My Thoughts

The Five-Minute Problem Solver: Why Your Brain's First Answer Is Usually Wrong

Three months ago, I watched a seasoned project manager—fifteen years in construction—spend two hours trying to "solve" why his concrete delivery was delayed. He rang suppliers, checked traffic reports, even called the depot manager's mobile. Turns out the driver had simply taken a wrong turn and was sitting in a McDonald's car park two suburbs over, too embarrassed to admit he'd stuffed up the GPS coordinates.

That's the thing about problem solving in Australia's business landscape. We're so bloody good at complicated solutions that we've forgotten how to spot simple ones.

Your Brain Is a Drama Queen

Here's what nobody tells you about problem-solving frameworks: your brain actively works against them. It craves complexity. Show your mind a straightforward issue, and it immediately starts crafting elaborate explanations involving supply chain disruptions, communication breakdowns, and systemic failures.

I've seen this everywhere from Perth mining sites to Melbourne consulting firms. A team member doesn't respond to emails for two days, and suddenly management is discussing "engagement strategies" and "cultural interventions." Nine times out of ten? They're just swamped with actual work.

The human brain evolved to spot sabre-toothed tigers, not invoice discrepancies. It defaults to threat mode, which means every problem feels like a crisis requiring immediate, dramatic action.

The Five-Minute Rule That Changed Everything

After watching countless businesses tie themselves in knots over straightforward issues, I started implementing what I call the Five-Minute Rule. Before you dive into root cause analysis or convene emergency meetings, spend exactly five minutes asking the dumbest possible questions:

What if this isn't actually a problem?
What if the obvious answer is correct?
What if we're overthinking this?

Last year, a retail client called me in because their "customer satisfaction scores were mysteriously declining." They'd commissioned surveys, hired consultants, restructured their service team. The five-minute solution? Their feedback forms had moved from the checkout counter to a spot near the toilets. Customers filling them out were literally pissed off.

The Australian Problem-Solving Paradox

We've got this weird cultural thing where admitting something was simple makes you look incompetent. I've watched CEOs in Sydney boardrooms dismiss straightforward solutions because they didn't seem "strategic" enough.

There's this unspoken rule that good solutions must be proportional to the perceived importance of the problem. Big client upset? Must need a comprehensive relationship management overhaul. Staff turnover increasing? Time for a complete cultural transformation program.

But here's the kicker: some of our most successful companies got that way by solving problems simply. Atlassian didn't revolutionise project management by creating the most complex software—they made it stupidly easy to track what needed doing.

The real skill isn't knowing 47 different problem-solving methodologies. It's knowing when not to use them.

Why Smart People Make This Worse

The smarter your team, the more likely they are to overcomplicate solutions. I've worked with brilliant engineers who could design systems to automate anything, but couldn't figure out why the office printer kept jamming. (Someone was loading the paper upside down.)

Intelligence creates blind spots. When you're capable of complex thinking, you assume complex thinking is always required. It's like having a Ferrari and using it to drive to the corner shop—technically impressive, completely unnecessary.

This is particularly brutal in consulting environments. Nobody wants to tell a client paying $300 an hour that their problem could be fixed with a ten-dollar process change. There's pressure to deliver solutions that feel worthy of the investment.

The Three Questions That Actually Matter

Forget your Six Sigma certifications for a moment. Before you start mapping processes and conducting stakeholder analysis, ask these three questions:

1. Who benefits if this stays broken? Sometimes problems persist because someone's getting value from the chaos. That department that's always firefighting? They might enjoy being seen as heroic problem-solvers.

2. What would a five-year-old do? Kids don't have the sophistication to overcomplicate solutions. They see what adults can't: that sometimes the direct path is the right path.

3. What are we pretending not to know? This is the big one. Most workplace problems have obvious solutions that everyone can see but nobody wants to acknowledge. Usually because the real issue is political, not technical.

When Simple Solutions Feel Too Simple

I get it. You've spent three days analyzing a workflow breakdown, and the solution turns out to be "talk to Dave in accounts because he knows how this actually works." It feels anticlimactic.

But that's your ego talking, not your business sense.

Last month, I consulted for a Brisbane logistics company losing money on late deliveries. They'd mapped their entire supply chain, hired efficiency experts, invested in tracking software. The real problem? Their dispatch coordinator was colour-blind and couldn't read the priority coding on their delivery sheets. A $15 solution fixed a $50,000 problem.

The client wasn't thrilled about paying my day rate for something their receptionist could have spotted. But that's exactly the point—sometimes you pay for experience not to find complicated solutions, but to have the confidence to implement simple ones.

The Courage to Be Obvious

Here's what fifteen years in business problem-solving has taught me: the biggest barrier to effective solutions isn't knowledge or resources. It's courage.

The courage to suggest something obvious when everyone else is performing complexity. The courage to say "maybe we're overthinking this" in a room full of people trying to sound strategic. The courage to implement a simple fix when there's pressure to demonstrate sophisticated thinking.

Some of the best problem-solvers I know aren't the smartest people in the room. They're the ones willing to state the obvious when everyone else is too clever to see it.

Because here's the truth about most business problems: they're not actually that complicated. We just make them that way because complicated feels more professional than simple.

And sometimes, the most sophisticated thing you can do is admit that the simple answer was right all along.

Need help developing practical problem-solving approaches for your team? Check out our creative problem solving workshops or learn more about decision making training that actually works in real business environments.