Let’s say you were responsible for training young people to thrive in the constantly changing economy of the 21st century. What is the single most important skill you would teach them?
At Blue Valley’s Center for Advanced Professional Studies, it’s not an idle question. Each year, the program provides more than 1,000 young people with next-level training in bioscience, business and other in-demand fields. CAPS wants its students to succeed in the world’s most competitive companies—or have the ability to start their own. (That’s partly why it launched its own business accelerator for students last year.)
CAPS officials have asked businesses what they need most in employees, and one trait consistently comes up: Companies want people who can solve problems—or, better yet, discover new problems to solve.
“Knowledge is free, and it is ubiquitous,” said Donna Deeds, CAPS’ executive director.
It’s more valuable, she said, to teach people how to solve problems.
Here are some of the most important lessons that CAPS has learned about fostering problem-solvers—principles that you could put to work in your own business.
People learn to solve problems by actually solving problems // Yes, it’s possible to sit someone down and show them the steps for solving a problem. Most high schools teach basic problem-solving. The vast majority of us learned the scientific method at some point, for example.
But telling someone how to solve a problem isn’t the same as putting them in a situation where they actually have to come up with a solution. It’s one reason why CAPS emphasizes project-based learning. In many of its courses, students will work on a real-life problem presented by a corporate partner.
Before you can solve a problem, you have to discover it // Students in the CAPS accelerator do a fair amount of off-campus research. They might visit a hospital, for example, to observe the patient experience and see what causes people frustration or pain.
Because they have time to study a situation and really think deeply about it, students discover problems that people might not even realize they had.
“That’s way beyond problem solving,” Deeds said. “That’s creating huge opportunities that nobody knew existed.”
There’s no one right answer // Students often get fixated on finding one solution to a problem, said Scott Kreshel and Jill Riffer, who lead the accelerator program.
In most schools, students are trained to deliver the right answer, singular. They learn how to solve an equation or explain Brown v. Board of Education—and there’s usually only one correct answer. But that’s not how the real world works. Instead of one way to increase sales or build an app, there could be thousands.
“There isn’t one right answer,” Kreshel said. “There isn’t one right way.”
