said. "People don't leave the labor market because they've got enough money to retire comfortably — it's often because they get ill, have to care for someone, or lose their job because their skills are seen as outdated.

"So we have to start thinking about how we can ensure people's health is sustainable as they age, while maintaining their skills and encouraging firms to offer more age-friendly jobs," Scott added.

Unrealistic or imperative?

Some may regard the idea of an "evergreen economy" as unrealistic — or even dystopian.

Longevity isn't a political priority right now for the US government, according to a Washington Post survey of public health experts, lawmakers, and senior health officials published late last year.

Meanwhile, the World Economic Forum has warned that anti-aging innovations might only worsen inequality in advanced economies. It cited a 2005 research paper that found the booming market for products such as age-defying moisturizers could give " a glimpse of the financial, social and ethical problems to come ."

However, it's difficult to resist Scott's own idealism and enthusiasm.

In a half-hour conversation with BI, he quoted David Bowie ("Aging is an extraordinary process whereby you become the person you always should have been"), laid out why longevity encompasses everything from "GDP to what I should have for breakfast," and shared how the death of his parents first inspired him to explore the topic.

As for how thinking about longevity has changed his own approach to aging, the 58-year-old economist says he's not advocating ultra-strict diets or taking loads of pills .

"This isn't about doing a Bryan Johnson by starving yourself for 16 hours a day and taking lots of supplements," Scott told BI, referring to the multimillionaire biotech CEO who's reportedly spending up to $2 million a year to try to lower his body's biological age.

"I do exercise a great deal, I try to take better care of my finances, and I've tried to change my sleep," he added. "But more than anything else, I'm just trying to keep up with my friends and family a bit more."

Watch: Millions of homes could flood the US housing market thanks to boomers

Main content

Semiconductors at scale: New processor achieves remarkable speedup in problem solving

In the context of CMOS (a type of semiconductor technology), it is necessary for the components of annealing processors to be fully "coupled." However, the complexity of this coupling directly affects the scalability of the processors.

In a new IEEE Access study led by Professor Takayuki Kawahara from Tokyo University of Science, researchers have developed and successfully tested a scalable processor that divides the calculation into multiple LSI chips. The innovation was also presented in IEEE 22nd World Symposium on Applied Machine Intelligence and Informatics (SAMI 2024) on 25 January 2024.

According to Prof. Kawahara, "We want to achieve advanced information processing directly at the edge, rather than in the cloud or performing preprocessing at the edge for the cloud. Using the unique processing architecture announced by the Tokyo University of Science in 2020, we have realized a fully coupled LSI (Large Scale Integration) on one chip using 28nm CMOS technology. Furthermore, we devised a scalable method with parallel-operating chips and demonstrated its feasibility using FPGAs (Field-Programmable Gate Arrays) in 2022."

The team created a scalable annealing processor. It used 36 22nm CMOS calculation LSI (Large Scale Integration) chips and one control FPGA. This technology enables the construction of large-scale, fully coupled semiconductor systems following the Ising model (a mathematical model of magnetic systems) with 4096 spins.

The processor incorporates two distinct technologies developed at the Tokyo University of Science. This includes a "spin thread method" that enables 8 parallel solution searches, coupled with a technique that reduces chip requirements by about half compared to conventional methods. Its power needs are also modest, operating at 10MHz with a power consumption of 2.9W (1.3W for the core part). This was practically confirmed using a vertex cover problem with 4096 vertices.

In terms of power performance ratio, the processor outperformed simulating a fully coupled Ising system on a PC (i7, 3.6GHz) using annealing emulation by 2,306 times. Additionally, it surpassed the core CPU and arithmetic chip by 2,186 times.

"The goal is to achieve this without the need for air conditioning, large equipment, or cloud infrastructure using current semiconductor processes. Specifically, we would like to achieve 2M (million) spins by 2030 and explore the creation of new digital industries using this."

In summary, researchers have developed a scalable, fully coupled annealing processor incorporating 4096 spins on a single board with 36 CMOS chips. Key innovations, including chip reduction and parallel operations for simultaneous solution searches, played a crucial role in this development.

More information: Taichi Megumi et al, Scalable Fully-Coupled Annealing Processing System Implementing 4096 Spins Using 22nm CMOS LSI, IEEE Access (2024). DOI: 10.1109/ACCESS.2024.3360034

Provided by Tokyo University of Science

(a) The die photo of a 22nm fully-coupled Ising LSI chip; (b) the front and back views of the board of a 4096-spin scalable full- coupled Ising LSI system. Credit: Takayuki Kawahara from TUS

Semiconductors at scale: New processor achieves remarkable speed-up in problem solving

Annealing processors are designed specifically for addressing combinatorial optimization problems, where the task is to find the best solution from a finite set of possibilities. This holds implications for practical applications in logistics, resource allocation, and the discovery of drugs and materials. In the context of CMOS (a type of semiconductor technology), it is necessary for the components of annealing processors to be fully "coupled." However, the complexity of this coupling directly affects the scalability of the processors.

In a new IEEE Access study published on 30 January 2024, led by ProfessorTakayuki Kawahara from Tokyo University of Science, researchers have developed and successfully tested a scalable processor that divides the calculation into multiple LSI chips. The innovation was also presented in IEEE 22 nd World Symposium on Applied Machine Intelligence and Informatics (SAMI 2024) on 25 January 2024.

According to Prof. Kawahara, We want to achieve advanced information processing directly at the edge, rather than in the cloud, or performing preprocessing at the edge for the cloud. Using the unique processing architecture announced by the Tokyo University of Science in 2020, we have realized a fully coupled LSI (Large Scale Integration) on one chip using 28nm CMOS technology. Furthermore, we devised a scalable method with parallel-operating chips, and demonstrated its feasibility using FPGAs (Field-Programmable Gate Arrays) in 2022.

In the study, which was partially supported by the JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number 22H01559, the Tokyo University of Science Entrepreneurship Grant (PoC Support Grant), and the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, the team created a scalable annealing processor. It used 36 22nm CMOS calculation LSI (Large Scale Integration) chips and one control FPGA. This technology enables the construction of large-scale fully coupled semiconductor systems following the Ising model (a mathematical model of magnetic systems) with 4096 spins.

The successful machine verification of this processor suggests the possibility of enhanced capacity. According to Prof. Kawahara, who holds a vision for the social implementation of this technology (such as initiating a business, joint research, and technology transfer), "In the future, we will develop this technology for a joint research effort targeting an LSI system with the computing power of a 2050-level quantum computer for solving combinatorial optimization problems. The goal is to achieve this without the need for air conditioning, large equipment, or cloud infrastructure, using current semiconductor processes. Specifically, we would like to achieve 2M (million) spins by 2030 and explore the creation of new digital industries using this."

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Taichi Megumi, Akari Endo, Takayuki Kawahara. Scalable Fully-Coupled Annealing Processing System Implementing 4096 Spins Using 22nm CMOS LSI . IEEE Access , 2024; 12: 19711 DOI: 10.1109/ACCESS.2024.3360034

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Shocked and honored, Randall McMurray receives Officer of the Year at 2024 SBPD awards

SOUTH BEND — Randall McMurray wears many hats in the South Bend Police Department , serving on the honor guard, pension board, peer support team, critical incidents stress management team, FACT team, rapid response team and as an emergency vehicle operations instructor.

McMurray, a first class patrolman currently serving as a crime scene technician, was shocked to receive a new role Wednesday night: South Bend's Officer of the Year.

“I’m very honored,” he said during the ceremony at the Four Winds Casino ballroom. “I’ve been here for 10 years, so it feels good to get recognized and know that my work is being seen by others.”

McMurray has "teched" 80 scenes while completing 202 reports, “treating each one with equal regard,” South Bend Police Chief Scott Ruszkowski said in his speech announcing McMurray's honor.

McMurray, who sat at a table near the front, said he had no idea he would be receiving Officer of the Year. In fact, his family picked the spot, he said.

“There’s a lot of people in the department who deserve this award just as much,” he said. For him, the awards are an opportunity to come together and “see the work everyone has done over the year and get recognized for it,” McMurray said.

This award won’t change McMurray's work ethic. “I’m going to continue to do what I do, working to the best of my ability and try to make citizens, my family and everyone proud,” he said.

Department presents Community Problem Solving Award and more

The department honored officers, police department personnel and community members throughout the evening, including the Community Problem Solving Award to Christine Karsten and Officer Brian Meador.

The award is given to anyone who shows an exemplary effort to identify, analyze and successfully respond to causes, conditions and problems that may lead to crime and neighborhood disorder.

Chief Scott Ruszkowski called recipient WNDU Morning News Anchor Christine Karsten the “voice and hope to the victims of unsolved crimes. She is a true ambassador of the message of ‘See something, say something, so we can do something,'" he said.

In Karsten’s segment, Michiana Unsolved, “she brings awareness to the unsolved cases in a way the community can empathize with and offers another way to make a difference,” Ruszkowski said.

Officer honored for saving baby's life

Community Resource Officer Brian Meador also received the Community Problem Solving Award, but before he could take his seat, Ruszkowski called state legislators to the stage.

In a surprise to Meador, Rep. Maureen Bauer, D-South Bend and state Sen. David Niezgodski, D-South Bend took the podium to announce the passing of House Concurrent Resolution 8 , in recognition of Meador’s heroic efforts on Dec. 12 in the police department’s lobby.

On the evening of Dec. 12, a couple was taking their child to the hospital when their child became unresponsive in the car. They entered the police station for help. Officer Meador, upon hearing the commotion, began performing chest compressions until medics arrived.

Niezgodski and Bauer credited Meador’s quick thinking, composure and training to save the child’s life, and it wasn’t the first time he’d done so.

Meador said he and two other officers previously saved a baby with special needs, winning a life-saving award previously.

He recalled the events leading up to the Dec. 12 incident.

“I thought it was a fight at first,” he said. After hearing the words, “He’s not breathing,” Meador said he started running.

“I didn’t know it was a baby (at first) either. All the training kicked in,” he said. He said he thinks all officers have a versatile training equipped to assist in any situation.

“If I hadn’t been there any of the other officers would have jumped in,” he said. “I just happened to be the guy that was there.”

Niezgodski and Bauer both presented House Concurrent Resolution 8 in their respective chambers, but Niezgodski credited Bauer for reaching out to him and beginning the resolution in the House.

“This is a way for us as legislators to recognize Officer Meador for his heroic actions,” Bauer told The Tribune. Having “the entire Indiana General Assembly come together and recognize his efforts, so many of my colleagues in the House were impressed by his actions.”

“It’s one of the most special things we can do as legislators to honor those back home,” Niezgodski said.

The department distributed 10 other awards, including:

Chief’s Award of Merit

Commander’s Award

Jose Aguilar, Tyler Donlon, Rodolfo Espraza, Sgt. Kevin Gibbons, Jen Jozwiak, Detective Chris Kozora, Officer Aaron Omanson and Officer Bradley Sadilek.

Department Commendation

Detective Kyle Bilinski, Officer Chris Brady, Detective Bruno Martinsky, Officer Hunter Miller, Rose Thompson, Chris Rajski, Officer Antonio Rodriguez, Detective Tim Taylor

Crime Prevention Special Commendation

Jarveair Bourn

Unit Meritorious Performance Award

SBPD Crime Lab: Charlie Eakins, Sierra Halstead, Ronald Kaszas, Lacie Klosinski, Aaron McCray, Ronald Wilson and Ray Wolfenbarger

Life Saving Award

Devonte Spratt, Jeffrey Veal, Zachery Wells, Brian Meador, Bradley Sadilek, Joseph Slabach, Jerrid Arnold, Maranda Baker and John Bies

Community Oriented Policing Special Partnership Award

Lynn Coleman, Tina Thompson, Charlotte Williams

Business Appreciation Award

Palmer Funeral Home and South Bend Cubs

Dortha Paxton Award

Tony Salazar

Patty Derue Nemeth Humanitarian Award

Crystal Hutchens

In a special recognition, Chief Dan Skibins recognized the efforts of field training officers who trained over 70 new recruits in 2022 and 2023 combined. "Without the dedication of our field training officers, we would not have been successful in building back our department to full staffing," he said in his speech. The department recognized Anne Hayes, Jeffery Vance, Travis Kukla, Tyler Donlon, Trent Mamazza, Timmy Buckingham, Sean Ryan, Joseph Carey, Reid Spitaels, Tony Dawson, Michael Stuk, Brandon Martin, Mollie Anton, Robert Anton and Tyler Jackey.

Email Tribune staff writer Camille Sarabia at [email protected] .

IMAGES

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COMMENTS

Problem solving stories Archive
Leadership story: A leader's reaction in a difficult situation. In the story, you will see why a leader always needs to keep a calm head even when others can't find a way to solve a difficult situation. Jul 19 Leadership stories, Mindset stories, Problem solving stories, Stories, Stories about communication, Teamwork stories.
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We travel alongside this young child as he shares his problem-solving journey. His problem, shown as a violet hued cloud hanging over the boy's head, only grew into a bigger and bigger the more he tried to avoid it, eventually turning into a raging storm, covering the pages of the story. The boy realizes when he finally confronts his problem ...
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Understanding the problem and solution story structures improves comprehension and helps readers make informed predictions. (As well as helping children see the creative possibilities in problem-solving!) Of course, almost all stories have a problem and a solution -with the exception of a concept book. So really, you can search out problem ...
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Problem-solving with story is an all-purpose, money-making, timesaving, status-building, enjoyment tool. It is a meta-skill! When I graduated with an electrical and mechanical engineering degree back in the 1980s, my first job was running electrical survey instruments in oilwells, so the oil company could know whether they had discovered oil.
Become a Better Problem Solver by Telling Better Stories
One of the biggest obstacles to effective decision-making is failure to define the problem well. Invoking the power of narrative and a simple story structure can help ensure that teams are solving the right problem. Arnaud Chevallier, Albrecht Enders, and Jean-Louis Barsoux February 01, 2023 Reading Time: 19 min. Subscribe Permissions and PDF.
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Story 1: [Name of Creative Problem Solver] Background Information. Name: Jane Smith Problem: Lack of access to clean water in rural communities. Jane Smith, a passionate engineer, grew up in a small rural community where access to clean water was a persistent problem.
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Top 10 Problem Solving Books. 7.0. 01. Gus's Garage. Written and illustrated by Leo Timmers. 7.0. 02. The Little Mouse, the Red Ripe Strawberry, and the Big Hungry Bear. Written and illustrated by Audrey Wood and Don Wood.
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3 min read · Mar 8, 2024. Read stories about Creative Problem Solving on Medium. Discover smart, unique perspectives on Creative Problem Solving and the topics that matter most to you like ...
Using Storytelling to Boost Problem Solving Skills
Storytelling can be a powerful tool to develop, maintain, and enhance problem-solving skills. It links creativity, critical thinking, and analytical skills with an engaging experience that helps shed insights on complex problems. The following sections explore the benefits of using storytelling to improve problem-solving skills.
A Beautiful Solution |Short Story about Problem Solving
A Beautiful Solution. A father was engrossed in his work while his little daughter constantly distracted him in an attempt for him to make him play with her. To keep her busy, the man tore a page of a printed map of the world from a magazine into pieces and asked her to go to her room and put them together to make the map again. The daughter ...
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Problem-solving is not the only thing that makes a story entertaining. We have other methods of drawing the audience in, such as novelty and attachment. But without problem-solving, events don't feel like a story anymore. So if you're a storyteller, you're also a creative problem-solver.
Episode 84: Storytelling For Problem Solving
We then discuss stories' influence on culture, change initiatives, and leadership development. Listen in to learn more about why we need to think beyond just telling stories and start noticing the problem the story is solving. Show Highlights [2:10] How Denise Got Her Start As A Story Coach
Problem solving
A short story on Problem solving and how to deal better with your difficulties and problems. A rich man, every night, pray the same prayer to God. He repeats his prayers again and again on a daily basis. In his words, he would ask, "God, please do one favor for me, at least one favor — and I have been asking this my whole life.
We Can Be Problem Solvers!
We Can Be Problem Solvers! Scripted story to help children understand the steps to problem solving. Includes problem scenario cards to help children practice finding a solution to common social problems. View Resource. File Type: pdf. Categories: Scripted Story. Tags: Classroom Implementation, Practical Strategies, Scripted Stories for Social ...
10 Storytelling Tactics To Help You Solve A Tough Problem At Work
Pick apart the themes . You may notice themes (i.e. accountability, trust, integrity) appearing. Write them down. Pick them apart. Don't judge yourself . Judgment is the enemy of story and a hindrance to problem solving. Make note of your judgments of yourself. Then quit it. Don't judge your boss and/or the company .
Giant Story Problems: Reading Comprehension through Math Problem-Solving
Working as a class, students read a story problem and answer a series of questions designed to bring out the essential points of the problem. Students then draw a picture on chart paper showing the details of the story problem. They write both an equation and a sentence to represent the problem. Finally, students repeat the process with new ...
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Problem Solving Examples for Recent Grads/Entry Level Job Seekers. Coordinating work between team members in a class project. Reassigning a missing team member's work to other group members in a class project. Adjusting your workflow on a project to accommodate a tight deadline.
Problem Solving Games, Activities & Exercises for Adults
4. Sudoku. Sudoku is one of the most popular free problem solving games for adults. The objective of this game is to fill each box of a 9×9 grid so that every row, column, and letter contains each number from one to nine. The puzzle makes a great team challenge. To play Sudoku on Zoom, screen share the game board.
71+ Free Social Problem-Solving Scenarios
71+ Social Problem Scenarios + 6 Blank Scenarios. Use the 71 social problem-solving scenarios to have your students get great experience practicing how to solve a social problem. Also, included are 6 blank scenarios. Then laminate them so you can use them over and over again. Therefore, create social problems that the student experiences and ...
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Problem Solving Techniques in Storytelling. Problem-solving is the key to structuring a story that resonates with people, and here are three problem solving techniques to develop a problem that ...
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This idea of applying a story framework to strategic planning is a new-school take on old-school ways. A relatively simple approach, it has the advantage of making problem-solving tangible and accessible. People like to frame their challenges in terms of good guys, bad guys, and happily-ever-afters; it's familiar, intuitive, and comforting.
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Semiconductors at scale: New processor achieves ...
Semiconductors at scale: New processor achieves remarkable speed-up in problem solving. ScienceDaily . Retrieved March 25, 2024 from www.sciencedaily.com / releases / 2024 / 03 / 240325114121.htm
Officers and community recognized in 12 awards by South Bend Police
The department honored officers, police department personnel and community members throughout the evening, including the Community Problem Solving Award to Christine Karsten and Officer Brian Meador.