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“How do I solve an ‘impossible’ problem?”
Have you ever felt incredibly overwhelmed when either tasked with or forced to deal with a problem in your life that seemed impossible to solve?
What if it meant the difference between life and death?
There’s a famous scene in the movie Apollo 13 that ends with Flight Director Gene Kranz saying to the team, “Failure is not an option.”
Based on a true story, it was supposed to be NASA’s third mission to land on the moon; however, just two days into the mission an explosion caused two oxygen tanks to fail in the service module. Cue Tom Hanks, playing astronaut Jim Lovell, reporting back to Mission Control in this famous scene, saying, “Houston, we have a problem”.
NASA very quickly needed to shift gears from trying to land the crew on the moon to getting them home safely.
Astronauts Lovell, John Swigert, and Fred Haise were forced to move to the lunar module in order to return to Earth — a use case it was not designed for. They would have a limited window to survive before they would be inundated with carbon dioxide, as the air scrubbers were only meant to filter enough of the gas to keep 2 astronauts alive in the module for a limited time.
Getting home safely was a problem that seemed impossible to solve.
As a product manager, I’ve worked almost predominately on moonshot types of projects — types of projects that have lofty goals, that no one has done before, and that involve a lot of unknowns. While not life-and-death scenarios for the most part, I’ve seen a lot of patterns emerge.
Here is an 8-step framework I have developed for how to approach solving problems that seem “impossible” to solve.
