Reframing is just a starting point for solving complex problems, not an end in itself.

To maximize your chances of coming up with a breakthrough solution, you need to test your ideas in the real world.

Sometimes you’ll get lucky and your solution will work brilliantly without much tweaking. But more than likely, even your best ideas will become that much better after a bit of real-world testing and iteration.

If you go “all in” on your solution based ONLY on a gut feeling, you’ll be more likely to succumb to the Sunk Cost Fallacy—getting so invested in your idea that you’re unwilling to let it go if it’s not working, and wasting a lot of time and money on ineffective solutions.

Think of problem solving as being like a game of no-limit Texas hold ’em.

Most of your starting cards will be either “meh” or complete junk. But if you hang in the game long enough, you’ll eventually draw killer opening hands like AA or AK.

Yet even though your odds of winning that hand are pretty high, you still have five community cards coming—any one of which could either lock in a winning hand or turn your pair of aces into an easy fold.

The last thing you’d want to do is push in all your chips right away. Instead, you make a series of bets based on the strength of your cards AND the changing conditions of the game itself.

You can use a similar approach for testing your ideas.

Discovering the best solution to a problem is like sitting through deal after deal, waiting for good cards before risking any of your chips. You want to take your time at the beginning, reframing the problem and asking the right questions, until your idea feels like that pair of aces.

Then you start testing your theory, making a series of appropriately sized bets based on real-world conditions and feedback. Only when you’ve had the chance to validate your theory should you consider pushing all your chips to the middle of the table.

Over the next few posts, we’ll explore some practical ways to test and validate your solutions before going all in on any one of them. In the meantime…

What will you do today to start testing and iterating your ideas?

Will you make smaller bets and see where they lead before investing all your time and energy into any one approach?