“Your car stopped, and a nice person comes by and sees that your car stopped and they're like, oh, I'm going to help you. And before you can explain what happened, they rush off and they come back with a can of gas. And you say, well, somebody stole my engine. They saw the problem and they solved the problem, but it wasn't your problem, because they never asked and you never explained why is it a problem… If we don't talk about why it matters, there's no one who's going to defend that solution at the end.”
sputnikintelligence.com
She had just shared a three-question framework: what's the problem, why is it a problem, how do you solve it. This is the story she uses in trainings to show why the middle question gets skipped, in advocacy and in teams generally.
I love that. I was a research assistant in law school for a book. And the professor I work for, Ann Alstadt, she gave me this framework that has become the way I try to talk about everything. She said, what's the problem? Why is it a problem? And how do you solve it?
Yes.
…you know, they saw the problem and they solved the problem, but it wasn't your problem because they never asked and you never explained why is it a problem. And I think what you're describing is that we are. We're in this moment where because of the surfeit of harm and bad information and bad news, we spend so much time talking about here's the problem. And then we jump to a solution set. But if we don't talk about why it matters, there's no one who's going to defend that solution at the end. Yes. No one's going to show up and say, oh, you have a little more time because you've explained the problem to me enough and why this is the problem that I'm going to give you more than two years to solve what is a 50 years conundrum. And because, and this goes back to your point about the batting average, if we aren't seeing how we're making progress or at least where we're moving and we're…
Totally. What is the problem? And what is the solution? And can you do that in a way that makes sense to normal, regular people? And if you can't, then, you know, there's the Feynman thing about like, if you can't explain it to whatever, you don't really understand it. And I think there is some…
I mean, one of the reasons I was excited to come to your bookstore is that, you know, I write these legal thrillers, political thrillers, and they're all about how do you take very weighty, heady concepts that people are never going to read a white paper about and convert it into something they…
What you just did was you told that person a story that explained it. And I think the best political communicators are good storytellers, right? And that art of telling an effective and clear story is really what it's all about. And when people don't understand what's happening, when they're…