Problem Solving: Avoiding The Silver Bullet Approach
It’s almost second nature to want to know the cause of a problem—to make the unknown known. The knowledge is valuable in that it helps us to understand, provides us material for conversation and brings us closer to solutions. But motivated as we are for answers, we often settle for the too-good-to-be-wholly-true variety.
For example, you might say you didn’t workout because you didn’t have time or you were late because of traffic. For complex problems, maybe you’ve decided Company X charges high prices because they only care about profit or that the bridge failed due to improper material selection.
It’s the monocausal answers like these that I call silver bullets: the magical one-liners that are used to “explain everything”. They pass for headlines. The explanation doesn’t feel false. And they’re roughly right. But silver bullets mistake the main cause for the only cause.
As you move forward, you’ll continually be faced with many problems of varying difficulty. Unlike the grade school ones, real world problems will tend to be tangles and tangles of causes—especially when people are involved. If you’re routinely blinded by the shinier things in life, you’ll miss valuable solutions hiding in less visible places.
So if you’re someone who’s looking to increase your odds in life by becoming a better problem-solver, you should avoid the silver bullet approach and always look for two causes.
The Problem with Silver Bullet Causes
When dealing with problems, the first obvious explanation you think of can shut down further exploration—in a confirmation-bias-like way. This kills creativity. When you fail to look for a second thing, the first thing becomes the only thing.
Then you also have to deal with non-obvious causes; these are indirect and may require a bit of reverse engineering or imagination to uncover.
For example, take a young boy who lives down the street, imagine witnessing him light a pile of sticks on fire.
Why’d the sticks catch on fire? For the silver bullet approach, your analysis might look something like this.
(1)The boy struck a match and tossed it on the pile.
But let’s avoid the silver bullet approach come up with a few other ideas.
(2) The sticks were placed there. (3) Oxygen was present. (4) The sticks were dry. (5) His parents weren’t around. Etc, etc, etc.
The boy’s act of lighting the fire gets the attention and would pass as the cause, but the same event doesn’t occur without the latter. Secondary causes or contributing factors get less play even when their absence would have entirely altered the course of events.
Sports commentators often do something similar when deconstructing losses. They’ll point to obvious mistakes made late in the game instead of the earlier ones of equal significance.
Silver Bullets vs Looking for Two Causes
Silver Bullet Approach:
Sticks catch fire -> Young boy lit them on fire
Workout didn’t happen -> Didn’t have time
Late to meeting-> Traffic
Bridge Fails -> Improper Material Selection
High prices -> Business X only cares about profit
Looking for 2 Causes Approach:
Pile of sticks caught on fire -> Oxygen present, someone put the sticks there, dry conditions, absent parents
Workout didn’t happen -> Didn’t consider 10-minute windows an option, workout at lunch, wake up earlier, use the stairs, avoid cat videos
Late to meeting-> Didn’t think about it being rush hour, got distracted, too optimistic about the flow of time, didn’t set reminder
Bridge Fails -> Lack of redundancy, improper maintenance, poor inspection practices
High prices -> Raw commodities cost more, mismanaged business, increased taxes
Looking beyond single causes naturally breaks down the problem into smaller pieces, making the complex more digestible. It’s also the more imaginative approach, which is the innovation. By seeking two causes in your search for answers, you’ll inevitably wind up with more than two ideas for solutions and improvements. You’ll also sound smarter in social settings if you’re voicing multiple reasons vs silver bullets - trust me.
Pro-tip: Your default response to “Why” questions should always be “Part of the reason….”. This does two things. It leaves open the possibility you missed something in your analysis, for which your audience might otherwise correct you. It’s also a reminder to yourself that there could be other reasons. (Hat tip to Naval)
Silver Bullet Problem Solving in Public the Public Domain
While grade school problems guide us toward one answer per problem, many of the most valuable-to-solve problems in life are complex: there are many causes of varying gradations sometimes acting at subtle scales over long time frames. Cancer, dementia, weather patterns, stock market moves, and the rise and fall of nations will likely lack an E=MC**2 one-liner where complexity finally yields to simplicity.
This is part of the reason why the framing ‘The Cure for Cancer’ is misleading, because it suggests there’s a silver bullet—as if all we have to do is find this one cure.
Maybe the lesson there is it’s easier organize resources under the silver-bullet banner, instead of with more realistic lines like “We need funding for 1000s of separate projects that probably won’t work (but a few will) plus parking lots need re-striping”.
Conclusion: Make a Habit of Looking for 2 Causes
Valuable problems that either you or your peers haven’t already solved are going to be complex and of the multi-variate variety. If you want to improve your odds at solving them by reducing misjudgment, you’ll need to avoid silver bullets, which can prematurely shut down thinking and reduce your luck. Instead, unlock your creativity by looking for two causes.
In short, you should always be skeptical of silver bullets—they only work in fairytales.
Author’s Note
The problem isn’t where the solution is.
“To trace something unknown back to something known is alleviating, soothing, gratifying and gives more over a feeling of power. Danger, disquiet, anxiety attend the unknown-the first instinct is to eliminate these distressing states.” - Frederich Nietzsche