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The problem of toxic solutioning

When experience can be your downfall.

Nathan Robinson
UX Collective
5 min readNov 24, 2020

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“We have always done it this way.”

Most of us have heard that at least a few times, and this sentence, as well as the line of thinking behind it, is immediately recognized as “the old way” of thinking, even archaic. While it’s easy for us to identify and associate this line of thinking as bad, knowing how to challenge the solution or how else to solve the problem is an entirely different task.

How Toxic Solutioning Happens

Many of us have trained ourselves to look for new solutions in the name of “innovation”. However, whenever we encounter problems, how often do we ask, “who has solved this, and how did they solve it?”. After all, isn’t it good to apply best practices? While it’s always good to leverage past successes, this is the same thought process behind doing things “the way we always have” in the past, framed slightly differently, and still produces many challenges to our goal of making optimal decisions.

There is a fine line between leveraging past success, and “we have always done it this way” thinking

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Published in UX Collective

We believe designers are thinkers as much as they are makers. Curated stories on UX, Visual & Product Design. https://linktr.ee/uxc

Written by Nathan Robinson

I write about Startups, Artificial Intelligence | Product Management | Problem Solving | Travel | Entrepreneurship | Decision Making | Indie Hacking

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