Problem Solving: Skills for the Future

Key takeaways

• As software takes on well-defined problems, put more of your effort into messes: framing them, handling exceptions and weighing trade-offs between people.
• Build five lasting skills in yourself and your children: framing, seeing systems, judging under uncertainty, collaborating across differences and verifying answers.
• With any smart tool, own the question and check the answer; at home, make it attempt first, ask the tool, then explain it back.
• Before committing to a fix for a tangled problem, ask 'and then what?' at least twice and sketch any loop that leads back to the start.
• Give children real problems with no single answer, ask how they would know it worked, and let them watch you learn from your own mistakes.

Inside this bit

1. Where problem solving is heading

   Problems come in two broad kinds. Well-defined problems, or puzzles, have a clear goal, known rules and a checkable answer: the shortest delivery route, the error in a spreadsheet, a timetable that fits.

2. The skills that grow in value

   When routine answers become cheap, the valuable skills sit around the answers. Five stand out.

3. Working alongside smart tools

   Smart tools are becoming problem-solving partners: they suggest causes, draft options and check calculations in seconds. Used well, they widen your thinking.

4. Tangled problems and second-order thinking

   Many problems your children will inherit are systems problems: water, traffic, energy, waste, the health of a neighbourhood. In a system, parts feed back on each other, so a fix can create the next problem.

5. Raising children for problems not yet solved

   Your children will face problems that do not exist yet, so the most useful thing to build is not a store of answers but comfort with open questions. Three moves help.

6. Keeping your own skills future-ready

   The risks ahead are real: tools that make confident mistakes, information that spreads faster than it can be checked, and problems such as climate or supply chains that cross every border. So are the opportunities.