When the Default Solutions Don't Work

The Green Path - Shifting Knowledge Series

You’ve been here before. A team is stuck, the project’s off-track, and all eyes turn to you. So, you do what you do best; you reach for your go-to move. Maybe you rally the team with a well-facilitated conversation. Maybe you break the chaos down with a crisp runbook or bring clarity with a decision-making model that’s never let you down. And it works—again. Why fix what isn’t broken?

But then, something shifts.

Maybe it was a passing comment at a conference, or a quiet moment during a mentoring session. Something lands differently this time. You realize why your time0honed solution doesn’t always work. It’s not about solving problems; it’s about classifying problems in order to choose the right solution. That insight settles in with surprising weight. How can you understand the shape of the problem space itself?

This issue we’re diving into exactly that. It’s the distinction that turns well practiced problem-solving found in the Solo block and adding context and perspective in the Detective block.

In the Solo block, you’re in the zone. You have your trusted playbook. You apply those tools with growing fluency. And it feels great! The skill is clicking. The results are real.

I remember that stage in my own journey—early instructional design days, armed with a recipe that seemed to work every time. Every training problem? I had the answer. Until... the context changed. The problems stopped matching the pattern. And suddenly, my magic recipe fell flat.

That shift can feel like a gut punch. You know you’ve been successful. But now you feel stuck, unsure, maybe even a little defensive. That’s normal. Take a breath. Your body is catching up to a deeper truth, which is that our default move is just one of many tools. And it’s time to expand your toolkit.

This is where the Detective block begins.

In Solo, a mentor helps in the moment. But in Detective, you need more than reactive guidance. You need a system for expanding context, not just refining the same solution. The goal now is to recognize types of problems. What makes C# different from C or Python when it comes to refactoring? Why do some interventions work in one team but fail in another?

As a mentor or facilitator, your job here is to help others learn to see the problem space, not just fix what’s in front of them.

This is the moment to go deep. To go down the rabbit hole of the skill itself.