a story about problem solving

Purpose Focus Commitment

To be better than yesterday

Perseverance story: Shake it off – The Donkey in the well story

In life some people when they have to deal with difficult situations freeze because of stress and do nothing, while others shake it off and try their best to deal with the situation. If nothing else The Donkey in the Well story teaches you that even when others give up on you, you should never give up on yourself.

Story about communication: Simple instructions gone wrong

Simple instructions for a simple task but the end result is not what was expected. Who is responsible for the outcome?

Wisdom story: The greatest liar challenge

A shrewd businessman organizes a challenge where you have to tell him two lies, and if you make him say that at least one of them is a lie then you win, but if he ignores them you lose. What would you say?

Problem solving story: Who is obligated to pay the “mountain” tax

In the story, three villages argue about who is obligated to pay the “mountain” tax and why it is so. But no one wondered why and how the mountain moved in the first place.

Story about fear: Mice, and their perfect plan for the cat

As you will see in the story, even though you might come up with the perfect plan with your team, your team even though they have all agreed, can come up with better excuses why they are not the one for the job.

Wisdom story: The case of the stolen smell

The case of the stolen smell is a perfect example of how you should deal with unreasonable people and their unreasonable demands.

Wisdom story: The cake parable

In the cake parable, you will learn what happens when you focus on arguing and being right rather than finding the right solution.

Wisdom story: Something to eat, drink, plant for just one coin

If you had just one coin with which you must buy something to eat, to drink, to plant, and with which to feed a cow, what would you buy?

Story about fear: How can a coward overcome cowardice?

Everyone can overcome cowardice as long as they work at it. This story is a great example of what it takes to do so. Come back and read it if you feel like giving up.

Leadership story: A leader’s reaction in a difficult situation

In the story, you will see why a leader always needs to keep a calm head even when others can’t find a way to solve a difficult situation.

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Great Stories About Finding Solutions

by Dawn J. Mitchell and Katrina Hankins

Whether you are four or forty-four, chances are you will encounter a few problems during this school year. Problems are a part of life and part of preparing our students for the future, which includes providing them with opportunities to consider different ways to solve problems. One of my favorite ways for our students to reflect on the everyday problems of life and possibilities for solving them is through the pages of a book. These five books below will provide you and your students with interesting and endearing characters who not only encounter problems but also work to figure out how to solve them.

At first read, this appears to be a simple but sweet story about friendship between two characters, Stick and Stone. Through the colorful pages we watch how Stick, a tall and skinny tree and Stone, a short, round rock are making it through life on their own. There problem arises in the form of Pinecone, who makes fun of Stone. The characters have to decide what to do and readers enjoy the outcome of Stick’s solution through the pages written in rhyming couplets. We rate this book a “perfect 10” and at the end of this story you will see why.

This story captures the struggle we all experience when we encounter an unexpected problem… the worry and angst, the flight to escape it, and finally the fight to overcome it. We travel alongside this young child as he shares his problem-solving journey. His problem, shown as a violet hued cloud hanging over the boy’s head, only grew into a bigger and bigger the more he tried to avoid it, eventually turning into a raging storm, covering the pages of the story. The boy realizes when he finally confronts his problem that it held a gift for him. “I discovered it had something beautiful inside. My problem held an opportunity!” We felt this book was an opportunity for our students to examine the problems both in and out of the classroom that we tackle each day and to consider the opportunities that await us in our journey to overcome them.

A young girl named Annabelle lives in a world that is lacking color and full of only gray skies and sparse trees. When she spies a box full of colorful yarn and knitting needles, she takes matters into her own hands and knits herself a vibrant sweater. Realizing that there is yarn left, this sweet girl decides to change the lives and the landscape of all that is around her, knitting clothing for everything from classmates to cars without ever running out. Annabelle’s generosity seems as endless as the box of yarn and seems to solve the problem of her colorless world until she encounters a greedy archduke who wants her box of yarn all for himself. You will have to find out for yourself how this “yarn” wraps up.

This story begins with a fragile glass kingdom that prides itself on vanity and values tidiness held together by the hard work of a mud fairy named Bloom, who keeps the castle going but leaves her mark of hard work behind in the mess she makes. Her hard work isn’t valued because only her mess is seen and she disappears into the forest. Years later, the castle is leaking and falling apart and the king and queen begin to search for Bloom to help restore the kingdom. When they can’t find her, they send an “ordinary girl”, Genevieve to locate Bloom and bring her back. When Genevieve comes back she is no longer just an “ordinary girl” and not only is able to solve the problem of the castle’s disrepair, but she is also able to re-write her own definition of her self-worth.

Milk starts off her very first day of school working hard to make new friends. She tries to share her crayons with Carrot, she works to be helpful and get Celery a new raisin, and she asks Cupcake if she can sit beside her. Milk doesn’t realize that her attempts at friendliness are overshadowed by her boasting and her “better than” attitude. Soon she is seen as being “spoiled” by one of her classmates, Waffle and this view becomes shared by her classmates. Milk comes to this self-realization and her problem is solved with an opportunity at humility in the form of Banana’s peel. See for yourself how Border’s lunchbox character’s come to life and work to provide possibilities to the problems of making new friends at school.

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Problem-Solving: The Unsung Hero of Every Story

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

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

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

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

Why Problem-Solving?

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

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

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

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

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

Crow Friend: What did you do?

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

Crow Friend: Did it work?

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

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

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

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

How Tension Draws Us to Problems

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

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

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

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

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

Once we accomplish that, our task only gets harder.

The Protagonist Should Always Be Solving Problems

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your Solution Should Not Only Work but Be Teachable

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Any Unnecessary Step Must Go

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Crow: So I did an unhappy dance…

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

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

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

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

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

But … but … the unhappy dance is so important!

Great advice again!

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

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

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

Become a Better Problem Solver by Telling Better Stories

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

Developing Strategy

Alex Nabaum/theispot.com

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

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

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

Seeking Problem Solvers

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

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

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

About the Authors

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All storytelling is about problem-solving

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

Context, problem, solution

All storytelling is about problem-solving.

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

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

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

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

Problems are inevitable. And problems are solvable. 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sequence is crucial

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

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

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

Business applications

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

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

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

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

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

Happy storytelling.

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

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

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21 Good Picture Books to Teach Problem and Solution

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

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

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

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

PRINTABLE LIST

problem and solution picture books mentor texts

Mentor Text Picture Books to Teach Problem and Solution

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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

Group of children engaging with teaching problem and solution materials on a table in a classroom setting.

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 is a children's book that beautifully illuminates the power of recycling.

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 (How Humpty Dumpty Got Back Up Again) by Dan Santat

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 Teodora del Acoris is a book about recycling.

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.

Number Line

\mathrm{Lauren's\:age\:is\:half\:of\:Joe's\:age.\:Emma\:is\:four\:years\:older\:than\:Joe.\:The\:sum\:of\:Lauren,\:Emma,\:and\:Joe's\:age\:is\:54.\:How\:old\:is\:Joe?}
\mathrm{Kira\:went\:for\:a\:drive\:in\:her\:new\:car.\:She\:drove\:for\:142.5\:miles\:at\:a\:speed\:of\:57\:mph.\:For\:how\:many\:hours\:did\:she\:drive?}
\mathrm{The\:sum\:of\:two\:numbers\:is\:249\:.\:Twice\:the\:larger\:number\:plus\:three\:times\:the\:smaller\:number\:is\:591\:.\:Find\:the\:numbers.}
\mathrm{If\:2\:tacos\:and\:3\:drinks\:cost\:12\:and\:3\:tacos\:and\:2\:drinks\:cost\:13\:how\:much\:does\:a\:taco\:cost?}
\mathrm{You\:deposit\:3000\:in\:an\:account\:earning\:2\%\:interest\:compounded\:monthly.\:How\:much\:will\:you\:have\:in\:the\:account\:in\:15\:years?}
How do you solve word problems?
To solve word problems start by reading the problem carefully and understanding what it's asking. Try underlining or highlighting key information, such as numbers and key words that indicate what operation is needed to perform. Translate the problem into mathematical expressions or equations, and use the information and equations generated to solve for the answer.
How do you identify word problems in math?
Word problems in math can be identified by the use of language that describes a situation or scenario. Word problems often use words and phrases which indicate that performing calculations is needed to find a solution. Additionally, word problems will often include specific information such as numbers, measurements, and units that needed to be used to solve the problem.
Is there a calculator that can solve word problems?
Symbolab is the best calculator for solving a wide range of word problems, including age problems, distance problems, cost problems, investments problems, number problems, and percent problems.
What is an age problem?
An age problem is a type of word problem in math that involves calculating the age of one or more people at a specific point in time. These problems often use phrases such as 'x years ago,' 'in y years,' or 'y years later,' which indicate that the problem is related to time and age.

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Overview of the Problem-Solving Mental Process

Identify the Problem
Define the Problem
Form a Strategy
Organize Information
Allocate Resources
Monitor Progress
Evaluate the Results

Frequently Asked Questions

Problem-solving is a mental process that involves discovering, analyzing, and solving problems. The ultimate goal of problem-solving is to overcome obstacles and find a solution that best resolves the issue.

The best strategy for solving a problem depends largely on the unique situation. In some cases, people are better off learning everything they can about the issue and then using factual knowledge to come up with a solution. In other instances, creativity and insight are the best options.

It is not necessary to follow problem-solving steps sequentially, It is common to skip steps or even go back through steps multiple times until the desired solution is reached.

In order to correctly solve a problem, it is often important to follow a series of steps. Researchers sometimes refer to this as the problem-solving cycle. While this cycle is portrayed sequentially, people rarely follow a rigid series of steps to find a solution.

The following steps include developing strategies and organizing knowledge.

1. Identifying the Problem

While it may seem like an obvious step, identifying the problem is not always as simple as it sounds. In some cases, people might mistakenly identify the wrong source of a problem, which will make attempts to solve it inefficient or even useless.

Some strategies that you might use to figure out the source of a problem include :

Asking questions about the problem
Breaking the problem down into smaller pieces
Looking at the problem from different perspectives
Conducting research to figure out what relationships exist between different variables

2. Defining the Problem

After the problem has been identified, it is important to fully define the problem so that it can be solved. You can define a problem by operationally defining each aspect of the problem and setting goals for what aspects of the problem you will address

At this point, you should focus on figuring out which aspects of the problems are facts and which are opinions. State the problem clearly and identify the scope of the solution.

3. Forming a Strategy

After the problem has been identified, it is time to start brainstorming potential solutions. This step usually involves generating as many ideas as possible without judging their quality. Once several possibilities have been generated, they can be evaluated and narrowed down.

The next step is to develop a strategy to solve the problem. The approach used will vary depending upon the situation and the individual's unique preferences. Common problem-solving strategies include heuristics and algorithms.

Heuristics are mental shortcuts that are often based on solutions that have worked in the past. They can work well if the problem is similar to something you have encountered before and are often the best choice if you need a fast solution.
Algorithms are step-by-step strategies that are guaranteed to produce a correct result. While this approach is great for accuracy, it can also consume time and resources.

Heuristics are often best used when time is of the essence, while algorithms are a better choice when a decision needs to be as accurate as possible.

4. Organizing Information

Before coming up with a solution, you need to first organize the available information. What do you know about the problem? What do you not know? The more information that is available the better prepared you will be to come up with an accurate solution.

When approaching a problem, it is important to make sure that you have all the data you need. Making a decision without adequate information can lead to biased or inaccurate results.

5. Allocating Resources

Of course, we don't always have unlimited money, time, and other resources to solve a problem. Before you begin to solve a problem, you need to determine how high priority it is.

If it is an important problem, it is probably worth allocating more resources to solving it. If, however, it is a fairly unimportant problem, then you do not want to spend too much of your available resources on coming up with a solution.

At this stage, it is important to consider all of the factors that might affect the problem at hand. This includes looking at the available resources, deadlines that need to be met, and any possible risks involved in each solution. After careful evaluation, a decision can be made about which solution to pursue.

6. Monitoring Progress

After selecting a problem-solving strategy, it is time to put the plan into action and see if it works. This step might involve trying out different solutions to see which one is the most effective.

It is also important to monitor the situation after implementing a solution to ensure that the problem has been solved and that no new problems have arisen as a result of the proposed solution.

Effective problem-solvers tend to monitor their progress as they work towards a solution. If they are not making good progress toward reaching their goal, they will reevaluate their approach or look for new strategies .

7. Evaluating the Results

After a solution has been reached, it is important to evaluate the results to determine if it is the best possible solution to the problem. This evaluation might be immediate, such as checking the results of a math problem to ensure the answer is correct, or it can be delayed, such as evaluating the success of a therapy program after several months of treatment.

Once a problem has been solved, it is important to take some time to reflect on the process that was used and evaluate the results. This will help you to improve your problem-solving skills and become more efficient at solving future problems.

A Word From Verywell

It is important to remember that there are many different problem-solving processes with different steps, and this is just one example. Problem-solving in real-world situations requires a great deal of resourcefulness, flexibility, resilience, and continuous interaction with the environment.

Get Advice From The Verywell Mind Podcast

Hosted by therapist Amy Morin, LCSW, this episode of The Verywell Mind Podcast shares how you can stop dwelling in a negative mindset.

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You can become a better problem solving by:

Practicing brainstorming and coming up with multiple potential solutions to problems
Being open-minded and considering all possible options before making a decision
Breaking down problems into smaller, more manageable pieces
Asking for help when needed
Researching different problem-solving techniques and trying out new ones
Learning from mistakes and using them as opportunities to grow

It's important to communicate openly and honestly with your partner about what's going on. Try to see things from their perspective as well as your own. Work together to find a resolution that works for both of you. Be willing to compromise and accept that there may not be a perfect solution.

Take breaks if things are getting too heated, and come back to the problem when you feel calm and collected. Don't try to fix every problem on your own—consider asking a therapist or counselor for help and insight.

If you've tried everything and there doesn't seem to be a way to fix the problem, you may have to learn to accept it. This can be difficult, but try to focus on the positive aspects of your life and remember that every situation is temporary. Don't dwell on what's going wrong—instead, think about what's going right. Find support by talking to friends or family. Seek professional help if you're having trouble coping.

Davidson JE, Sternberg RJ, editors. The Psychology of Problem Solving . Cambridge University Press; 2003. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511615771

Sarathy V. Real world problem-solving . Front Hum Neurosci . 2018;12:261. Published 2018 Jun 26. doi:10.3389/fnhum.2018.00261

By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

ASTORIA FILMWRIGHTS – THE MISSION
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The Coming Age of Story
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The Storywheel
The Golden Paradigm
The Creative Storymaking Process
Six Creative Storymaking Techniques
The Golden Thread: The Subject of Your Story

The Role of the Problem in Great Stories

The Threat and The Essential Elements of Story
The Scourge Being Avoided and the Value Being Pursued
The Threat and the High Concept Great Idea
How To Create a Great Threat
The Real Cause of the Problem in a Great Story
The Character Archetypes and Major Players of a Great Story
The Marvelous and Terrible Elements
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Troublemakers and Troubleshooters: Two Critical Fail-Safe Archetypes

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Chapter 3: Why The Old Great Stories Were Created
Chapter 4: How The Old Great Stories Were Created
Chapter 5: Why The Old Great Story Takes The Form That It Does
Chapter 6: How The Great Story Does Its Work
Chapter 7: How This Natural Storymaking Process Was Cut Off

by James Bonnet

Taken individually all great stories are about problem solving. Taken altogether, as they are on The Storywheel, all great stories are about transformation. What is the link between problem solving and transformation? Great stories show us how to transform the negative energy that created the problem into higher consciousness.

Stealing Fire From the Gods

In the previous story course article, I talked about the Subject of the story – which is what your story is really about, and which, when taken to the quintessential, has a surprising and enormous potential power. In this article, I will talk about the Problem of the story, which is another essential element that has enormous potential power.

In real life, a problem is anything that is contrary to the way you want things to be. In a great story the problem is the central, unifying event that holds the story together. In Harry Potter , Voldemort is trying to take possession of the Wizard World. That is the problem that brings about the change of fortune and that is the problem that has to be resolved. In The Lord of the Rings , an almost identical story, Sauron is trying to take control of Middle-earth. In The Hunger Games, to return to her home and family, a young girl has to be the last one standing in a fight to the death with twenty-three other well-armed young killers. In a Faithful Place, to solve the murder of his fiancé, a Dublin detective has to unravel the mystery of his own dysfunctional family. In Hugo , a once famous pioneer filmmaker has been completely forgotten, and a young boy has to solve that problem in order to recover the family he has lost. In The King’s Speech, a soon-to-be king, with many important speech-making duties, has a serious stuttering problem. In Toy Story 3 , Lotso, a once lovable bear, has become a tyrant terrorizing the toys at a day care center. In The Sixth Sense , the spirits of dead people are haunting a little boy’s mind. In Ordinary People , a young boy is suicidal. In The Silence Of The Lambs , a serial killer is on the loose. In Jaws , a shark is devouring bathers at the height of the tourist season. In Hamlet , Hamlet’s uncle, Claudius, has murdered Hamlet’s father, the king, and taken possession of his kingdom and his queen. In The Lion King, another almost identical story, Simba’s uncle, Scar, murders Simba’s father, the king, and takes possession of his kingdom and his queen. In Groundhog Day, an arrogant boor is reliving the worst day of his life over and over and over again.

Each of these stories and hundreds of other great stories I could name revolve around a problem that has to be resolved. And these are the central events that are holding these stories together and giving them power. And, when these problems are finally solved, it brings the story to a satisfactory conclusion and we know it is over.

The reason great stories are about problems, and what this important pattern is telling us about ourselves, is that life is all about problems. Despite their prevalence, I’m not sure that most people realize how much our lives are dominated and controlled by problems. We are bombarded daily by all sorts of big and little problems. They come at us by phone, via email and the news – everything from finding our lost keys and having nothing to wear to a stolen wallet or a flooded basement. On top of that there are emotional problems, financial problems, health problems – threats to our lives and our well-being, threats to our families, threats to our communities, threats to our country and the world. All of the professions, in fact – doctor, lawyer, accountant, plumber, psychologist, therapist, auto mechanic, teacher, soldier, policeman, fireman, etc. are built around problem solving. They make their living solving problems for other people. Doctors make their living helping people solve medical problems, lawyers make their living helping people solve legal problems, plumbers make their living helping people solve plumbing problems, and so on.

What problems do storymakers solve? Well, great storymakers help people solve the most serious problem of all, the problem of ignorance – ignorance concerning who we really are and who we were really meant to be.

Be that as it may, story has gotten its most significant story structures from the problem solving structures we encounter in real life – from real serial killers, real diseases, real wars and disasters. Everything significant about the problem-solving structures of a great story can be traced back to the structures of problems and problem solving in real life. The only difference is that the problem solving structures in a great story have been artistically treated. The great mission of story is to show us how to analyze, cope with, and solve the problems that stand between us and the values we are pursuing, between us and our dreams, between us and our full potential. And revealing how that problem was created and how it can be resolved is at the very heart of a great story – and at the very heart of who we are and the predicaments we face during our relatively brief visit to this sometimes scary, often delightful, but always incredible planet called Earth.

To find the problem of your story, if you don’t already know what it is, probe the original fascination or the subject, seeking council from the source of your creativity and ultimate creative partner, the creative unconscious self . Anything you need to know about any particular problem is stored somewhere in the DNA, and the creative unconscious self can access that information. You just have to ask your self the right direct questions then play midwife to the new ideas as they come to life in your imagination. In any event, play with a lot of different possibilities until you discover a problem that really intrigues you. Then, if you want to make that problem more fascinating, take it to the quintessential – make your story a definitive revelation of that problem and you will make that story extremely relevant and powerful.

* * * * * * *

In the next story course article I will talk about the Threat , which is the cause of the problem, and another essential element without which there would be no story. The threat is, in fact, the very thing that brings the story into being and creates all of the other essential elements – which makes it something worth knowing about and something worth thinking about.

If you have any questions about any of the ideas in these story course articles, I’d be happy to answer them. Better yet come to my intensive weekend story seminar on October 20-21 and we can talk about them there.

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This Reading Mama

Books with a Clear Problem and Solution

By thisreadingmama 5 Comments

When teaching kids how to comprehend and/or write fiction text, often times it’s good to start with books and stories that have a clear problem and solution text structure .

This means that the story line introduces characters and a problem at the beginning –> the character(s) try to solve the problem in the middle, which rises to a climax –> and at the end, the problem is solved, with the “good” guy winning.

The determining importance post , from our Reading Comprehension Series , has a great visual to SHOW this progression in fiction text. We also have lots of free, graphic organizers for fiction text structure here .

Books that Have a Clear Problem and Solution Text Structure - This Reading Mama

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Books with a Clear Problem and Solution Structure

Today, I’m sharing 16 of our favorite books that feature a clear problem and solution structure to help kids see how fiction texts are often composed. By the way, these texts aren’t just great for comprehension, but can also be used to help kids WRITE their own fiction stories as well, an extra bonus!

Ira Sleeps Over by Bernard Waber is about boy named Ira, who becomes anxious quite about what his friend, Reggie, will think of him if he brings his teddy bear over to spend the night. This is a GREAT book for teaching text-to-self connections as well as the problem and solution text structure.

Dog Breath by Dav Pilkey is a pun-filled book about a family pet, Hally Tosis, who has incredibly bad breath. The Tosis family tries to help Hally get rid of the bad breath to no avail. But dog breath may actually be a good thing, especially when two thieves visit the Tosis family!

Oliver Button is a Sissy by Tomie dePaola is about a little boy named Oliver who is clearly different than all the other boys at school. He’d rather paint, tap dance, and read instead of playing sports like all the other boys, which earns him the name, “Sissy.” But once he shows his dancing skills at the school talent show, he receives a new name – “Star.”

Harry the Dirty Dog by Gene Zion features a cute little family puppy who despises his baths. So much so, that he hides his bath brush and runs away. As he is away, he gets very dirty, from a white dog with black spots to a black dog with white spots. As hunger strikes, he heads home only to find that the family doesn’t recognize him.

The Little Engine by Watty Piper is a classic book that features a clear problem and solution structure as the little engine helps the broken down engine climb over the mountain to deliver toys to all the boys and girls on the other side of the mountain.

Caps for Sale by Esphyr Slobodkina is such a fun and interactive book about a peddler who gets his caps stolen by a bunch of monkeys. He tries, in anger, to get his caps back, only to be mocked by the monkeys. What will he do to get all those caps back? Such a simple solution that kids may be able to predict as they read along.

Any of Kevin Henkes’ books are great for teaching the problem and solution text structure with fiction. One of my daughter’s favorites is Lilly’s Purple Plastic Purse . Lily loves her purple plastic purse so much she brings it to school to share, but Mr. Slinger, her teacher, takes it from her. To get revenge, she draws a mean picture of her teacher only to have him see it. She begins to feel great remorse for her actions and wants to make amends. Will Mrs. Slinger forgive her?

Mo Willems is one of my kids’ favorite authors. Knuffle Bunny was probably the first book they were introduced to by him. Trixie and Daddy take a trip to the laudromat. On the way home, Trixie realizes Knuffle Bunny has been left behind. Follow the journey of Trixie and Daddy as they try to get Knuffle Bunny back. There are more Knuffle Bunny adventures including Knuffle Bunny Too , but I warn you to keep a tissue box handy when you read Knuffle Bunny Free .

Jamaica’s Find by Juanita Havill features a little girl, Jamaica, who finds a stuffed dog and hat at the park. She takes the hat to the lost and found, but decides to keep the stuffed dog for herself. She finds herself wondering if she’s done the right thing by keeping the dog. She finally decides to take it back to the lost and found and finds a friend along the way. This book is a great one to show that characters don’t always face external problems; sometimes characters have internal struggles and problems.

Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig is about a donkey named Sylvester who finds a magic pebble. Just then, a lion comes to attack him and he wishes to be a rock. Sylvester is changed into a rock, but he can no longer hold the magic pebble to wish himself back into his usual form. His family looks high and low for him and is eventually returned to his family. William Steig has such a way with words and his books can fit into multiple comprehension strategies, such as asking questions .

Enemy Pie by Derek Muson is such a fantastic book for many comprehension strategies. It’s been one of my favorites for a long time and I LOVE reading it to kids who have never heard the story. When a bully (Jeremy Ross) moves into the neighborhood, the young boy’s summer is ruined. That is until the young boy’s father says he can help get rid of the bully (enemy) by making him some enemy pie. The boy wonders: What is “enemy pie” and how does it work? Will it get rid of enemies? What does it taste like? Will “enemy pie” solve all his problems?

Camilla worries about what others think of her so much that on the first day of school, she wakes up with a bad case of the stripes…and much more! Her body adds on the ailments of every fear she has until a kind, old lady helps her to learn that it’s okay to just be herself. A Bad Case of the Stripes by David Shannon has an explicit external conflict, but kids have to read “in between the lines” to get the internal problem Camilla faces and eventually conquers.

The Stray Dog by Marc Simont is one of the books we used an example for our determining importance post with fiction . A family goes for a nice picnic away from the city only to meet a cute, stray dog. They leave the park without the dog, but think about him all week. The next weekend, the family returns to the park, hoping that the stray dog will show up again. He does, but now they have another obstacle to overcome. Such a cute book and one that requires kids to pay attention to the story that the pictures also tell.

If I had a dollar for every Elephant & Piggie book we’ve read {and re-read} this school year, I’d be rich! 🙂 All of his books contain a clear problem and solution format, but in such a fun and playful way that kids WANT to read these. While the words are written for the 1st grade level, older kids will enjoy them, too. Waiting is Not Easy! is one of Mo Willems’ newest Elephant & Piggie books and was also featured in our determining importance post with fiction from our Reading Comprehension Series .

Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak is another classic book that features a clear problem and solution structure. Max is banished to his room without supper because of his behavior and falls asleep only to “wake up” in a world of wild things. Max begins to long for home again and wakes up to find that his mother has left his supper in his room to eat. I love how Sendak asks kids to read between the lines a bit to figure out how his supper got there and why. So adorable and such a classic!

More Book Lists You May Enjoy:

50+ Texts for Modeling Comprehension Strategies compiled This Reading Mama

50+ Books for Modeling Comprehension Strategies
Books to Help you Teach Comprehension
Letter of the Week Book Lists & Letter Packs

Books that Have a Clear Problem and Solution Text Structure complied by This Reading Mama

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April 25, 2016 at 6:38 pm

This was helpful. Thanks, I have most of these books.

November 4, 2016 at 11:22 am

Is this list available somewhere in document form?

November 4, 2016 at 11:47 pm

I don’t believe so, but that’s a GREAT idea!

December 7, 2020 at 7:51 pm

Loved the tips and advice in your article. You explained it well and I guess I am going to apply these in my future writing project. You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children. Come and visit my blog on Tips on How to Write a Story That’s Perfect for Children Hope this will help.

Thanks Attilio

January 8, 2021 at 9:19 pm

This is useful information that helps me in my future writing. Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. It is also to train your mind to imagination to think big. Keep it up!

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11 Books That Help Empower Little Kids to Solve Big Problems

by Meghan Fitzgerald

Ada Twist, Scientist by Andrea Beaty, illustrated by David Roberts

Mindset: There are problems to solve all around us.

The only thing better than Beatty’s masterful rhymes are her marvelous characters. In Ada Twist, Scientist , she nails the curiosity and inquiry that drives a true problem seeker and solver. Our kids love this one, and we hope it inspires them to take on the mindset that there are problems to solve all around us. As parents, we love how this book both acknowledges some of the lumpier parts that come along with supporting genuine problem solving in our kids and reminds us that it’s so worth it in the end.

Stuck by Oliver Jeffers,

Mindset: Problem solving can be fun (or at least quite silly).

Although we would never advocate throwing objects into trees, we cannot help but love this book. This whimsical tale shows a young boy, Floyd, as he attempts to solve an all too familiar problem—his kite is stuck in a tree! Floyd’s approach makes kids of all ages smirk and squeal with delight. When we read this, we enjoy acting amazed as the situation grows more and more outrageous. The book gets our kids talking, too. Even our youngest has ideas about why Floyd’s plan is not ideal and can share how she’d go about getting that kite un-stuck.

What Do You Do With a Problem? by Kobi Yamada, illustrated by Mae Besom

Mindset: I have the resources to solve problems.

Even though our goal is for problem solving to be joyful , sometimes real problems are daunting, especially to kids who may not yet realize that they have the capacity to solve them. This beautiful follow up to Yamada and Besom's What Do You Do with an Idea helps kids see a child really wrestle with a problem and gives everyone a way to talk about the opportunity available in every problem, even the ones that seem hard.

Cat and Bunny by Mary Lundquist

Mindset: Sometimes the key to solving a problem is teamwork and inclusion.

When a new friend asks to join Cat and Bunny’s tight-knit two-friend circle, Bunny says yes, but Cat’s not so sure. The changing dynamics of friendship can be tough for kids to navigate, and flexibility solves a lot of tricky issues.

Going Places by Paul A. Reynolds, illustrated by Peter H. Reynolds

Mindset: Every problem has many different solutions.

Talk about thinking outside the box: Some kids love to follow directions. Others prefer to let their imaginations take them from challenge to solution. This book about a go-cart race that takes flight celebrates both sets of strategies.

Papa’s Mechanical Fish by Candace Fleming, illustrated by Boris Kulikov

Mindset: Creative thinking is at the heart of problem solving.

We love that this fanciful story about a dad inspired by his child’s question (“have you ever wondered what it would be like to be a fish?”) to invent the submarine is based on a real-life inventor! This story gets school-aged kids’ imaginations whirring.

The Boy and the Airplane by Mark Pett

Mindset: Problem solving is joyful.

A little boy’s beloved toy airplane gets stuck on a roof. Through the beautiful illustrations in this wordless book, kids can work through the problem with the protagonist, and wonder how they’d go about solving it themselves.

To the Sea by Cale Atkinson

Mindset: I have the capacity to solve any problem.

“I see you” are the magic words that kick off an epic adventure. When Tim meets a big blue whale no one else can see (no one else can see Tim, it seems to him sometimes), he’s tasked with helping his new friend find his way back to the sea. Kids will love discovering Tim’s process as he methodically sketches solutions for this massive problem. The winning strategy is a sweet surprise.

Solutions for Cold Feet (and Other Little Problems) by Carrie Sookocheff

Mindset: There are problems to solve everywhere.

Solutions abound for many of life’s little problems, as illustrated by a little girl and her dog. What if you’re caught in the rain? Faced with a boring day? Eating a fast-melting ice cream cone? Strategies range from clear to creative.

Beautiful Oops! by Barney Saltzberg

Mindset: I have experience that I can use to solve new problems.

Kids’ problem-solving comes with lots and lots of mistakes along the way, which is the most wonderful thing about the process. This interactive book celebrates mistakes as an opportunity for new discoveries. Read it together and then make “Beautiful Oops” a family catch-phrase for turning problems into launching pads for progress.

Journey by Aaron Becker

A girl yearning for adventure in this Caldecott Honor book makes it herself with a swipe of her red crayon. That single tool takes her on a magical trip and it’s what she uses to draw her way out of each dilemma.

Meghan Fitzgerald

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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

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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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Rajesh Setty

Bringing ideas to life. with love, a story on problem solving – contributed by sridhar krishnan.

Sridhar Krishnan shares a wonderful story about problem solving. Enjoy!

So the cunning money-lender suggested that they let providence decide the matter. He told them that he would put a black pebble and a white pebble into An empty money bag. Then the girl would have to pick one pebble from the bag. 1. If she picked the black pebble, she would become his wife and her father’s debt would be forgiven. 2. If she picked the white pebble she need not marry him and her father’s debt would still be forgiven. 3. But if she refused to pick a pebble, her father would be thrown into jail. They were standing on a pebble strewn path in the farmer’s field.

As they talked, the moneylender bent over to pick up two pebbles. As he picked them up, the sharp-eyed damsel/girl noticed that he had picked up two black pebbles and put them into the bag. He then asked the girl to pick a pebble from the bag. Now, imagine that you were standing in the field. What would you have done if you were the girl? If you had to advise her, what would you have told her? Careful analysis would produce three possibilities: 1. The girl should refuse to take a pebble. 2. The girl should show that there were two black pebbles in the bag and expose the money-lender as a cheat. 3. The girl should pick a black pebble and sacrifice herself in order to save her father from his debt and imprisonment. Take a moment to ponder over the story.

The above story is used with the hope that it will make us appreciate the difference between lateral and logical thinking. The girl’s dilemma cannot be solved with traditional logical thinking.

Think of the consequences if she chooses the above logical answers. What would you recommend to the girl do?

Please see the solution after you come up with your own solution

What the girl really did:

The $.02 : Most complex problems may have a simple solution; just change the way you think about them.

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Using Storytelling to Boost Problem Solving Skills

Introduction

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

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

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

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

What is Storytelling?

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

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

The Benefits of Using Storytelling

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

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

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

The Link Between Storytelling and Problem Solving Skills

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to Use Storytelling to Improve Problem Solving Skills

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

Identify the Problem You Need to Solve

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

Create a Story Around the Problem

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

Use the Story to Generate Ideas and Solutions

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

Share the Story with Others

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

Practice Storytelling

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

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

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

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

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

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5 powerful strategies for executive control, revolutionize problem solving strategies, creating anticipation: the secret to creative problem solving, 5 practical tips for successful problem solving, the unexpected twist: how it can solve your toughest problems.

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What Is Creative Problem-Solving & Why Is It Important?

Business team using creative problem-solving

01 Feb 2022

One of the biggest hindrances to innovation is complacency—it can be more comfortable to do what you know than venture into the unknown. Business leaders can overcome this barrier by mobilizing creative team members and providing space to innovate.

There are several tools you can use to encourage creativity in the workplace. Creative problem-solving is one of them, which facilitates the development of innovative solutions to difficult problems.

Here’s an overview of creative problem-solving and why it’s important in business.

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What Is Creative Problem-Solving?

Research is necessary when solving a problem. But there are situations where a problem’s specific cause is difficult to pinpoint. This can occur when there’s not enough time to narrow down the problem’s source or there are differing opinions about its root cause.

In such cases, you can use creative problem-solving , which allows you to explore potential solutions regardless of whether a problem has been defined.

Creative problem-solving is less structured than other innovation processes and encourages exploring open-ended solutions. It also focuses on developing new perspectives and fostering creativity in the workplace . Its benefits include:

Finding creative solutions to complex problems : User research can insufficiently illustrate a situation’s complexity. While other innovation processes rely on this information, creative problem-solving can yield solutions without it.
Adapting to change : Business is constantly changing, and business leaders need to adapt. Creative problem-solving helps overcome unforeseen challenges and find solutions to unconventional problems.
Fueling innovation and growth : In addition to solutions, creative problem-solving can spark innovative ideas that drive company growth. These ideas can lead to new product lines, services, or a modified operations structure that improves efficiency.

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Creative problem-solving is traditionally based on the following key principles :

1. Balance Divergent and Convergent Thinking

Creative problem-solving uses two primary tools to find solutions: divergence and convergence. Divergence generates ideas in response to a problem, while convergence narrows them down to a shortlist. It balances these two practices and turns ideas into concrete solutions.

2. Reframe Problems as Questions

By framing problems as questions, you shift from focusing on obstacles to solutions. This provides the freedom to brainstorm potential ideas.

3. Defer Judgment of Ideas

When brainstorming, it can be natural to reject or accept ideas right away. Yet, immediate judgments interfere with the idea generation process. Even ideas that seem implausible can turn into outstanding innovations upon further exploration and development.

4. Focus on "Yes, And" Instead of "No, But"

Using negative words like "no" discourages creative thinking. Instead, use positive language to build and maintain an environment that fosters the development of creative and innovative ideas.

Creative Problem-Solving and Design Thinking

Whereas creative problem-solving facilitates developing innovative ideas through a less structured workflow, design thinking takes a far more organized approach.

Design thinking is a human-centered, solutions-based process that fosters the ideation and development of solutions. In the online course Design Thinking and Innovation , Harvard Business School Dean Srikant Datar leverages a four-phase framework to explain design thinking.

The four stages are:

The four stages of design thinking: clarify, ideate, develop, and implement

Clarify: The clarification stage allows you to empathize with the user and identify problems. Observations and insights are informed by thorough research. Findings are then reframed as problem statements or questions.
Ideate: Ideation is the process of coming up with innovative ideas. The divergence of ideas involved with creative problem-solving is a major focus.
Develop: In the development stage, ideas evolve into experiments and tests. Ideas converge and are explored through prototyping and open critique.
Implement: Implementation involves continuing to test and experiment to refine the solution and encourage its adoption.

Creative problem-solving primarily operates in the ideate phase of design thinking but can be applied to others. This is because design thinking is an iterative process that moves between the stages as ideas are generated and pursued. This is normal and encouraged, as innovation requires exploring multiple ideas.

Creative Problem-Solving Tools

While there are many useful tools in the creative problem-solving process, here are three you should know:

Creating a Problem Story

One way to innovate is by creating a story about a problem to understand how it affects users and what solutions best fit their needs. Here are the steps you need to take to use this tool properly.

1. Identify a UDP

Create a problem story to identify the undesired phenomena (UDP). For example, consider a company that produces printers that overheat. In this case, the UDP is "our printers overheat."

2. Move Forward in Time

To move forward in time, ask: “Why is this a problem?” For example, minor damage could be one result of the machines overheating. In more extreme cases, printers may catch fire. Don't be afraid to create multiple problem stories if you think of more than one UDP.

3. Move Backward in Time

To move backward in time, ask: “What caused this UDP?” If you can't identify the root problem, think about what typically causes the UDP to occur. For the overheating printers, overuse could be a cause.

Following the three-step framework above helps illustrate a clear problem story:

The printer is overused.
The printer overheats.
The printer breaks down.

You can extend the problem story in either direction if you think of additional cause-and-effect relationships.

4. Break the Chains

By this point, you’ll have multiple UDP storylines. Take two that are similar and focus on breaking the chains connecting them. This can be accomplished through inversion or neutralization.

Inversion: Inversion changes the relationship between two UDPs so the cause is the same but the effect is the opposite. For example, if the UDP is "the more X happens, the more likely Y is to happen," inversion changes the equation to "the more X happens, the less likely Y is to happen." Using the printer example, inversion would consider: "What if the more a printer is used, the less likely it’s going to overheat?" Innovation requires an open mind. Just because a solution initially seems unlikely doesn't mean it can't be pursued further or spark additional ideas.
Neutralization: Neutralization completely eliminates the cause-and-effect relationship between X and Y. This changes the above equation to "the more or less X happens has no effect on Y." In the case of the printers, neutralization would rephrase the relationship to "the more or less a printer is used has no effect on whether it overheats."

Even if creating a problem story doesn't provide a solution, it can offer useful context to users’ problems and additional ideas to be explored. Given that divergence is one of the fundamental practices of creative problem-solving, it’s a good idea to incorporate it into each tool you use.

Brainstorming

Brainstorming is a tool that can be highly effective when guided by the iterative qualities of the design thinking process. It involves openly discussing and debating ideas and topics in a group setting. This facilitates idea generation and exploration as different team members consider the same concept from multiple perspectives.

Hosting brainstorming sessions can result in problems, such as groupthink or social loafing. To combat this, leverage a three-step brainstorming method involving divergence and convergence :

Have each group member come up with as many ideas as possible and write them down to ensure the brainstorming session is productive.
Continue the divergence of ideas by collectively sharing and exploring each idea as a group. The goal is to create a setting where new ideas are inspired by open discussion.
Begin the convergence of ideas by narrowing them down to a few explorable options. There’s no "right number of ideas." Don't be afraid to consider exploring all of them, as long as you have the resources to do so.

Alternate Worlds

The alternate worlds tool is an empathetic approach to creative problem-solving. It encourages you to consider how someone in another world would approach your situation.

For example, if you’re concerned that the printers you produce overheat and catch fire, consider how a different industry would approach the problem. How would an automotive expert solve it? How would a firefighter?

Be creative as you consider and research alternate worlds. The purpose is not to nail down a solution right away but to continue the ideation process through diverging and exploring ideas.

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Continue Developing Your Skills

Whether you’re an entrepreneur, marketer, or business leader, learning the ropes of design thinking can be an effective way to build your skills and foster creativity and innovation in any setting.

If you're ready to develop your design thinking and creative problem-solving skills, explore Design Thinking and Innovation , one of our online entrepreneurship and innovation courses. If you aren't sure which course is the right fit, download our free course flowchart to determine which best aligns with your goals.

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What's the Problem?: A Story Teaching Problem Solving (Executive Function)

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What's the Problem?: A Story Teaching Problem Solving (Executive Function) Paperback – Picture Book, March 18, 2019

Reading age 4 - 8 years
Book 6 of 10 Executive FUNction
Print length 32 pages
Language English
Grade level 1 - 2
Dimensions 8.8 x 0.1 x 8.8 inches
Publisher Boys Town Press
Publication date March 18, 2019
ISBN-10 1944882383
ISBN-13 978-1944882389
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Publisher ‏ : ‎ Boys Town Press; Illustrated edition (March 18, 2019)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 32 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1944882383
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1944882389
Reading age ‏ : ‎ 4 - 8 years
Grade level ‏ : ‎ 1 - 2
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 3.95 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 8.8 x 0.1 x 8.8 inches
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Bryan smith.

Hello. My name is Bryan Smith. I was born and raised in Texas. I have been in elementary education for the past 22 years. The last 17 years have been spent as an elementary school counselor. During this time, I have seen many behaviors from children I wanted to see changed. Examples include changing yourself to fit in, children controlling their impulses, and bad sportsmanship. I decided to write books address these issues in a humorous way. I am so grateful to get to work with children every day. I have been married for 20 years and have two wonderful boys. I spend much of my time coaching their sports! I hope you enjoy my books and thank you for your support.

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Why Word Problems Are Such a Struggle for Students—And What Teachers Can Do

Give Cindy Cliche a math word problem, and she can tell you exactly where most students are going to trip up.

Cliche, the district math coordinator in the Murfreesboro City school district in Tennessee, has spent decades teaching elementary schoolers how to tackle their first word problems and now coaches teachers in how to do the same. Kids’ struggles, for the most part, haven’t changed, she said.

Take this problem, which students might work on in 1st grade: There are some bunnies on the grass. Three bunnies hop over, and then there are five total. How many bunnies were there to begin with?

The problem is asking about a change: What’s the starting, unknown quantity of bunnies, if adding 3 to that quantity equals 5? In other words, x + 3 = 5 . But most 1st graders don’t make that connection right away, Cliche said. Instead, they see the numbers 3 and 5, and they add them.

“Nine times out of 10 they’re going to say, ‘eight,’” Cliche said. “They’re number pluckers. They take this number and this number and they add them together or they take them apart.”

This is one of the biggest challenges in word problem-solving, educators and researchers agree—getting students to understand that the written story on the page represents a math story, and that the math story can be translated into an equation.

Making this connection is a key part of early mathematical sense-making. It helps students begin to understand that math isn’t just about numbers on a page, but a way of representing relationships in the world. And it’s one of the ways that kids learn to unite conceptual understanding of problems with the procedures they will need to solve them.

“When students struggle [with word problems], it tends to be everything else they have to do to get to the calculation,” said Brian Bushart, a 4th grade teacher in the West Irondequoit schools in Rochester, N.Y.

There are evidence-backed strategies that teachers can use to help students make these connections, researchers say.

These approaches teach students how to understand “math language,” how to devise a plan of attack for a problem, and how to recognize different problem types. And though they provide students tools and explicit strategies, these techniques are designed to support kids’ sense-making, not circumvent it, said Lynn Fuchs, a research professor in the department of special education at Vanderbilt University.

The goal, she said, is “understanding the full narrative of what’s being presented.”

How word problems are used in early grades

Story problems serve a few different purposes in early grades, said Nicole McNeil, a professor of psychology at the University of Notre Dame who studies students’ cognitive development in math.

They can help connect children’s preexisting knowledge to the math they’re learning in class—"activating that knowledge kids have in their everyday life, and then showing, how do mathematicians represent that?” McNeil said.

Cliche likes to use word problems in this way to introduce the concept of dividing by fractions.

“We’ll tell the kids, ‘I have three sandwiches here and I need to divide them in half so that everyone will get a piece,’” she said. “‘How many people can I feed?’”

After students solve the problem, Cliche introduces the operation that students could use to divide by fractions—marrying this conceptual understanding with the procedure that students would use going forward.

But word problems can also be used in the opposite direction, to see if students can apply their understanding of equations they’ve learned to real-world situations, McNeil said.

And there’s another, practical reason that teachers practice word problems: They’re ubiquitous in curriculum and they’re frequently tested.

There are lots of different kinds of problems that kids could work on in math classes, said Tamisha Thompson, a STEAM (for science, technology, engineering, the arts, and math) instructional coach in the Millbury public schools in Massachusetts, and a doctoral student in learning sciences at Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

Many story problems have one right answer, but there are also problems that could have multiple answers—or ones that aren’t solvable. Spending more time with a broader diversity of problems could encourage more creative mathematical thinking, Thompson said. “But we’re really driven by standardized tests,” she said. “And standardized tests typically have one right answer.”

In general, between 30 percent and 50 percent of standardized-test items in math feature these kinds of story problems, said Sarah Powell, an associate professor in the department of special education at the University of Texas at Austin.

“Until things change, and until we write better and different tests, if you want students to show their math knowledge, they have to show that through word problem-solving,” Powell said.

Why students struggle with word problems

Sometimes, students struggle with word problems because they don’t know where to start.

Just reading the problem can be the first hurdle. If early-elementary schoolers don’t have the reading skills to decode the words, or if they don’t know some of the vocabulary, they’ll struggle, said McNeil.

That can result in students scoring low on these portions of standardized tests, even if they understand the underlying math concepts—something McNeil considers to be a design flaw. “You’re trying to assess math, not reading twice,” she said.

Then, there’s math-specific vocabulary. What do words like “fewer than,” or “the rest,” mean in math language, and how do they prompt different actions depending on their placement in a problem?

Even if students can read the problem, they may struggle to figure out what it’s asking them to do, said Powell. They need to identify relevant information and ignore irrelevant information—including data that may be presented in charts or graphs. Then, they have to choose an operation to use to solve the problem.

Only once students have gone through all these steps do they actually perform a calculation.

Teaching kids how to work through all these setup steps takes time. But it’s time that a lot of schools don’t take, said Cliche, who has also worked previously as a state math trainer for Tennessee. Word problems aren’t often the focus of instruction—rather, they’re seen as a final exercise in transfer after a lot of practice with algorithms, she said.

A second problem: Many schools teach shortcut strategies for deciphering word problems that aren’t effective, Powell said.

Word problem “key words” charts abound on lesson-sharing sites like Teachers Pay Teachers . These graphic organizers are designed to remind students which math words signal different operations. When you see the word “more,” for example, that means add the numbers in the problem.

Talking with students about the meaning of math vocabulary is useful, said Powell. But using specific words as cues to add or subtract is a flawed strategy, Powell said, because “there is no single word that means an operation.” The word “more” might mean that the numbers need to be added together—or it might mean something else in context. Some problems have no key words at all.

In a 2022 paper , Powell and her colleagues analyzed more than 200 word problems from Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) and Smarter Balanced math tests in elementary and middle school grades. Those tests are given by states for federal accountability purposes.

They found that using the key words strategy would lead students to choose the right operation to solve the problem less than half the time for single-step problems and less than 10 percent of the time for multistep problems.

Evidence-based strategies for helping struggling students

So if key words aren’t an effective strategy to support students who struggle, what is?

One evidence-based approach is called schema-based instruction . This approach categorizes problems into different types, depending on the math event portrayed, said Fuchs, who has studied schema-based instruction for more than two decades.

But unlike key words, schemas don’t tell students what operations to use. Instead, they help students form a mental model of a math event. They still need to read the problem, understand how that story maps onto their mental model, and figure out what information is missing, Fuchs said.

One type of schema, for example, is a “total” or “combine” problem, in which two quantities together make a total: “Jose has five apples. Carlos has two apples. How many apples do they have together?” In this case, students would need to add to get the answer.

But this is also a total problem: “Together, Jose and Carlos have seven apples. If Jose has five apples, how many apples does Carlos have?”

Here, adding the two numbers in the problem would bring students to the wrong answer. They need to understand that seven is the total, five is one part of the total, and there is another, unknown part—and then solve from there.

To introduce schemas, Vanderbilt’s Fuchs said, “we start with a child and the teacher representing the mathematical event in a concrete way.”

Take a “difference” problem, which compares a larger quantity and a smaller quantity for a difference. To demonstrate this, an early-elementary teacher might show the difference in height between two students or the difference in length of two posters in the room.

Eventually, the teacher would introduce other ways of representing this “difference” event, like drawing one smaller and one larger rectangle on a piece of paper. Then, Fuchs said, the teacher would explain the “difference” event with a number sentence—the formula for calculating difference—to connect the conceptual understanding with the procedure. Students would then learn a solution strategy for the schema.

Children can then use their understanding of these different problem types to solve new problems, Fuchs said.

There are other strategies for word-problem-solving, too.

Attack strategies . Several studies have found that giving students a consistent set of steps they can use to approach every problem has positive effects. These attack strategies are different from schemas because they can be used with any problem type, offering more general guidance like reminders to read the problem and pull out relevant information.
Embedded vocabulary. A 2021 study from Fuchs and her colleagues found that math-specific vocabulary instruction helped students get better at word problem-solving. These vocabulary lessons were embedded into schema instruction, and they focused on words that had a specific meaning in a math context—teaching kids the difference between “more than” and “then there were more,” for example.
‘Numberless’ problems . Some educators have also developed their own strategies. One of these is what’s called “numberless” word problems. A numberless problem has the same structure as a regular story problem but with the quantities strategically removed. An initial statement might say, for example, “Kevin found some bird feathers in the park. On his way home, he lost some of the feathers.”

With numberless problems, instead of jumping to the calculation, “the conversation is the goal,” said Bushart, the 4th grade teacher from New York, who has created a website bank of numberless problems that teachers can use .

The teacher talks with students about the change the story shows and what numbers might be reasonable—and not reasonable. The process is a form of scaffolding, Bushart said: a way to get students thinking conceptually about problems from the start.

Balancing structure and challenge

These approaches all rely on explicit teaching to give students tools that can help them succeed with problems they’re likely to see often in class or on tests.

But many math educators also use word problems that move beyond these common structures, in an attempt to engage students in creative problem-solving. Figuring out how much structure to provide—and how much challenge—can be a delicate balance.

These kinds of problems often require that students integrate real-life knowledge, and challenge them to “think beyond straightforward applications of mathematical situations,” said McNeil of Notre Dame.

There may be an extra number in the problem that kids don’t have to use. Or the problem might pose a question that would lead students to a nonsensical answer if they just used their procedural knowledge. For example: 65 students are going on a field trip. If each bus can hold 10 students, how many buses are needed?

Students might do the calculation and answer this question with 6.5, but that number doesn’t make sense, said McNeil—you can’t have half a bus.

In a 2021 study , McNeil and her colleague Patrick Kirkland rewrote some of these challenging questions in a way that encouraged students to think more deeply about the problems. They found that middle school students who worked on these experimental problems were more likely than their peers to engage in deep mathematical thinking. But, they were also less likely to get the problems correct than their peers who did standard word problems.

Other research, with young children, has found that teaching students how to transfer their knowledge can help them work through novel problems.

When students are given only problems that are all structured the same way, even minor changes to that format can prevent them from recognizing problem schemas, said Fuchs.

“What we found in our line of work is that if you change the way the word problem reads, in only very minor ways, they no longer recognize that, this is a ‘change’ problem, or a ‘difference’ problem,” she said, referencing different problem schemas.

In the early 2000s, she and her colleagues tested interventions to help students transfer their knowledge to more complex, at times open-ended problems. They found that when children were taught about the notion of transfer, shown examples of different forms of the same problem type, and encouraged to find examples in their own lives, they performed better on novel, multistep problems than their peers who had only received schema instruction.

The results are an example of how explicit instruction can lay the groundwork for students to be successful with more open-ended problem-solving, Fuchs said.

Exactly how to sequence this learning—when to lean into structure and when to release students into challenge—is an open question, McNeil said.

“We need more researchers focused on what are the best structures? What order should things go in? What is the appropriate scope and sequence for word problems?” she said. “We don’t have that information yet.”

A version of this article appeared in the May 10, 2023 edition of Education Week as Why Word Problems Are Such a Struggle for Students—And What Teachers Can Do

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Story Problems

Once you know your basic operations ( addition , subtraction , multiplication , division ), you will encounter story problems, also known as word problems, which require you to read a problem and decide which operation to perform in order to get the answer. There are key words here that often indicate which operation you will use. We will give you a list of them, but remember that for many problems, there may not be a key word, and you’ll have to use your best judgment in order to figure out what to do!

Here are the key words:

For addition:

In addition to, sum, total, more than, altogether, in all, combined, extra, raise, plus, both, additional

For subtraction:

How many more, difference, how many less, fewer, left (sometimes, left over), change, lost, decreased (by), less, remain, take away

For multiplication:

How many times, times, multiplied by, of, every, product, by, twice as much, three times as much (and so on), rate, at this rate, doubled, tripled (and so on), in all

For division:

How much/many will each receive?, divided among, split up between, per, ratio, percent, each, divide (or split) evenly, cut, average, share, quotient, equally (split, divided, etc)

For telling that something equals another amount:

is/are, yields

In order to solve a story (word) problem successfully:

Read the entire problem thoroughly
Make a list of the numerical (number) information you’ll need. If the numbers have units attached (for example, 12 inches), make sure you attach units in your list so you don’t get confused.
Write out the number equation you’ll need to solve.
Complete the solving process carefully.
When you get your answer, reread the problem and ask yourself, “Does this answer make sense?”
Remember to label your answer with the correct units, if needed.

Example Story Problems

In this section, we’ll give you several examples of story (word) problems, starting with simple problems and working up towards more complex problems.

Nick had 8 toy trucks in his toy box. His friend Nathan brought over 3 more toy trucks. How many toy trucks did the boys have altogether?

What is the key word in this problem?

If you look back at the list of key words at the top of the page, you’ll find that altogether listed as a key word.

Altogether is our key word. Now, what operation will we have to perform to get the answer to this problem?

We know we’ll have to do addition, because altogether is a key word that means adding.

Now, what will our problem look like?

We know we’ll be adding together 8 + 3, because those were the two numbers mentioned in the problem.

What is 8 + 3?

Therefore, our answer is 11 toy trucks altogether.

Now, let’s try another one.

John had 15 books on his bookshelf. John’s dog, Buster, came in and slobbered all over four of them. How many books did John have left that were not slobbered on?

If you look back at the list of key words at the top of the page, you’ll find that left is listed as a key word.

Left is our key word. Now, what operation will we have to perform to get the answer to this problem?

We know we’ll have to do subtraction, because left is a key word that means subtract.

This problem is a subtraction problem. Now, let’s get it set up. How will this problem look?

We know we’ll be subtracting 15 – 4, because those were the two numbers mentioned in the problem.

Now, perform the subtraction. What is 15 – 4?

Our final answer is 11 books.

Now, let’s try a couple harder problems.

Dan is getting ready to go to a concert. He wants to figure out how many people will be there. He knows that there are 250 rows of seats, and each row has 40 seats in it. How many seats are there in the concert hall in all?

If you look back at the list of key words at the top of the page, you’ll find that in all is listed as a key word.

In all is our key word. Now, what operation will we have to perform to get the answer to this problem?

We choose multiplication because we see the keyword in all, but also because it makes sense. Essentially this may be seen as an addition problem, which is why the keyword is also in the addition section, but since the adding of the rows would all be the same, we can multiply to make the process faster.

This problem is a multiplication problem. Now, let’s get it set up. How will this problem look?

We would use 250 x 40 because we decided that this is a multiplication problem. Since we want to figure out a total number of seats in the hall, we’re going to multiply the two given numbers together, as if we were calculating area.

Now, perform the multiplication. What is 250 x 40?

Our final answer is that there are 10,000 seats at the concert Dan is attending.

Let’s look at one more example. Three friends go out to dinner. Near the end, they get the bill and they owe the restaurant $27.89. They want to split the bill evenly between the three of them. How much will each person pay?

If you look back at the list of key words at the top of the page, you’ll find that split evenly is listed as a key word.

Evenly is our key word. Now, what operation will we have to perform to get the answer to this problem?

We choose division because we see the keywords “split” and “evenly.” Also, division makes sense because they want to divide the bill between three people. Because they’re splitting it up, we would choose division.

This problem is a division problem. Now, let’s get it set up. What would our equation be?

We choose $27.89 / 3 because we know we have to split up the amount of money, $27.89, between the three friends, so we know we have to divide by three.

Now, perform the division. What is $27.89 / 3? (Round to the nearest cent)

When we divide, we get an answer of 9.2966666, with a repeating 6 at the end. We want to round it to the nearest cent, which is the hundredths place after the decimal. We see that that number is already a 9, and a 6 after it means round up. However, we can’t make one place value a ten, so we increase the tenths digit by one, turning the 2 into a 3. If this doesn’t make sense, please read rounding numbers . Thus, your final answer is $9.30 after rounding.

Now, let’s go through some harder story (word) problems. All of the story problems we’ve done have had only one step, and we’ve been able to easily decide if they are addition, subtraction, multiplication, or division. However, some story problems have more than one step, involving more than one key word and/or operation. We’ll show you a few of these now.

Carly is making a dress. She needs 1 yard of yellow fabric, 1.5 yards of purple fabric, and .5 yards of green fabric. Yellow fabric costs $5.95 per yard, purple fabric costs $3.95 per yard, and green fabric is on sale for $7.00 per yard. How much will she spend in all if she buys just enough fabric to make her dress? (Ignore tax in your calculations). Click Next Step for the first part of the solution.

First, we have to figure out how much Carly is spending on each amount of fabric; then, we can use the key word “in all” which tells us that we need to add the amounts together for a final total. In order to figure out how much each piece of fabric costs, we need to multiply the price by the amount she needs to get a total.

First, let’s calculate the yellow fabric cost. She needs one yard, and it costs $5.95 per yard, so she’ll be spending $5.95.

Now, let’s calculate the purple fabric cost. She needs 1.5 yards, and it costs $3.95 per yard; therefore we have to multiply 1.5 times $3.95, which comes out to be $5.93 (we round to the nearest cent).

Finally, let’s calculate the green fabric cost. The green fabric is on sale for $7.00 per yard, and she needs .5 yards of it, so we multiply $7.00 times .5 and get $3.50.

Now, we have three money amounts (one for each color fabric) that we can now add together to get a total amount that Carly will spend. We know that we have to add these amounts together, like this:

$5.95 + $5.93 + $3.50 = $15.38

Thus, our final answer is that Carly will spend $15.38 on fabric for her dress.

Now, we’ll give you one to practice on. John is planning to carpet three rooms in his house. One room is 15 by 12 feet, one room is 17 by 14 feet, and the last room is 10 by 12 feet. John has 130 square feet of carpeting already. How much more carpeting does he need in order to carpet all three rooms?

First, you have to figure out how many square feet he has to carpet overall. That means we need to figure out the area of each room, and add those together. We multiply the dimensions together as follows: 15 x 12 = 180 ft 2 17 x 14 = 238 ft 2 10 x 12 = 120 ft 2

Now, we have the area of each floor he has to carpet, so we can add these all together to find out the total amount of carpeting he needs.

180 + 238 + 120 = 538 ft 2 . This is the total amount John will need. However, the problem said that he already has 130 ft 2 of carpet, so we need to figure out how much more he needs. Therefore, we need to subtract 130 from 538, and we get 408 ft 2 leftover. This is how much more carpeting John will need to finish off his three rooms.

Final answer: 408 ft 2 .

The Smith family is going to take a vacation to Florida. They live in Illinois, and have figured out that the trip is 1,150 miles from their house to the hotel in Florida. They get 28 miles per gallon of gas, and plan on travelling at an average rate of 60 miles per hour. Gas costs about $2.89 per gallon.

a) How long will it take them to get to Florida? (in hours)

For this part, you divide the total miles (1,150) by the speed they’re travelling (60 mph) and you would get 19.16666 (repeating). You would round the answer to 19.2 hours.

Final answer: 19.2 hours.

b) How much money should they leave for gasoline (going one way)?

First, you would divide the total number of miles (1,150) by the amount of miles they get per gallon of gas (28); this gives you 41 gallons—the total amount needed for the trip. Then, you would multiply the number of gallons (41) by the cost per gallon of gas ($2.89) and round to the nearest cent, which gives you $118.49. This is the amount they should save for gas going one way.

Final answer: $118.49

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If QR = x − 1, RS = 7, and QS = 2x, what is QS?
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Local News | Need to solve a problem? Try a little creative…

Local News | Need to solve a problem? Try a little creative genius

See the other possibilities or, to use a 21st century word, try a “workaround”.

Being a word person, I love acronyms. Decades ago, I played around with acronym phrases that “defined” the word. For example, NOW could stand for No Other Way, or a STAR could be Someone Terrific And Radiant. My problem-solving acronym for the word STOP, which is to See The Other Possibilities, has been my lifelong trusty tool for turning a “no” into a “yes.”

A 21st century word that best describes “seeing the other possibilities” is called a “workaround.” Author and business consultant Paulo Savaget teaches workaround solutions from nontraditional strategies in his book “The Four Workarounds.” His problem-solving lessons are derived from organizations that have achieved massive wins with “minimal resources, innovative wit and practical ingenuity of feisty entities.”

The piggyback approach is my favorite workaround – pairing a new goal with something that is already successfully working. For instance, instead of initiating a new distribution method into remote regions like the Amazon, much-needed medications are included with boxed bottles of Coca-Cola that already have established routes.

Flexibility is the key to solving problems. My auto mechanic spent two weeks researching a solution to replacing a part that’s no longer manufactured, nor could it be purchased used. Gratefully, he and a technician came up with a workaround that is working just fine.

Digital devices offer plenty of practice in figuring out workarounds, and it’s the same with simple fix-its around the house. Some of mine, like stuffing a tightly folded paper towel between the latch and a window to stop it from rattling, make me laugh … but they do solve the problem.

Often, my best ideas come to me in the shower and there’s a scientific explanation why time spent lathering up can prompt brilliant thoughts to bubble up. Zachary Irving, an assistant professor of philosophy and cognitive science at the University of Virginia, has found that when the mind is free enough to meander around, creative ideas can surface.

Shower environments check all the boxes for inspired ideas to arise out of nowhere. While scrubbing down, you’re occupied with a familiar routine – washing, shampooing, shaving – all free of outside distractions. The water acts as white noise, and its temperature is similar to that of the body. Experts say this makes for an ideal immersive experience.

Now the question is how to make sure those brilliant brainstorms don’t get lost while drying off. Surely there’s a “shower solution” for that!

Writer, editor and speaker Cheryl Russell is a Laguna Woods Village resident. Contact her at [email protected].

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OpenAI Announces a New AI Model, Code-Named Strawberry, That Solves Difficult Problems Step by Step

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OpenAI made the last big breakthrough in artificial intelligence by increasing the size of its models to dizzying proportions, when it introduced GPT-4 last year. The company today announced a new advance that signals a shift in approach—a model that can “reason” logically through many difficult problems and is significantly smarter than existing AI without a major scale-up.

The new model, dubbed OpenAI o1, can solve problems that stump existing AI models, including OpenAI’s most powerful existing model, GPT-4o . Rather than summon up an answer in one step, as a large language model normally does, it reasons through the problem, effectively thinking out loud as a person might, before arriving at the right result.

“This is what we consider the new paradigm in these models,” Mira Murati , OpenAI’s chief technology officer, tells WIRED. “It is much better at tackling very complex reasoning tasks.”

The new model was code-named Strawberry within OpenAI, and it is not a successor to GPT-4o but rather a complement to it, the company says.

Murati says that OpenAI is currently building its next master model, GPT-5, which will be considerably larger than its predecessor. But while the company still believes that scale will help wring new abilities out of AI, GPT-5 is likely to also include the reasoning technology introduced today. “There are two paradigms,” Murati says. “The scaling paradigm and this new paradigm. We expect that we will bring them together.”

LLMs typically conjure their answers from huge neural networks fed vast quantities of training data. They can exhibit remarkable linguistic and logical abilities, but traditionally struggle with surprisingly simple problems such as rudimentary math questions that involve reasoning.

Murati says OpenAI o1 uses reinforcement learning, which involves giving a model positive feedback when it gets answers right and negative feedback when it does not, in order to improve its reasoning process. “The model sharpens its thinking and fine tunes the strategies that it uses to get to the answer,” she says. Reinforcement learning has enabled computers to play games with superhuman skill and do useful tasks like designing computer chips . The technique is also a key ingredient for turning an LLM into a useful and well-behaved chatbot.

Mark Chen, vice president of research at OpenAI, demonstrated the new model to WIRED, using it to solve several problems that its prior model, GPT-4o, cannot. These included an advanced chemistry question and the following mind-bending mathematical puzzle: “A princess is as old as the prince will be when the princess is twice as old as the prince was when the princess’s age was half the sum of their present age. What is the age of the prince and princess?” (The correct answer is that the prince is 30, and the princess is 40).

“The [new] model is learning to think for itself, rather than kind of trying to imitate the way humans would think,” as a conventional LLM does, Chen says.

OpenAI says its new model performs markedly better on a number of problem sets, including ones focused on coding, math, physics, biology, and chemistry. On the American Invitational Mathematics Examination (AIME), a test for math students, GPT-4o solved on average 12 percent of the problems while o1 got 83 percent right, according to the company.

The new model is slower than GPT-4o, and OpenAI says it does not always perform better—in part because, unlike GPT-4o, it cannot search the web and it is not multimodal, meaning it cannot parse images or audio.

Improving the reasoning capabilities of LLMs has been a hot topic in research circles for some time. Indeed, rivals are pursuing similar research lines. In July, Google announced AlphaProof , a project that combines language models with reinforcement learning for solving difficult math problems.

AlphaProof was able to learn how to reason over math problems by looking at correct answers. A key challenge with broadening this kind of learning is that there are not correct answers for everything a model might encounter. Chen says OpenAI has succeeded in building a reasoning system that is much more general. “I do think we have made some breakthroughs there; I think it is part of our edge,” Chen says. “It’s actually fairly good at reasoning across all domains.”

Noah Goodman , a professor at Stanford who has published work on improving the reasoning abilities of LLMs, says the key to more generalized training may involve using a “carefully prompted language model and handcrafted data” for training. He adds that being able to consistently trade the speed of results for greater accuracy would be a “nice advance.”

Yoon Kim , an assistant professor at MIT, says how LLMs solve problems currently remains somewhat mysterious, and even if they perform step-by-step reasoning there may be key differences from human intelligence. This could be crucial as the technology becomes more widely used. “These are systems that would be potentially making decisions that affect many, many people,” he says. “The larger question is, do we need to be confident about how a computational model is arriving at the decisions?”

The technique introduced by OpenAI today also may help ensure that AI models behave well. Murati says the new model has shown itself to be better at avoiding producing unpleasant or potentially harmful output by reasoning about the outcome of its actions. “If you think about teaching children, they learn much better to align to certain norms, behaviors, and values once they can reason about why they’re doing a certain thing,” she says.

Oren Etzioni , a professor emeritus at the University of Washington and a prominent AI expert, says it’s “essential to enable LLMs to engage in multi-step problem solving, use tools, and solve complex problems.” He adds, “Pure scale up will not deliver this.” Etzioni says, however, that there are further challenges ahead. “Even if reasoning were solved, we would still have the challenge of hallucination and factuality.”

OpenAI’s Chen says that the new reasoning approach developed by the company shows that advancing AI need not cost ungodly amounts of compute power. “One of the exciting things about the paradigm is we believe that it’ll allow us to ship intelligence cheaper,” he says, “and I think that really is the core mission of our company.”

Broncos' M.I.A. WR Marvin Mims Jr. Could be Answer to Offensive Problems

Luke patterson | sep 11, 2024.

Aug 11, 2024; Indianapolis, Indiana, USA; Denver Broncos wide receiver Marvin Mims Jr. (19) scores a touchdown against Indianapolis Colts safety Nick Cross (20) during the second quarter at Lucas Oil Stadium.

Denver Broncos

When Denver Broncos head coach Sean Payton moved up to select wide receiver Marvin Mims Jr. in the second round of the 2023 NFL draft (No. 63), he was met with much criticism from the fan base and local media. Folks felt that the 5-foot-11, 182-pound playmaker from Oklahoma was a long way from replicating the dynamic, deep-threat type of receiver needed to lift the lid off NFL defenses.

As a rookie, Mims quieted the doubters in Denver with an explosive first quarter of the season as a receiver and primary punt and kickoff returner, earning a Pro Bowl bid and second-team All-Pro honors. His dynamic returns ranked him No. 1 in average yards returned while also making him the fourth rookie in team history to earn a trip to the Pro Bowl, with just two Broncos having ever been named as a return specialist.

Mims disappeared on offense from Week 6 on but was a welcome addition to the Broncos' historically bad special teams. He showed early promise as a receiver, playing in 19 games with 22 receptions for 377 yards and a touchdown, including nine first downs.

Surely, he’d be primed for an increased role in Year 2, especially with Payton singing Mims' praises for most of the offseason, vowing to more consistently utilize him as a receiver in 2024.

But that's not how it shook out in Week 1's loss in Seattle. Mims was mostly missing in action, finishing with just one target and zero receptions. Let's examine the disappearing act and how the Broncos can involve him to help lift Payton's failure-to-launch offense.

Snoozing in Seattle

The Broncos' 26-20 opening loss to the Seattle Seahawks spelled a frustrating start to the season and the beginning of the Bo Nix era in Denver. In the aftermath, Payton remained loyal to his first-round rookie QB, accepting accountability for the mismanagement of offensive play calling and expressing frustration with the skilled positions of the Broncos offense.

The Broncos' leading receiver in Seattle was rookie seventh-rounder Devaughn Vele with eight catches for 39 yards, while Josh Reynolds led the team with 45 yards receiving (a long of 25 yards). Team captain Courtland Sutton was limited to four catches for 38 yards in Denver’s atrocious and ineffective passing game.

Mims was nearly non-existent against Seattle, logging just 12 of Denver’s 69 offensive snaps with only that single target to speak of evidence that he played on offense. He did return five punts for 47 yards and three kickoffs for 69 yards, though.

While Mims doesn't have the right to insert himself into a game or influence formations and snap counts, the dynamic playmaker should be expected to receive reps on offense. As it stands, Mims is getting outworked by a late-round rookie and veteran practice-squad receiver in Lil’ Jordan Humphrey.

Jerry Jeudy is in Cleveland and Tim Patrick in Detroit, which should motivate Mims to earn a prominent role in Payton’s offense. But it’s up to Mims to prove to Payton that he can be trusted to assist Nix in his development and ability to win football games every week.

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Solving Broncos' Playmaker Problem

Denver Broncos wide receiver Devaughn Vele (81) and wide receiver Marvin Mims Jr. (19) celebrate a touchdown.

Say what you will about Payton, but the man has complete control over this football team. Nary a peep nor a rumor leaves Broncos HQ without the head coach’s knowledge or stamp of approval.

Some folks in Broncos Country have speculated that perhaps Mims is confused and frustrated in his second season. There were some minor rumblings about him exchanging words with assistant and positional coaches during some of Denver's public training camp practices where a helmet may or may not have been thrown in the heat of the moment.

If true, we’ve all been there before, where frustration gets the better of us, and before we’ve had time to reflect and recollect ourselves to move on. Mims likely shares the same frustration as his head coach, teammates, and fan base after opening the season with a loss, especially in a very winnable game for the Broncos.

The good news is that Mims has an opportunity to get on the same page with Nix and Payton on Sunday against the Pittsburgh Steelers in Denver’s home opener. Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin’s infamously physical and intelligent defense presents threats via a pass rush led by T.J. Watt, while guarding the defensive backfield with veterans like Minkah Fitzpatrick.

Pittsburgh’s defense recorded two sacks, two interceptions, and five pass deflections in an 18-10 upset win on the road vs. the Atlanta Falcons in Week 1. This matchup dictates that Payton tasks Nix with the same quick release and deliberate decision-making that made him a first-round pick last April and won him the starting quarterback position.

The best way to do that is to have Mims operate out of the slot in the short-to-medium pass game. He’ll need to be willing to contend with much bigger and more physically imposing defenders, including the Steelers' linebacker corps. Mims should get worked into that action with some creative play-calls.

Bottom Line

Mims is the type of player who thirsts for the ball in open space, as most undersized offensive threats do. The man runs a 4.38-second 40-yard dash, for crying out loud, which screams for him to get the ball. An end-around or surprise reverse could catch the ‘Blitz-burgh’ defense off guard, especially with its formidable pass rush screaming upfield to sack Nix.

Getting the football into Mims’ hands early and often as a receiver could restore the 22-year-old playmaker's missing confidence and momentum. That same momentum could transfer to special teams, an area where he's already made a name for himself in 2023 and assisted the Broncos in earning some tough wins.

Follow Mile High Huddle on X and Facebook and subscribe on YouTube for daily Broncos live-stream podcasts!

LUKE PATTERSON

Luke Patterson has covered the Denver Broncos and NFL Draft at Mile High Huddle since 2020, though he's been on the beat since 2017. His works have been featured on Yahoo.com and BleacherReport.com and he has covered many college Pro Days on-site, the Shrine Bowl, the Senior Bowl, Broncos Training Camp, Broncos Local Pro Days, and various Broncos credentialed events.

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Leadership story: A leader's reaction in a difficult situation. In the story, you will see why a leader always needs to keep a calm head even when others can't find a way to solve a difficult situation. Jul 19 Leadership stories, Mindset stories, Problem solving stories, Stories, Stories about communication, Teamwork stories.
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Great Stories About Finding Solutions. Five books that show you interesting and endearing characters who encounter problems and figure out how to solve them. by Dawn J. Mitchell and Katrina Hankins. Whether you are four or forty-four, chances are you will encounter a few problems during this school year. Problems are a part of life and part of ...
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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.
Become a Better Problem Solver by Telling Better Stories
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 ...
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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 ...
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Problem-solving is a mental process that involves discovering, analyzing, and solving problems. The ultimate goal of problem-solving is to overcome obstacles and find a solution that best resolves the issue. The best strategy for solving a problem depends largely on the unique situation. In some cases, people are better off learning everything ...
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In a great story the problem is the central, unifying event that holds the story together. In Harry Potter, Voldemort is trying to take possession of the Wizard World. That is the problem that brings about the change of fortune and that is the problem that has to be resolved. In The Lord of the Rings, an almost identical story, Sauron is trying ...
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When teaching kids how to comprehend and/or write fiction text, often times it's good to start with books and stories that have a clear problem and solution text structure.. This means that the story line introduces characters and a problem at the beginning -> the character(s) try to solve the problem in the middle, which rises to a climax -> and at the end, the problem is solved, with ...
Books That Help Teach Kids Problem Solving
The changing dynamics of friendship can be tough for kids to navigate, and flexibility solves a lot of tricky issues. Going Places by Paul A. Reynolds, illustrated by Peter H. Reynolds. Mindset: Every problem has many different solutions. Talk about thinking outside the box: Some kids love to follow directions.
The Problem Solving Superhero
No capes or wands are needed for this superhero story, just a desire to learn, grow and try something new, all entirely on your own. May you find your own su...
Episode 84: Storytelling For Problem Solving
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.
A story on problem solving
posted in General on January 24, 2007 by Rajesh Setty. Sridhar Krishnan shares a wonderful story about problem solving. Enjoy! Many years ago in a small Zezuru village, a farmer had the misfortune of owing a large sum of money to a village moneylender. The moneylender, who was old and ugly, fancied the farmer's young beautiful daughter.
Using Storytelling to Boost Problem Solving Skills
In conclusion, storytelling can be a potent tool for improving problem-solving skills. Through storytelling, individuals can develop their creativity, analytical thinking, and develop empathy, which are all critical skills required for problem solving. The power of storytelling can help in a wide range of scenarios, from customer service issues ...
What Is Creative Problem-Solving & Why Is It Important?
Creative problem-solving primarily operates in the ideate phase of design thinking but can be applied to others. This is because design thinking is an iterative process that moves between the stages as ideas are generated and pursued. This is normal and encouraged, as innovation requires exploring multiple ideas.
Problem-Solving Strategies: Definition and 5 Techniques to Try
In insight problem-solving, the cognitive processes that help you solve a problem happen outside your conscious awareness. 4. Working backward. Working backward is a problem-solving approach often ...
What's the Problem?: A Story Teaching Problem Solving (Executive
Fortunately, some good old-fashioned fatherly advice coupled with a tried-and-true strategy for solving problems keeps everyone safe and satisfied.Â This story introduces and encourages readers to use SODAS (Situation, Options, Disadvantages, Advantages, and Solution) as a way to logically and thoughtfully figure out how to solve any problem ...
Why Word Problems Are Such a Struggle for Students—And What Teachers Can Do
This is one of the biggest challenges in word problem-solving, educators and researchers agree—getting students to understand that the written story on the page represents a math story, and that ...
Story Problems
Story Problems. Once you know your basic operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division), you will encounter story problems, also known as word problems, which require you. to read a problem and decide which operation to perform in order to get the answer. There are key words here that often indicate which operation you will use.
Analyzing and Designing Story Problems That Matter
By Cathery Yeh, Maureen Neumann, and Corey Drake, posted May 22, 2017 — In our previous three blog posts, we wrote about how the context and the chosen numbers in the story problems that we create for our students can influence students' experiences with mathematics.Story problems influence students' sense of belonging in classrooms by whether they can see themselves in the story ...
Need to solve a problem? Try a little creative genius
My problem-solving acronym for the word STOP, which is to See The Other Possibilities, has been my lifelong trusty tool for turning a "no" into a "yes." ...
OpenAI Announces a New AI Model, Code-Named Strawberry, That ...
The new model, dubbed OpenAI o1, can solve problems that stump existing AI models, including OpenAI's most powerful existing model, GPT-4o. Rather than summon up an answer in one step, as a ...
Learning to Reason with LLMs
To solve this problem, we need to find all real numbers x x x such that p ( 1 x ) = x 2 , p\left(\frac{1}{x}\right) = x^2, p ( x 1 ) = x 2 , where p p p is a monic real polynomial of degree 2 n 2n 2 n , and it is given that
Born with a rare heart defect, sixth grader wants to solve the world's
Now, Luke is a happy, curious 11-year-old intent on solving the world's problems. "Luke is just an overall great kid," Mia said. "He's a really old soul." Luke Domingo (left) with his parents, Geody and Mia, at an American Heart Association Heart and Stroke Walk. (Photo courtesy of Mia Domingo)
Broncos' M.I.A. WR Marvin Mims Jr. Could be Answer to Offensive Problems
Solving Broncos' Playmaker Problem. Denver Broncos wide receiver Devaughn Vele (81) and wide receiver Marvin Mims Jr. (19) celebrate a touchdown as Indianapolis Colts safety Nick Cross (20) looks ...

- \twostack{▭}{▭}	\lt	7	8	9	\div	AC
+ \twostack{▭}{▭}	\gt	4	5	6	\times	\square\frac{\square}{\square}
\times \twostack{▭}{▭}	\left(	1	2	3	-	x
▭\:\longdivision{▭}	\right)	.	0	=	+	y

Purpose Focus Commitment

Perseverance story: Shake it off – The Donkey in the well story

Story about communication: Simple instructions gone wrong

Wisdom story: The greatest liar challenge

Problem solving story: Who is obligated to pay the “mountain” tax

Story about fear: Mice, and their perfect plan for the cat

Wisdom story: The case of the stolen smell

Wisdom story: The cake parable

Wisdom story: Something to eat, drink, plant for just one coin

Story about fear: How can a coward overcome cowardice?

Leadership story: A leader’s reaction in a difficult situation

Great Stories About Finding Solutions

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