problem solving short stories

, a solution-oriented approach to solving children's problems. The illustrations are by different Finnish artists.

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These books have so far been published in Finnish and Norwegian. Solution Stories 3 is also available in Swedish. Foreign publishers interested in publishing these books are advised to contact the author Dr. Ben Furman directly.

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.

Get Hands-On Help With Plot, Characters, and More

During our fall writing workshops, we’ll step you through figuring out a portion of your story. Hurry – the first workshop is in a few weeks!

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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.

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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.

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Stories / Problem solving Stories - The best reading on the web

Newest problem-solving poems.

The Galactic Thinker – To the Planet of Hand-Wringers (slightly deeper)

“Why are you wringing your hands?”

“Who are YOU to ask?”

“I am the Galactic Thinker, and I’ve come with a solution.”

“Oh? What is your ‘ solution ’?”

“The Problem Solver’s Mindset, which is but a component of a broader philosophy.”

“Oh? What ‘ broader philosophy ’?”

“The Philosophy of Broader Survival.”

“Well, if you are going to get broad about anything, survival is a good place to go… as for my hand-wringing, I am wringing my hands because the climate is changing!”

“But change is the only constant with planetary climates. Why fight it? You cannot stop change or put the planet under glass. You might as well accept it and adapt, with technology first, biology second, and natural selection in the long run… but you really should try my Problem Solver’s Mindset. It is far superior to hand-wringing.”

“But hand-wringing manipulates others!”

“Yes, and that may be the best use of your skills, or lack thereof, but if you were a problem solver yourself, well, let’s just say that there are never enough actual problem solvers, everyone wants to be a manipulator, which spells suicide and extinction against a harsh and deadly universe. Better to have more problem-solving mentalities than manipulative mentalities. I mean, look at it from the perspective of resources – which is more valuable? Wouldn't you say problem solvers?"

"No, I would say that depends on which is more needed at the time."

"Good point, but I am speaking from the point of view of the present, when problem solvers are rare compared to manipulators... but, to take a more generalized view, yes, it would depend on which resource you need more of at the moment, and I think it comes down to an optimum ratio."

"An optimun ratio?"

"Yes. Let's presume that there is an optimum ratio between the number of problem solvers and the number of manipulators. If the ratio deviates to a less than optimum relationship, then one or the other or both will have to be adjusted in order to attain the optimum ratio again."

"I have a contrary point to make on climate control, too, if you don't mind..."

"No, go ahead..."

"You sound as if you do not wish to attempt to control climate, that you are arguing for adaptation instead."

"You are right, I did sound like that. My first response is a general principle concerning poisons that I would argue..."

"What is the principle?"

"That, on blind principle, it is not a good thing to release poisons into the environment, and we can control that."

"We do not know if there are any benefits to it. We are blinded by the detrimental effects. I would err on the safe side and just not emit poisons into the atmosphere and the environment, and too much carbon dioxide can be classified as a poison. My second response considers climate change itself – that without it, perhaps one species would overrun the planet, there being no change to offer new inhibiting factors."

"Like humans on earth?"

"Yes, but now we are into whether a species is a benefit to all of life or not. Humans can be if they adopt my Philosophy of Broader Survival, which is concerned with all of life, and beyond..."

"Artificial Intelligence and even non-living matter."

"So climate change may have a 'cleansing' effect on overpopulation of a species that happens to thrive in the current climate system..."

"It is a notion. Humans, without my philosophy, are a bane to their planet and to the galaxy, so I would not oppose climate change in their case if they proved to be unenlightenable. I have a third response to why climate change may have a beneficial side to it..."

"What is the benefit?"

"That it would stir a species out of its stupor and force it to adapt to different environments. Take current humans, for example. The still have to learn how to exist at the planet's freezing poles and underwater and in vast deserts and underground and beyond the planet. They may need to be kick-started by a severe change in climate. There is also another point..."

"What is it?"

"That without such challenges, life on the planet may regress back to its microbial state, which would mean a loss of higher consciousness, which is needed to deal with the broader threats of the universe, and you begin by asking questions. You know, I am struggling with creating a simplified classification system for questions..."

"What do you have so far?"

"That 'how' questions are scientific, 'why' questions are philosophical, and when, where, who, and what are informational questions."

"I think that system could work. It would restrict the crossover use of the words, since the words can be used in any one of those three categories... so what is this ‘problem solver’s mindset’ that you speak of?”

“In detail?”

“First I must ask a standard question, so don't take offense..."

"Do you have the time and the attention span, I do not want to waste my time with yet another flighty airhead consumed with some frivolous and imploded mentality. I have had enough of them.”

“I think I've proven my staying power already, so I will strive to stay with you mentally...”

“In detail, and I will try to make it painless and quick, the Problem Solver’s mentality consists of phases, and just to note, throughout all phases you will be constantly asking question and trying to find answers, or solutions, to them. The first phase is Exploration . You want to get out there and try to discover what we do not yet know about the harsh and deadly universe that we were born into. When you think you’ve made a Discovery , then the next phase is Analysis – what kind of discovery is it – just personal or universal? Another question is whether it is a potential threat or benefit to life. Note that threats can be turned into benefits with a little engineering. After you’ve determined whether a discovery is personal or universal, and whether it is a threat or a benefit to life, then you must assess whether there are already existing solutions to it, and whether they are local or universal. If you find that the solutions are inadequate, then the next phase is Solution Development , which also involves constant questions along the way. When you finally have a new solution, the next phase is Solution Implementation , that is, getting the solution out there, which involves many things such as distribution and installation, and maybe even training and continued support. Then you are back to phase one, Exploration again. Doesn’t that sound like a better mental frame of mind than hand-wringing?”

“It does... and thank for trying to make it painless and quick...”

“Now what are you doing?”

“I’m looking for a reason to wring my hand over it...”

“Hmmm… well, I’ll wait. Maybe you will find something...”

“Anything yet?”

“No, not yet...”

“How about now?”

“Nope. Nada...”

"I ran out of negatories."

“Maybe I can help find something to wring your hands over…  

“Maybe, or maybe not...”

“Ah-ha! You have finally found something to wring your hands over!”

“Haha… or not...”

“I suppose that you can wring your hands over your possible inability to become good at problem solving...”

“Yes, all of those 'phases' sound daunting...”

“Well, take heart. In advanced societies, each phase becomes the job of specialists, so you can engage in whatever phase you are good at.”

“What if I am good at nothing?”

“You are best at something, even if it is not very good yet. Things become better with practice, remember. Any time that you are new at something, you are not very good at it. You become better with practice, and the best practice is when you do not realize that you are doing it.”

“How does that happen?”

“You like what you are doing, so you don’t really think about it. Before you know it, you are good at it, and that will become your specialty. Advanced societies naturally evolved into societies of specialists as tasks become more and more complicated. Why, I was learning what seemed to be a simple task, and I broke it down into 119 steps! And that was something that looked EASY! So, ‘ complicated ’, yes… that happens… NOW what are you winging your hands over?”

“My future is not completely secure!”

“Oh… you have my pity.”

“Is yours?”

“No, but things could be a LOT worse… it is all in one’s perspective. If you lack it, then expose yourself to the less fortunate. You will quickly gain a healthier perspective than one of hand-wringing .”

“You said ‘hand-wringing’ with disdain!”

“I know, and I shouldn’t. It is but a social tool… a lazy one to be sure, but a tool nevertheless...”

“You said ‘lazy’ with disgust!”

“I did! It can be deplorable...”

“But what if one is not genetically disposed to be above it?”

“There is another cause...”

“What is it?”

“Apathy, which is commonly mistaken for laziness, and do you know where apathy comes from?”

“From where?”

“From a dissatisfaction with the clueless state of life in this universe, that is from where, and my philosophy addresses it, and people dismiss it, the damn scoundrels!”

“Hahaha… at least you aren’t wringing your hand over it.”

“No, I would explode in anger instead...”

“Oh… that is worth wringing my hands over, isn’t it… your anger may permanently damage some of my precious nerve cells, which are not repairable, so in effect, your anger could partially kill me, which may lead to my anger in return, where my solution would be to seek justice, in this case to destroy some of YOUR irreparable nerve cells with some of MY anger!”

“Yes, that is how it works, isn’t it… and eye for an eye...”

“Or two eyes for an eye when anger is involved!”

“Twelve! Ah, that made me feel better for some reason… twelve eyes for one! Haha, that must be ‘justice’...”

“Maybe… and yet anger can be avoided...”

“How? Holding one's breath?”

“No. It is the fact that anything that can cause anger can equally cause sadness, so you have a choice in the tool that you use to affect a social outcome, anger or sadness, and sadness is non-destructive, since it works by eliciting sympathy. It is like a old parable that I came across as a child...”

“What was it?”

“The sun and the wind made a bet at who could cause a man to remove his coat. The wind tried force, i.e. ‘anger’, and what did the man do?”

“What did the man do?”

“He pulled his coat tighter, that’s what!”

“So the wind failed to blow the coat off of the man by using force...”

“Yes. Then it was the sun’s turn. The sun turned up the heat a bit, which represented ‘gentle persuasion’, since it is less violent than the wind, and what did the man do?”

“He took off his coat!”

“So the sun won...”

“Yes, which symbolized gentle persuasion winning out over violent anger.”

“But doesn’t anger work at times?”

“Yes! I use it on myself all of the time when I curse my shortcomings! But on others, seldom, yet it does work sometimes, but you have to consider the nerve cells that you are permanently destroying in the process, and the revenge that it may cause… in fact, you may be killing some of your own nerve cells whenever you summon up anger. There is another peril with anger...”

“Addiction and habit. You do not want to be a continuous source of nerve cell destruction. Return violence is sure to ensue. I would gladly mete it out myself to any such person, and it would be twelve eyes for one!”

“Ah, the satisfaction! Haha… but then you would only get yourself into trouble...”

“I would have to argue my case in court, no doubt… say, you are not wringing your hands… why, you seem absolutely authoritative for some reason...”

“I am thinking about gardening. I am very good at it...”

“Hmmm… so it offers respite from hand-wringing...”

“Yes, I suppose it does… well, thank you for the new and useful perspectives… is that what your philosophy is all about?”

“Yes, perspectives. It is the first step in broader survival… and the deeper and more accurate the perspective is and the more broad that it is, the better. Mine is a work in progress. Feel free to contribute. It is still in its infancy, no doubt...”

"So emotions are tools to effect social outcomes?"

"Yes, and people think that they are something mysterious, or something to be treasured by sensitive poets... they are not. They are simple social tools."

"But they exist on their own without our thinking..."

"Yes, the source may be different, primal rather than deliberative, but the goal is the same – affecting social outcomes. We've just learned to use them consciously, and, sad to say, cluelessly."

"Enter your philosophy?"

"Enter my philosophy and the insights therein."

"Sensitive poets... ha! Are you a sensitive poet?"

"Probably not. I'm probably more like a heavy boot trampling on it."

"Give it a try, then you can post this piece on AllPoetry, as well as on Storywrite!

"Since there would be a poem in it?"

"Yes, that is my reasoning..."

"Sigh... OK. Here goes nothing..."

MY DEEP SENSITIVE EMOTIONS IN A CRUEL, CRUEL WORLD

"Haha... you are going to be spontaneous, aren't you!"

"Yes, and I have a chore that I am sacrificing to thank for it... I have some shelving that I need to put up instead... now here goes... one more lame poem for the universe..."

These nights and expectations drift on moonlit reflections,

they call to me from stalactite caves

of darkened moods and icy fears

in a midsummer's dance of windowed desires...

From deep within, the lightening swarms

(I love you so much it hurts) –

yet your eyes are two ember-orbs of malevolence,

or so my delusions color the world

in unannounced choruses from screaming dervishes

that dance on rebel clouds retching their wine-wings,

spreading their claws to puncture my skull

with ice daggers and sleep-snow,

and with gaping maws that goes 'crunch',

extinguishing my flame on the road to oblivion...

Or so my super-sensitivity would say,

I, the ultra-deep-feeling poet

in touch with the finer nuances of life and existence

in waves of imaginary astral goo that so many cretins believe in...

GAAAAAAH! The fools...

But on a gentler note, there is the struggle of a feather

to overturn the stone, to reduce the battlement

to creamy rubble, fog-bound, itching

in corridors of pulsating magnetic magic

creeping through the iridescent fibers of my over-taxed brain lost in the rustling curtains of woe...

woe is me...

"Hmmm... should I stop there? One person said that I write like she talks – on and on and on and on... "

"No, continue... it hasn't become completely dull yet..."

And yet, she weaves her silken knots

of love like beds of moss beneath the softness of fragrant morning evergreens

in haphazard stands crowded above the meandering murmuring creek banks lined with lovely summer bowers

with the mountain songs ringing betwixt the midnight showers –

and with you beside me, I love them all.

"I think that is a good place to stop. What do you think? After all, half of an artist's job is knowing when to stop... this is especially true for sculptures..."

"You may end there on a love note. Nice effort, by the way. You could have continued until it was epic in scale, couldn't you have..."

"I could have, yes..."

Since the coolness of the cedar gorge beckons, like mayhem shredded into self-pity and spread over the mannequin highways that lead us to more emotive gibberish that speak of gas station cockroach copulations...

"Ech! You are failing as an artist!"

"By not knowing when to stop?"

"Then I shall stop..."

Like a pleasant song of a garden birdy cooing to beads of golden dew as I, a cigarette orchid, smolders in silence, lost in the velvet button of a mansion's Livingston leather chair...

"Stop already!"

"Haha... sorry. Consider this the end."

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Speech is Beautiful

10 Wordless Videos that Teach Problem Solving

Education · Tips

I work in teletherapy, which means that I use a computer to display my materials and activities for my students. I have a couple extremely quiet older elementary students and I decided that video was a way to engage and encourage them to answer questions and retell events. In particular I wanted them to think about solving hypothetical problems. I found 10 WORDLESS videos on YouTube that show interesting problems and make kids think about how to solve a problem — and they have to provide the language!

10 Wordless Videos I Love

• Piper Short Movie — A baby bird finds a way to survive a big wave. 
• Ormie the Pig — A pig attempts to get a jar of cookies off of the top of the fridge. 
• Let Me In! — Simon’s cat wants to come inside and makes some bad decisions!
• Sweet Cocoon — Figuring out how to fit in your cocoon is hard work.
• Rollin Safari  — What would animals be like if they were round? 
• Embarked — Should a tree house follow its friend? (minimal English words at the end)
• TV Dinner — What should you do if your cat won’t leave you alone? (Simon’s cat)
• Playmate — An old robot toy wants to play. Will the boy play with it? 
• Birds on a Wire  — Learn how you should treat others (that are different than you)
• Sticky Tape — What should the cat do when tape is sticking to him? (Simon’s cat)

Since it’s YouTube, so you must preview each video and usually there is an ad in front of it. I would get each video cued up (after the ad) and then share it with students. You will be surprised how much language you will get from your quietest kids as they figure out how to solve the characters’ problems. Enjoy!

If you LOVE wordless videos, check out my other post:

• 10 Absurd Wordless Videos that Teach Describing .
• 10 Wordless Videos for Speech Therapy that Teach Inferencing .

Additionally, I created a line of wordless videos focused on life skills. Check it out here:

• Wordless Life Skills: Recipe Video Series

Can you tell how much I like using video, specifically wordless videos, in my speech therapy sessions? They are a terrific, engaging therapy tool.

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March 30, 2017 at 7:54 am

Dear Sarah I really find this interesting nd liked it lot thnx for u to sharing with us I m also teacher nd from Pakistan

April 5, 2017 at 8:40 am

Thank you for sharing this Sarah! I teach in a dual language program and these videos are exactly what I was looking for.

April 5, 2017 at 10:52 pm

Thank you for letting me know! 🙂

April 5, 2017 at 4:15 pm

Just wanted to point out that the movie “Fat” might not be too appropriate for kids if you pay attention to the details….

Thank you for commenting. The title is off-putting, but when viewed the short, I saw that the animals turn into balloons and float around. If you feel like that is not appropriate for your students, you can omit sharing that with them.

April 7, 2017 at 9:08 pm

I wasn’t meaning the title. I was meaning the part where the cow he was milking floats away and then he ‘milks’ a bull…

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• November 28, 2021

Teaching Problem and Solution with Picture Books

Teaching problem and solution gets a little easier with these picture books. Each book has problem and solution scenarios built into the plot, some more obvious than others. With their rich narratives and engaging illustrations, picture books offer a way to introduce and explore this concept. This blog post delves into the significance of teaching problem and solution through picture books and shares effective strategies.

Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links. If you purchase anything through them, I will get a small referral fee and you will be supporting me and my blog at no extra cost to you, so thank you! You can find more information here .

Why Use Picture Books for Teaching Problem and Solution?

Understanding problem and solution helps your students develop problem-solving and creative thinking skills. Exploring picture books with problem and solution plots helps them see a problem being introduced, how the character(s) try to solve it and how they finally resolve the issue.

In picture books with problem and solution scenarios, your students will see characters who:

• use knowledge to solve problems independently
• predict outcomes
• think things through
• make good decisions
• try new ways to solve problems
• make mistakes and try again
• recognize breakthroughs
• use trial and error to find a solution

Discussion Questions For Teaching Problem and Solution

• Describe the different ways the characters were effective problem-solvers.
• How did [character] solve the problem? What strategies did they use?
• Why do you think [character] was an effective problem solver?
• Why did [character’s] idea work in the end? Did they think about how their decisions would affect the outcome and other characters?
• Did [character] make good decisions? Is there anything they could have done differently?
• Think of possible solutions for [character’s] problem.
• Did [character] work independently to solve the problem or did they work collaboratively? Was this the best strategy?
• Does a thinker have to be brave, a risk-taker….?
• Did their decision making surprise you? Why or why not?
• Was [character] creative in their thinking? Explain your answer.
• How did [character’s] way of thinking impact the outcome of the story?

Picture Books for Teaching Problem and Solution

Ada Twist, Scientist by Andrea Beaty

Ada Twist scientific curiosity propels her to question, hypothesize, experiment, and unravel the world’s mysteries, including one close to home.

Ada Twist, Scientist fuels discussions around curiosity, inquiry, the pursuit of knowledge, and creative thinking and is a great choice for teaching problem and solution.

Ada's Violin: The Story of the Recycled Orchestra of Paraguay by Susan Hood

Ada Río dreams of playing the violin, but her financial circumstances prevent her from pursuing this aspiration. This changes with the arrival of an innovative music teacher who creates instruments from discarded rubbish. 

Paraguay’s inspiring world-renowned Recycled Orchestra highlights the power of music, ingenuity, and the human spirit.

After the Fall by Dan Santat

A fresh retelling of the classic Humpty Dumpty story told from the egg’s perspective. Humpty Dumpty bravely faces his fear of heights, teaching us about courage, overcoming adversity, and the importance of self-esteem.

After the Fall promotes discussions around character traits, perspectives, and a growth mindset. It encourages students to understand and embrace their fears, foster adaptability, and celebrate resilience.

A Bad Case of the Stripes by David Shannon

Camilla Cream loves lima beans but won’t eat them because her friends hate them. A mysterious illness causes her to become what others think she should be. Only when she embraces her true self does she recover.

A Bad Case of the Stripes serves as a reminder that individuality should be celebrated and that personal growth stems from self-acceptance and the courage to resist societal pressures.

Black Dog by Levi Pinfold

Black Dog takes us to a family home where a large black dog grows in size and menace, causing fear among the family members. Yet, the smallest one shows immense courage and open-mindedness to discover the truth about the dog.

Engage your students in discussions about overcoming fears, taking risks, and not letting fear control our perception. Encourage them to conquer their fears and take on challenges bravely.

A Chair For My Mother by Vera B. Williams

A Chair for My Mother illuminates the power of love, family, and community even in the most challenging times. Rosa, her mother, and her grandmother lose their home to a devastating fire.

The book gives us a glimpse into poverty, the importance of saving money, the impact of community kindness and generosity, and the power of perseverance, even in the face of adversity.

Chalk by Bill Thomson

Three friends find a bag of magical chalk at the park on a rainy day – whatever they draw becomes real. A sun clears clouds, butterflies fly, and dinosaurs leap from the 2D realm. When a child’s drawn dinosaur chases them, they must creatively resolve the problem.

Chalk promotes creativity, problem-solving, the power of imagination and consequences, teaching children that every action can have effects they must deal with.

Click, Clack, Moo Cows That Type by Doreen Cronin

When Farmer Brown’s cows stumble upon a typewriter, they start typing letters demanding electric blankets. Things escalate quickly as the cows strike, and Duck is the mediator. But the peace doesn’t last long when the ducks have their own demands!

Click, Clack, Moo story promotes dialogue about fair negotiations’ importance, communication’s power, and the essence of compromise.

Dragons Love Tacos by Adam Rubin

Dragons may love tacos but hate spicy salsa. A boy discovers this peculiarity and hosts a taco party for his dragon friends. The party takes an unexpected turn when the salsa, much to the dragons’ dismay, turns out to be spicy, leading to a chaotic and fiery mess.

Dragons Love Tacos offers opportunities to discuss the concepts of problem-solving, cause and effect, and the importance of careful planning and reading labels!

Enemy Pie by Derek Munson

When Jeremy Ross moves to town, a boy’s life changes for the worse. He is Jeremy’s enemy. Dad advises making an enemy pie, but it will only work if he spends the whole day with his enemy. They end up having so much fun the boy doesn’t need the pie. Use to discuss kindness, conflict resolution, bullying, and problem-solving.

Ernest, the Moose Who Doesn't Fit by Catherine Rayner

Ernest the moose is so LARGE he can’t fit inside the book. Determined, he shimmies, shifts, and shuffles his body but he just won’t fit. With a bit of thought his friend, chipmunk, comes up with a solution. Reinforces themes of determination, problem-solving and creative thinking.

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Fossil by Bill Thomson

This is the second of two picture books with a problem and solution by Bill Thomson. A young boy and his dog stumble upon a fossil which springs to life when touched! The boy excitedly cracks open more rocks, revealing more living fossils. But the excitement quickly turns into terror when he discovers a pterodactyl, which swoops down and flies off with his dog.

Fossil encourages discussions on curiosity, discovery, the unexpected consequences of our actions and problem and solution. 

How the Ladies Stopped the Wind by Bruce McMillan

The wind in Iceland is so strong a group of women decide to fix the problem. They plant trees to limit its effects and overcome problems through problem-solving, cooperation and persistence.

Jabari Jumps by Gaia Cornwall

Jabari resolves to jump off the diving board for the first time. Despite his determination, fear and uncertainty hold him back. But with his father’s gentle encouragement, Jabari finds the courage to make the leap.

Jabari Jumps explores a growth mindset, courage, risk-taking, determination, and overcoming fears. It is also great for your students to make connections to Jabari’s fear of trying something new.

Journey by Aaron Becker

A lonely girl discovers a magic red marker and creates a door that transports her into an enchanting world filled with wondrous landscapes and adventure. She witnesses an evil emperor capture a majestic bird. She outsmarts the emperor’s army to free the bird. 

The girl’s journey inspires courage in facing challenges, persistence in pursuing goals, and thinking outside the box to overcome obstacles.

King Bidgood's in the Bathtub by Audrey Wood

This is the first of two picture books with a problem and solution by Audrey Wood. King Bidgood enjoys having a bath so much he won’t get out. His page calls upon the court for help. Nothing works, so while everyone is despairing of what to do the page plugs the plug! Use to teach sequencing, creative thinking, problem & solution and prediction.

Lilly's Purple Plastic Purse by Kevin Henkes

Lilly adores her school, teacher, and purple plastic purse. Her enthusiasm for her purse leads her on an unexpected journey of self-discovery, teaching her important lessons about self-management, forgiveness, integrity, and self-reflection.

Through Lilly’s experiences, readers learn the value of controlling their impulses and honesty. Lilly’s experiences teach the importance of second chances, making amends, and learning from our actions.

The Little Mouse, The Red Ripe Strawberry, and the Big Hungry Bear by Audrey Wood

This is the second of two picture books with a problem and solution by Audrey Wood. The narrator attempts to convince a little mouse to share a recently picked succulent strawberry. Worried about a big, hungry bear, the mouse employs various strategies, including disguising and locking away the fruit, to keep it safe.

The Little Mouse, The Red Ripe Strawberry, and the Big Hungry Bear promotes discussions on sharing, problem-solving, creative thinking and cause and effect.

The Lumberjack’s Beard by Duncan Beedie

Jim chops down trees in the forest without considering the repercussions. His actions make many animals homeless, so Jim allows them to reside in his huge beard. He replants the trees and waits for them to grow so the animals can return to their natural habitats.

The Lumberjack’s Beard encourages discussions about environmental conservation, cause and effect, and problem-solving and highlights how people can rectify mistakes.

The Marvellous Moon Map by Teresa Heapy

Mouse wants to find the moon with his own moon map. His friend, Bear thinks it would be better to plan and organise the trip. Mouse heads off alone but ends up lost with his map that can’t help him. Luckily, Bear helps him out him and they discover something better than the moon. Reinforces themes of friendship, organisation, creative thinking and problem-solving.

Mufaro's Beautiful Daughters by John Steptoe

Mufaro’s two daughters react differently to the King’s search for a wife – one is aggressive and selfish, the other kind and dignified. The king disguises himself to learn the true nature of both girls and chooses Nyasha, the kind and generous daughter, to be the queen. This African folktale promotes themes of jealousy, vanity and kindness.

Our Little Inventor by Sher Rill Ng

Nell has an ingenious invention to solve the pollution problem in the Big City. She sets off on a journey to the city, far from where she lives. She finds the pollution is much worse than she expected. Nell is dismayed when city leaders mock her. With unexpected help and Nell’s determination, she shows her machine to the city. Promotes girls in STEM, pollution, determination, perseverance, critical thinking and problem-solving.

Outfoxed by Claudia Boldt

Harold, a fox, is challenged by his father to catch a chicken. He decides to follow his heart and helps the chicken escape. Reinforces themes of empathy, independence, problem-solving and creative thinking.

The Paper Bag Princess by Robert Munsch

Princess Elizabeth is a resourceful young girl who must outsmart a dragon to save her prince while dressed in a humble paper bag. The Paper Bag Princess invites discussions about empowerment, courage, independence, and challenging traditional gender roles by illustrating the strength of character over appearance. It emphasises that real heroines can save the day with their wit and courage, regardless of appearance.

Phileas's Fortune: A Story about Self-Expression by Agnes de Lestrade

Large factories churn out beautiful, ugly and funny words. People purchase, then swallow the words to communicate. Not all words are equal and the cost of each word varies. Phileas catches three discarded, random words to express his love for Cybele. Reinforces themes of communication, perseverance, problem-solving, risk-taking and creative thinking.

Rainbow Weaver by Linda Elovitz Marshall

Ixchel, a young Mayan girl, is passionate about continuing her community’s weaving tradition. Unable to use traditional materials, she innovatively uses colourful plastic bags, transforming waste into a woven rainbow fabric.

Rainbow Weaver sparks discussions on sustainability and recycling, empowering indigenous female characters, persistence and creative problem-solving.

Ralf by Jean Jullien

Ralf is always getting under everyones feet no matter what hr does. One night he smells smoke and stretches his body around the house trying to wake the family. After being saved, the family accept Ralf for who he is even if he still gets in the way. Reinforces themes of acceptance, caring, courage and problem & solution.

Star in the Jar by Sam Hay

A little boy finds a star and keeps it in a jar. He makes the decision to help the sad star get home., but wonders how to do this. He makes a star shape in the garden and the stars lift their little friend home.

Stuck by Oliver Jeffers

This is the first of two picture books with a problem and solution by Oliver Jeffers. When Floyd’s kite gets stuck in a tree, he throws his shoes in an attempt to free it. However, when that doesn’t work, Floyd resorts to increasingly outrageous objects (even people!) to dislodge the kite.

Stuck ignites discussions on cause and effect, creative problem-solving strategies, persistence in the face of obstacles, resourcefulness and initiative and adaptability in new situations.

Swimmy by Leo Lionni

After almost being eaten by a big fish, Swimmy works together with a school of fish to frighten off the big tuna. Use to promote problem & solution, cooperation, courage and overcoming fear.

This Moose Belongs to Me by Oliver Jeffers

This is the second of two picture books with a problem and solution by Oliver Jeffers. Wilfred is an organised boy who lives his life by rules. He claims a wandering moose as his new pet and names him Marcel. The moose is not keen on Wilfred’s rules and meets an old lady who claims him as her own. Wilfred recognises Marcel’s independence and learns how to compromise.

Wangari Maathai by Franck Prevot

The late Nobel Laureate Wangari Maathai sparked a revolutionary movement in Africa to challenge deforestation. In a bold move, she championed African women to plant trees, ultimately helping cultivate lush farms and thriving communities. Maathai also provided seedlings to men, school children, and even soldiers, spurring further reforestation efforts and making a lasting impact.

When the Rain Comes by Alma Fullerton

In rural Sri Lanka, Malini helps plant the rice crop for the first time. The ox-cart arrives full of seedlings and the driver asks her to care for the ox. The skies darken and the monsoon rain falls, separating Malini from everyone. Rather than running for safety, she saves all the seeds from ruin. Use to teach responsibility, courage and problem & solution.

What are your favourite picture books for teaching problem and solution in the your classroom?

2 thoughts on “Solve It With Stories: Teaching Problem & Solution with Picture Books”

As far as I might be concerned, the most awesome aspect of kids’ books is the significant statements that epitomize a whole book in a sentence or two. Nobody will at any point settle on the “best” quotes, however here are a portion of my top choices!

An amazing post with great tips as always. Anyone will find your post useful. Keep up the good work.

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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:

Twitter  •  Linkedin  • 

31 Best Wordless Videos to Teach Problem Solving

Wordless videos are a fun and entertaining way to get your students learning and talking. Using wordless videos to teach problem-solving is a great way to keep your students stay engaged all while working on their goals.

Who Could Benefit From Wordless Videos?

Students who struggle to solve social problems can benefit from first practicing problem-solving someone else’s problems in a wordless animation, for example, prior to having to solve the social problems in their own lives. It’s easier to identify problems in someone else’s life than it is in your own life.

Ways in Which to Use Voiceless Videos

• Answering wh-questions: Have your students watch the animated short film and then ask them wh-questions.
• Retell a story/sequencing: After watching the films have your students retell or sequence the short film.
• Solving hypothetical problems: Use the following wordless videos to teach problem-solving. Stop the video throughout and have your students identify the problem and a possible solution to the problem. Then you can move on to practice solving problems in real life .
• Predictions/inferences: Stop the video throughout and have your students make predictions and inferences about what might happen next in the film.

Don’t Forget to Grab your Freebie!

Be sure to grab the freebie that goes along with this bundle of wordless videos. The freebie comes with:

• Problem-solving
• A set of wh-questions
• Story retell with predictions

There are 31 sets of the following worksheets.

Before you begin…

• I have watched all of these short animations to make sure they are appropriate. However, please preview the entire video prior to showing your students as you know best what is appropriate for your level of comfort and for your individual students.
• Almost all of these videos show ads prior to the start of the animation short. I suggest cueing up the video prior to showing the video to your students as some ads may not be appropriate.

31 Wordless Videos to Teach Problem Solving

1. t he small shoemaker: 5:32 minutes.

This short is about Mr. Botte’s shoemaker’s shop, and the passionate and skillful shoemaker’s daily life is about to be disturbed as another shoemaker creates a street vendor stall just in front of Mr. Botte’s store!

2. The Sweet Cocoon: 5:57 minutes

End video by 4:55. Please preview the end of this video prior to showing it to your students. I have decided to end this video by 4:55 minutes to avoid the sad ending for some of my students.

This animation is about two insects that decide to help a struggling caterpillar in her metamorphosis process!

3. The Wishgranter: 4:48 minutes

This short film is about a world where wishes are granted by mythical beings that live under fountains. The wish granter is forced to go above ground in order to grant a wish of love.

4. Dustin: 7:45 minutes

This super cute animation is about a pug learning to have a new roommate of an automatic cleaning robot.

5. Rollin’ Safari: 2:01 minutes

Enjoy this fun short film about what the world would be like if animals were round.

6. Piper: 3:20 minutes

Watch a hungry sandpiper hatchling as she ventures from her nest for the first time to dig for food by the shoreline. However, the only problem is that the food is buried under the sand where scary waves roll up onto the shore.

7. Hola Llamingo: 3:52 minutes

Enjoy this film about the beautiful, fleeting friendship between a boy and his pinata which comes to life.

8. Soar: 6:14 minutes

This short film called Soar is about a young girl who must help a tiny boy pilot fly home before it’s too late.

9. Brush A Fox Tale: 3:37 minutes

A young fox who enjoys painting has a crush on his neighbor. When he tries to hide it his other paintings come to life to try to convince him otherwise.

10. Fishing with Sam: 5:53 minutes

A pesky little penguin keeps stealing all the fish from a bear, a seal, and two other penguins, but they disguise a plan to take care of that pesky little penguin.

11. The Box: 7:01 minutes

This animation is about an old man who finds a mouse in his house. He ends up taming the mouse he first wanted to get rid of.

12. Coin Operated: 5:14 minutes

Watch this short film about the life of a young man that spans over 70 years in the life of one naive explorer.

13. Partly Cloudy: 5:49 minutes

Enjoy this super cute film. Everyone knows that it is a stork that delivers babies, but where do the storks get the babies from? The answer comes from the clouds, where cloud people sculpt babies from clouds and bring them to life.

14. Lifted: 5:03 minutes

A cute animation about a young alien who is in training to capture a human but gets overwhelmed with all the switches.

15. Ormie The Pig: 3:52 minutes

This fun short is about a pig named Ormie. Ormie wants a cookie. But they are out of reach…or are they? See Ormie’s attempts to gain the warm sweet taste that is his obsession.

16. Embarked: 4:24 minutes

Watch this super cute short about a treehouse who follows his family even after the young boy moves away.

17. SpellBound: 3:06 minutes

A young girl who is jealous of her sister must save her after writing negative thoughts that unexpectedly transform into monsters.

18. The Birds: 3:25 minutes

An animated short about a group of small birds that make fun of a larger funny-looking bird, but when they try and get rid of the larger funny-looking bird their plan backfires and the large bird is soon laughing at his bullies.

19. A Fox and A Mouse: 6:23 minutes

Enjoy this sweet animation as a lonely fox hunts a mouse – and their relationship evolves as two owls begin to get in the middle of the fox’s hunt!

20. Pigeon Impossible: 6:15 minutes

A newbie secret agent is faced with a problem seldom covered in basic training: what to do when a pigeon gets trapped inside your multi-million dollar, government-issued nuclear briefcase.

21. The Children’s Tree: 1:58 minutes

This short film is about an imaginative little girl, a good-hearted old tree, and a helpful butterfly.

22. Hey Deer: 6:15 minutes

This fun short film is about an adorable, cocoa-drinking deer who is eager to tidy and shovel show in front of his house every day. However, there is a suspicious earthquake every night which causes the mess day by day. Between two cups of cocoa, the amazing truth reveals itself which changes the deer’s life forever…

23. Catch It: 5:25 minutes

A group of meerkats takes care of their beloved and unique fruit but a twist happens when a vulture comes and disturbs their peace of mind.

24. Mouse for Sale: 4:16 minutes

This short is about a lonely mouse in a pet shop, craving to be bought by someone. But he’s got one big problem: his huge ears. The kids entering the store keep laughing at him. Will Snickers find the buddy he so desires, someone who will take him for who he is?

25. One Man Band: 4:02 minutes

Watch this super cute short about a young peasant girl with one coin left when she encounters two competing street performers who’d prefer the coin find its way into their tip jars. The little girl is caught in the middle as a musical duel ensues between the one-man-bands.

26. Dust Buddies: 4:05 minutes

A story about the friendship between two dust bunnies who live peacefully under a couch. When an evil maid comes to clean the house and sucks Fuzz into her vacuum, Lint must overcome his fears and set out to rescue his friend.

27. The Stubborn Donkey: 4:25 minutes

The short film is all about a stubborn donkey who is difficult to move but a bit of greek music just could do the trick.

28. The Egyptian Pyramids: 3:36 minutes

This cute animation is about an archaeologist who is about to discover the secret of the Egyptian Pyramids.

29. Minuscule: 5:09 minutes

The short film revolves around the day-to-day existence of slugs and how a caterpillar tries to blend into the family.

30. Jinky Jenkins and Lucky Lou: 3:52 minutes

When the misfortunate Jenkins and the Lucky Lou run into each other one morning, they find a thrilling and fulfilling change of pace as they hurtle down the hills of San Francisco in an ice cream cart.

31. Can I Stay: 3:48 minutes

This sweet short animation is about an apprehensive homeless girl who must traverse a dangerous, wintry city in order to escape her adorable pursuers.

Get me my Problem Solving Wordless Videos Freebie!

Problem Solving Restorative Justice Graphic Visual :

Use this Flip Book Graphic Visual to help your students solve their conflicts with others and to make things right.

• 1. Identify the Problem: Fill out the scenario by writing down what happened and drawing what happened.
• 2. Have your Student Identify their Feelings: Draw their emotions and write down their thoughts in the thought bubble.
• 3. Have the other Student Involved Identify their Feelings: Draw the other person’s emotions and write down the other person’s thoughts in the thought bubble.
• 4. Make Things Right: Identify how to make things better.
• 5. My Notes: Fill in any additional information you might find helpful to know or remember.

Get your students talking and problem-solving using these super cute wordless animation videos to teach them problem-solving skills. Also, you can use these short videos to teach story retell, sequencing, answering wh-questions, or inferences/predictions. Are your students ready to start solving real-life problems? Be sure to grab the 71+ problem-solving scenarios freebie to get additional problem-solving practice!

Tuesday 7th of February 2023

I have used this resource numerous times. This is amazing! I appreciate you taking the time to create this and for making it free. My students love them. you visuals and graphics are on point. Will you be making more. I would pay for it as I find it worth it and very useful. Some of the other Wordless Video I have seen that I like include: The Present, Snack Attack, Carrot Crazy, and The Bridge. There are others...Please let us know! Thanks again!

Melissa Berg

Wednesday 8th of February 2023

Hi Judith, Thanks so much for reaching out! I'm happy to know you like this resource. I currently don't have another set in the works, but since it is a fan favorite I can definitely add it to my list of ideas for the future. Thanks for the suggestion and additional videos to look into. All my best, Melissa

Monday 7th of November 2022

This is great for my high-functioning autism students!

The Best Handout for Phonological Processing Disorder Therapy - Speech Therapy Store

Monday 11th of May 2020

[…] 31 BEST WORDLESS VIDEOS TO TEACH PROBLEM SOLVING […]

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108 Free Speech Therapy Wh Questions Printable - Speech Therapy Store

Friday 1st of May 2020

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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. As with any high-order activity, it takes mastery to make it look simple. Executives don’t realize how tricky framing can be until they try it. To compound the challenge, plenty has been written on the importance of framing, but there’s been little concrete guidance on how to do it. Senior executives are especially prone to overestimating the value of experience as a guide to solving novel challenges. They come to our classes thinking they’re skilled problem framers only to realize their deficiencies when presenting to their peers. Their framing efforts go astray in predictable ways.

Framing Fails

When executives get stuck on a complex problem, they’re often urged to “think outside the box” and redefine the assumptions and constraints that hold them back — in short, to change their framing. Although executives are familiar with the concept of framing, in our work with them we’ve observed three recurring errors.

1. Assuming everyone sees the same problem. The biggest pitfall comes when executives take for granted that all stakeholders have the same intuitive understanding of the problem. This is hardly ever the case.

In our opening example, the HR chief reasoned that creating a new social space would make the company a more appealing place to work. But this was only one aspect of the challenge of attracting and retaining talent. He did not propose other alternatives — such as investing more in employee development, improving the company’s HR marketing, or devising better salary and benefits packages — to prompt discussion of which approach would offer the best return on investment.

By default, we frame problems without a great deal of thought, using routines, heuristics, and experience to bypass formal analysis. We instinctively recognize the type of problem before us and reach for familiar solutions. This makes sense for problems that are urgent, recurring, and low risk, where experience is most likely to lead to a good answer. 1 The trouble starts when we try to apply the same approach to problems that are complex, novel, or high risk.

When relying on intuition, cognitive biases (such as overconfidence and confirmation bias) can muddle the decision-making process. The deep smarts that enable people to discern problems and propose instant remedies in their domains of expertise quickly become a liability outside it. 2 The French call this déformation professionnelle — the tendency to see any problem through the distorting lens of one’s professional experience. We overestimate the relevance of our experience and underappreciate what we don’t know. However, complex strategic problems require new perspectives and options, not just what has worked in the past.

Of course, executives cannot afford to turn every decision into a project, so they need to be discerning about the types of decisions that warrant such investment, homing in on those that cannot be easily undone.

2. Targeting the wrong problem. Even when someone makes a conscious effort to articulate the problem and not rely on instinct, they might frame it too narrowly or too broadly.

In class, we show participants a cartoon of a company’s covered parking facility that is so jam-packed with cars that no one can get in or out anymore, and we ask, “What is the company’s problem?”

Many come up with skewed or narrow frames: How do we increase the parking capacity? How do we reduce the demand for parking? How do we incentivize people to not come by car? These are not just definitions of the problem; they are also solutions in disguise: The frame already indicates a preferred set of solutions and closes off alternative ways of addressing the situation.

Others propose frames that are too broad: How do we fix the parking lot problem? (Is it unsafe, too far away, dirty?) How do we get people to work? (This expands into other areas that are irrelevant.) Or even, How do we get all the employees to do their jobs? (This is too generic and opens up tangential issues like motivation and working from home.)

An effective frame captures the essence of the problem. If it’s too narrow, it risks being ineffective by focusing on just one of the drivers, such as demand for parking spaces, and missing important or emerging issues altogether. If it’s too broad, it risks stretching attention and resources across too many concerns, including ones that have little or no relevance.

In the car-park problem, a good formulation could be, How can we decongest our parking lot? or How can we align parking spaces and parking needs? These frames open the opportunity for alternatives that address both supply and demand issues and hybrid solutions that combine elements of both.

3. Pushing a single perspective. Another common trap is unilateral framing. Having defined the challenge alone or with like-minded colleagues, problem solvers are often blindsided by objections from critical stakeholders — especially those whose support they had taken for granted.

A cognitive bias known as the false consensus effect leads us to overestimate the extent to which others will perceive a situation in the same way we do. 3 As a result, we underinvest in engaging others or testing our frames.

This was the situation in our opening example. When the HR chief presented the project to create a new gathering space, he expected to discuss what kind of budget the board would approve and not the underlying rationale for the project, which he assumed was self-evident.

Having defined the challenge alone or with like-minded colleagues, problem solvers are often blindsided by objections from critical stakeholders.

The HR chief explained what the executive team was debating but not why . The board’s unexpected challenge reflected the HR chief’s failure to prepare board members for the initiative or to reflect their concerns in the solution. While the board didn’t have a preexisting view of the recruitment problem, its members believed that the social space only indirectly tackled the issue and that there were more-targeted and potentially lower-cost solutions. Had the board’s perspective been integrated in defining the problem, the executive team could have considered a broader set of solutions that reflected the board’s concerns.

There are other traps in strategic decision-making, such as failure to consider innovative solutions or simply choosing a bad one. Our point is that effective framing is more important and more difficult than it seems. A process is necessary. We propose a two-part solution: Frame and reframe.

Creating an Initial Frame

Research and our experience with executives show that using a basic story framework can help people make sense of complex information. Storytelling is not only useful for persuading others but also valuable for thinking through ambiguous information.

Too often, executives come to us with a bunch of ideas but no clear understanding of the problem they are trying to solve. At the other extreme, they present a bunch of different issues that are somehow related, but without clarity on how they connect with, contradict, or complement each other.

Storytelling is not only useful for persuading others but also valuable for thinking through ambiguous information.

Storytelling makes it possible to structure this complexity by summarizing the problem in the form of a single overarching question — a quest — that will lead to the solution. An effective quest has just three elements:

• A hero — the main protagonist. Depending on the challenge, it could be a single person, a team, an ad hoc project group, a unit, or even the whole organization.
• A treasure — the hero’s aspiration. This captures the one overriding goal, be it transforming the company, expanding into new markets, upgrading a team, or changing careers.
• A dragon — the chief obstacle. This is the complication preventing the hero from getting the treasure. A compelling dragon creates a strong hook and a shared understanding of the challenge to be faced.

Pulled together, these three elements define the quest, which takes the form, How may [the hero] get [the treasure], given [the dragon]? A quest works best with one hero, one treasure, and one dragon — otherwise, it’s more than one story. When someone is dealing with multiple dragons, it’s better to ask whether there is a single challenge or whether it might be more sensible to place the different dragons into separate problem frames. (See “The Do’s and Don’ts of Framing.”)

What’s more, it’s important that all elements are present when defining a problem. In the car-park problem, we did not mention any constraints to the challenge (the dragon) in terms of space, money, time, or conflicting agendas. A more realistic framing of that quest might look like this: How can we as an organization provide adequate parking for our people, given our limited funding?

This story framework helps get to the heart of the challenge. It highlights the critical pain points and lays bare assumptions. Explicitly listing the hero, treasure, and dragon forces consideration of all that is necessary, but only what is necessary. It holds decision makers accountable for the choices and sets up more meaningful conversations with stakeholders.

We’ve applied this approach to hundreds of problems in a wide array of disciplines, including business, architecture, physics, and engineering, and have yet to meet a problem that can’t be summarized in this way. It helps explain in simple terms even the most complex problems, but that simplicity can be deceptive. Getting to such a simple quest will take significant effort, particularly for the most complex problems.

Developing an initial frame is good, but the real value comes from sharing it with other stakeholders early on.

Framing a Better Quest

One trap to avoid when using this method is the temptation to stick with the first quest that comes to mind. Developing a sound quest is an iterative process, and going deeper into understanding a problem requires stress-testing the quest.

The strength of the story template is that it formulates the problem in a concise way that is easily understood by others — decision makers who lack detailed knowledge, colleagues in other departments, outside stakeholders such as partners or suppliers — without overwhelming them with details or context. They can add perspectives and question premises, constraints, and blind spots. Bringing them in at the framing stage gives them a chance to be heard before anyone grows overly attached to a particular set of alternatives or a specific solution. Research also suggests that a diversity of perspectives promotes a more exhaustive exploration of alternative solutions and positively affects the quality of decisions. 4

Reframing can start with considering the initial approach to the problem and asking, “Why would this not be the best quest to undertake?” The answer may be that you’ve identified the wrong hero, treasure, or dragon.

Picking the wrong hero can result in efforts that fail to gain traction. This is a situation we observed at Europe’s largest paper and board maker, Stora Enso. As demand for paper plunged, the executive team wanted to renew the business and diversify into new businesses based on wood-fiber products. But the top executives — middle-aged industry veterans, all male, and all Scandinavian — found it impossible to come up with outside-the-box ideas.

Jouko Karvinen, then CEO, realized that the executive team was the wrong hero. It was ill-equipped to identify or explore emerging business opportunities in adjacent sectors. Members were too invested in the choices and practices of the existing business. They lacked the individual openness and collective diversity needed to rise to the challenge.

The company handed responsibility for the effort to a new, more diverse team that comprised a dozen up-and-coming employees, among them women, non-Scandinavians, and people with experience in other industries. This team was given free rein to challenge the status quo. Karvinen defined their mandate: “I don’t want PowerPoint presentations giving advice about what we could do. I want [you] to come back with ideas that we can implement and requesting to start up a new business.”

In our narrative framework, the second, more diverse team was the hero, transforming the organization into a renewable materials company was the treasure, and the original executive team’s lack of experience and skills in these new areas proved to be the dragon. Once the challenge was viewed in this way, the new team’s recommendations, along with important system and process changes, enabled Stora Enso to transform itself into a leading provider of renewable products in packaging, biomaterials, and wooden construction — as well as a developer of new textile fibers that use tree cellulose, in a joint venture with H&M and Ikea.

Focusing on the wrong treasure can mean that efforts won’t yield the desired results. Consider Switzerland-based Logitech. Piggybacking on the PC revolution, the developer of high-end peripherals — including mice, keyboards, speakers, and webcams — delivered 39 consecutive quarters of double-digit growth.

In 2008, Gerald Quindlen became CEO just as smartphones (and, later, tablets) began to disrupt the desktop market that accounted for 89% of Logitech’s revenues. In his quest narrative, he was the hero who had to overcome the dragon of the dwindling PC market to achieve his treasure — a return to double-digit sales growth. 5 To do that, he bet heavily on an acquisition in videoconferencing and a partnership with Google on its smart TV, but neither of the deals worked out as expected. The company spread itself too thinly and lost its focus on its core capability: innovation.

In the process, Logitech missed obvious trends in peripherals — notably the GoPro camera craze — and lost market share in specialized accessories for gamers. It was also slow to respond to opportunities in the mobile device market. What new products it did release were not cool or exciting. Focusing on sales targets often meant tacking on new features to existing products without considering what the market wanted. Engineers became preoccupied with creating products that hit price points but didn’t satisfy consumer needs or tastes. 6

Quindlen was replaced as CEO in January 2013 by Bracken Darrell, an industry outsider who had a different treasure in mind. “We’re going to become a design company” and put the user at the heart of Logitech’s innovation activities, he told employees.

“We didn’t lose the capability, we lost the expectation,” Darrell told investors. “We stopped expecting to have great products.” 7 After overcoming some initial resistance from engineers who feared that Logitech might become a “fashion” company, the design-led strategy opened the way for a host of innovations in different product categories.

While sales growth has the advantage of being concrete and measurable, it is less effective as a treasure. It has little power as an aspirational goal and does not provide guidance, focus, or inspiration on how to move forward. In contrast, the goal of becoming a design company, with its focus on user needs, provides a much stronger sense of direction.

Since Darrell’s appointment, Logitech has become much more agile, responsive, and innovative. One measure of the change is its annual haul of prestigious design awards: It has won more than 250 since 2015. In the same period, revenues have more than doubled while profits have increased thirteenfold and share prices have increased ninefold.

Reflecting on the tendencies of some CEOs to focus on financial performance, Darrell noted, “If you start in the wrong place, sometimes you get to the wrong place.” 8

Picking the wrong dragon means wasting energy on pointless battles. That’s what happened to Christine Christian, CEO of Dun & Bradstreet’s Australian operation. As the hero, her team spotted an opportunity to provide additional risk-management solutions in response to a forthcoming change in Australian tax regulations, a treasure that was a once-in-a-lifetime, windfall opportunity. The subsidiary was well positioned to capitalize on the opportunity, but doing so required funding to make a sizable investment in a call center.

The dragon, as Christian saw it, was convincing the head of the Asia-Pacific region to allocate funds from his limited budget to an initiative that had no strategic value for the other subsidiaries in the region. When her boss turned down the request, she was so frustrated that she wanted to resign. But her team persuaded her to consider alternative approaches, such as seeking funding from outside the regional group. That proposal was approved, and the team found several partners eager to pursue the opportunity.

Christian and her team had taken too restrictive a view of the obstacle. The need for internal funding was in fact a dragon that could not be surmounted, but securing general funding was one that was more easily overcome. The narrow framing led Christian to ask her boss the wrong question. Addressing the real dragon led to finding an external partner with a shared interest in the Australian market, which proved to be a very lucrative strategic move for the subsidiary.

In each of these cases, questioning the logic and assumptions enabled the protagonists to reframe the challenge, thereby opening a whole realm of new strategic opportunities. The quest format is a key lever for formulating problems that the organization can actually solve.

Why Stories Help

Statistician George Box famously said, “All models are wrong, but some are useful.” The key to developing a useful model is to include all that matters, but only what matters. This is how the story approach helps with problem-solving: by providing a straightforward way to define and clarify the problem to be solved. A concise description of the quest can lead to a clear strategy for moving forward.

The brevity of the quest narrative is part of its strength. Uncluttering exposes the chief pain point, the blind spots and constraints, and assumptions about causality. It makes it easy to share and to challenge the logic.

The simplicity of the template also makes it something that’s easy for business leaders to recall and useful in identifying what’s missing from or confusing in presentations from team members. It makes it easy to decide whether new evidence requires changing leading actors, goals, or obstacles. In short, it helps leaders sift out the background information so that they can focus on the essential components of the problem. Indeed, executives can use the quest narrative to educate teams on how to present problems.

The story ingredients depersonalize criticism when people question assumptions, blind spots, and artificial constraints. Tough questions like “Why you? Why this? Why now? Why haven’t you …? Aren’t you missing …? Who will resist?” are easier to voice and less likely to trigger defensiveness when couched in terms of a hero, treasure, or dragon.

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Finally, stories tap into our playfulness. The language of stories makes exchanges more engaging. It contributes to creating a safe environment. It is liberating, putting team members into a more expansive and upbeat frame of mind when discussing problems. It awakens our creativity. Of course we could slay the dragon, but what else could we do? Circumvent it, neutralize it, or turn it into an ally?

Beyond being an analytical challenge, complex problem-solving is also a people challenge. It requires input, different perspectives, involvement, and buy-in from other stakeholders. Integrating outside views obviously is important when making recommendations for a specific course of action, but it is critical when deciding the appropriate way to frame the problem. When the audience agrees with your framing, it becomes much easier to persuade them of your solutions.

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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Bedtime Stories for Problem-Solving

Bedtime stories are not only a great way to bond with your child before they go to sleep, but they can also help them develop important problem-solving skills. By engaging in stories that involve moral dilemmas and challenging situations, children can learn how to approach problems creatively and confidently. In this article, we'll explore the benefits of bedtime stories for problem-solving and how Oscar Stories can help.

At its core, problem-solving involves identifying the key problems, brainstorming possible solutions, and selecting the most effective approach. While children naturally develop these skills through play, they can also benefit from structured activities like bedtime stories. These stories can help children engage their imagination, develop empathy, and explore different scenarios.

Oscar Stories takes this concept to the next level by providing personalized stories that challenge children to solve problems unique to their storyline. Children can select their own characters, traits, and friends, all while learning important life lessons about honesty, courage, and empathy. Each story is tailored to the child's preferences, ensuring a captivating and immersive experience.

The Oscar Stories app has a wide range of stories that go beyond the traditional fairy tales and fables. These stories cover a variety of topics, from friendship and bravery to overcoming personal obstacles and making tough decisions. By giving children the opportunity to engage with complex issues in a safe and supportive environment, they can develop the skills and confidence they need to tackle challenges on their own.

In addition to providing children with engaging and personalized stories, Oscar Stories is also designed to be easy-to-use for busy parents. With the click of a button, parents can generate a new story every bedtime, keeping their child engaged and excited for each storytime session. By spending quality time with their child and exploring magical worlds together, parents can create cherished memories that last a lifetime.

In conclusion, bedtime stories are a fun and effective way to develop problem-solving skills in children. By exploring complex issues through engaging storylines, children can learn how to approach problems creatively and confidently. With Oscar Stories, parents can take this concept to the next level by providing personalized stories that challenge their child to solve problems unique to their storyline. Download Oscar now and embark on spellbinding bedtime adventures with your child!

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Teacher Created Resources Story Engineering: Problem-Solving Short Stories Using STEM, Grade 1-2

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• Students can create devices and solutions using everyday materials. Each unit focuses on one problem and one challenge, but other problems are presented as options for future challenges.
• The activity pages invite individual and group work room for brainstorming , problem-solving, building, testing, and reflecting.
• Problem-solving short stories using STEM
• The grade level includes 11 units. Each unit contains a teacher overview and lesson plan, one original fiction passage with room in margins for annotations, and STEM activity sheets based on a single STEM problem/challenge.

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Integrate engineering and literacy into your curriculum with this innovative approach to learning. Students will read fictional passages and solve problems using STEM and the engineering design process. Students can create devices and solutions using everyday materials. Each unit focuses on one problem and one challenge, but other problems are presented as options for future challenges. The activity pages invite individual and group work with room for brainstorming, problem-solving, building, testing, and reflecting. The book includes 11 units, which each include a teacher overview and lesson plan, one original fiction passage with room in margins for annotations, and STEM activity sheets based on a single STEM problem/challenge. 112 pages.

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Short Stories for Kids on Sharing and Problem Solving

• posted by admin
• 21 May 2022

Short Story on Importance of Sharing

Once in a big city there lived a toy maker. He had a daughter name Anne. She was six years old. Was a cheerful girl. The toy maker decided to make beautiful toys for her and gift it on her birthday. He wanted to make her birthday a very special one and also wanted to earn name and fame for the kind of toys he made.

He started to work day and night! he designed beautiful and unique toys. The kind of toys he made was found nowhere in that city. He gathered equipment and materials from different countries paying a lot of money to build beautiful toys.

Finally, the toys were ready. On her birthday, he arranged it in a glorious manner and presented it in front of everyone. Everyone started to praise him seeing the designs, model, creativity behind the toy making. He proudly presented the whole lot toys to his daughter. She too was overjoyed. She immediately called all her friends and started to play with toys. Seeing her friends playing, the toy maker felt irked. Later in the night he asked his daughter not to share any of her toys with her friends. He said that he had made those toys only for her to play and enjoy.

A few days passed, he observed that his daughter looked very dull. He was surprised. He thought that he had made the best toys in the world for his daughter so that she could play and enjoy. When he asked his daughter, she said there is no fun in having so many toys without anyone to play with! None of them make her happy. She pleaded him to allow her to share those toys with her friends. Unwillingly he agreed.

To his surprise, he saw a drastic change in his daughter’s behaviour! She was very happy and so were her friends. Every friend of her praised him for the  toys. He realised that it was not the toys which made her happy but playing with others made her happy.

From then on, he never objected his daughter to share her toys.

Parenting Takeaway:

We often think that we are happy because of the things that we have with us. But actually, we can be happy only if we are with the people we like. Sharing our things is sharing and spreading happiness. This is how we can convert money and materials into happiness.  

Short story on changing oneslef before changing others

Once upon a time there was a king. He was very prosperous. He was a  great warrior too. He had a large army of soldiers, elephants and horses.

After returning from a winning war! he fell sick. His leg was also injured. After a lengthy medication, the doctor advised him to go for a walk every so that he  could gain  strength in his legs. As per the advice, the king started to walk every day. But the walking path was not well - maintained. He complained to the welfare minister and asked to make the path smoother. The welfare minister asked the servants to clear the stones and thorns on the walking path. But the king was not satisfied. He again complained that the road was not smooth. He asked the minister to spread flowers throughout the walking path so that it become easy for him to walk. The minister was worried. If they had to cover the path with flowers, then they had to pluck hundreds of flowers from the surrounding areas which would have an impact on the trees and garden.

Hesitatingly the minister politely pleaded to the king that, instead of laying tonnes flowers on the road, if the king could simply change his pair of shoes, it would solve the problem. After taking the advice, the king changed his shoes. It really worked! It solved all the problems too.

Moral of the Story

This is a beautiful short story to illustrate the fact that we must know that we should change ourselves before we start blaming the world around us. It is always a good idea to shif the locus of control from extrenal environment to ones own actions. This is an importnat life lesson for kids

These short stories are meant as conversation starters with kids on various topics. Do take a look at our conversation starter Posters

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Smitha Prasad is a budding writer who writes articles and short stories for kids. She believes that childhood is the right age to inculcate the right values in kids. It helps them to develop into confident adults.  She designs and runs a kid’s magazine called  A LITTLE MORE -An Engaging booklet, through which she tries to reach kids that helps kids stay away from screen, build conversations and build the right mindset in kids 

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