Imagine Jo: Everyone in Jo’s life recognizes her as an outstanding problem solver. She’s the type of person who seems capable of almost anything. Jo excels at intuitive problem-solving. Over her life, she’s built a big toolkit of skills for understanding and working through challenging situations. Nothing fazes her anymore.

If you’d like to develop these skills, similar to Jo, read on to understand the building blocks.

Five Ways to Develop Your Problem-Solving Instincts

1. Imagine a Smaller Problem

Imagine Jo is tasked with planning a virtual seminar for 300 people. She feels momentarily flustered at the scale, but then she considers how she’d plan a seminar for three people. She realizes the ingredients for success are mostly the same in both scenarios.

We all learn the skill of visualizing smaller problems when we’re learning math. To understand how math works, we need to first think of simpler scenarios. If we need to figure out how far we’d travel in eight hours at 60 mph, we might first think about how far we’d travel in one hour.

If we translate a problem into numbers, we can visualize the mechanics of the problem easily, and the answer often becomes obvious. We can mentally grasp smaller numbers better, and this allows us to get an intuitive sense of the situation and what we’re being asked to do.

2. Recognize Transferable Thinking Patterns

We can pick up problem-solving strategies from all around us. Here are some examples of how this works:

• You notice how a mechanic identifies a problem by the noise. You realize there are parallels with recognizing when you’re running roughshod.
• The way a museum arranges exhibits to control walking flow inspires how you structure documents or meetings.
• Observing how a programmer writes tests to know their code is working, even in unusual situations (like if a user enters a nonsense number), leads you to consider how you could evaluate whether a personal strategy is capable of working robustly in all conditions.

When you can recognize these types of applications from one sphere to another, you blur the lines between problem-solving and creativity.

3. Recognize Info That Might Be Useful Later

People tend to assume that insights happen in one shot, but good ideas often arrive in pieces over long periods of time, and we gradually assemble them.

An important use of intuition is for information and resources that don’t have an obvious use now, but might later. For example, you notice particularly nice data visualizations in someone’s presentation. You ask the presenter how they made them. You don’t have any need to make data visualizations right now, but you play around with the tool they used for a few minutes, sensing there will be a time when you’ll want to use it.

Or perhaps you hear a quote that resonates with you deeply and you’re not quite sure why. It doesn’t seem to have a practical use in your life right now. You remember it, and gradually the relevance to your current life becomes clear. Perhaps it takes you a couple of weeks to see the links clearly, but once you do, the resonance of the quotation helps you feel confident about the direction you should take.

4. Imagine a Bigger Problem

Earlier, I made the point that we sometimes need to think about smaller versions of problems to intuitively understand them. It can be hard to wrap our minds around big numbers or lots of variables, and we need to simplify a problem to be able to grasp it.

The opposite strategy can also help. Thinking of a bigger version of the problem can reveal obvious ways to handle it.

For example, if we only need to onboard one new employee a year, we might not have much process for that. If we imagine how we’d approach it if we had to do it once a week, we’d probably see ways to streamline it.

We can improve how we plan an event for 300 people by imagining how we’d plan for 3,000, just as we can by imagining how we’d plan for 3.

5. Acting on Incomplete Understanding

An aspect of developing intuitive problem-solving is recognizing that you can act before you fully understand the big picture and trust that acting will help you fill in some of the blanks. For example:

• You ask a question when you feel blocked even though you think you should be able to figure it out yourself.
• You say yes to an interesting opportunity before you know how you’d make it lucrative enough to be worth your time.
• You tell someone you’d like to collaborate with them at some point before you have an idea for the specific project.

Imagine Jo is approached by a student at a conference. The student seems to have a special spark about them, based solely on a two-minute conversation. She invites them to connect on LinkedIn and leaves a nice comment whenever they share an achievement. She doesn’t have any particular motivation for it other than to be encouraging. Jo couldn’t explain why she bothers. Some things just feel worth doing before you understand why. She’s comfortable with this lack of complete understanding.

Being Intuitive Can Help You Be Good at Being Analytical

A lot of good problem-solving relies on observation, pattern recognition, and being willing to explore thought exercises that allow you to understand problems deeply and conceptually. Just like in math, people who excel at creative problem solving are those who can deeply understand the nature of what a problem is asking of them, what the current picture is, and what picture they need to end up at. People who struggle in both math and everyday problem-solving tend to superficially learn procedures but can’t see links between concepts.

If you see yourself as creative or as intuitive, you might not have viewed problem-solving as a skill you could excel at. Hopefully, the concepts explored here have shown you a path to doing that. Being analytical can feel very artistic and intuitive.