37 Across: a three-letter word with the clue “‘Big’ digit.”

I immediately type in T-E-N. The “Big Ten” collegiate athletic conference is often a crossword reference.

By the time I’ve gone through the puzzle’s clues two or three times, I’m stuck on an answer that intersects with 37 Across. Nothing seems to fit. The letters I have seem to point to an obvious solution, but the E in TEN doesn’t allow for it.

After taking longer than it should have to realize my mistake, I delete TEN and finish the Down clue with the obvious solution. Then, I look at 37 Across for the umpteenth time. I now have an O in the middle of the three-letter word.

In classic face-palm fashion, I get it. “Digit” doesn’t mean number. It means finger or… TOE.

But you already knew that.

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Getting Fooled Is Fun

One of the most delightful aspects of a good crossword puzzle is exactly this type of linguistic misdirection. You read a clue. Your mind assumes that a word or phrase means one thing. But the answer is based on a completely different meaning for that word or phrase. An especially good clue will have you discounting obvious solutions to other clues. When you finally figure it out, there’s a nerdy little thrill in the cathartic face-palm that follows.

Crossword creators leverage linguistic assumptions—like “digit” more often standing in for “number” than “finger” or “toe”—to mess with our minds. And it’s these short-lived and inconsequential moments of mental chaos that make solving crossword puzzles fun. On the surface, a crossword is “just” a puzzle, a typically independent pen and paper game with only trivial ties to the real world. But dig a little deeper, and a crossword becomes a training ground for noticing when our assumptions and jumps-to-conclusion are standing between us and our goals.

The problem we think we’re dealing with is often only a small piece of the puzzle. Sometimes, it’s not part of the puzzle at all. If we spend all our energy trying to solve a problem that’s at best a fragment and at worst a complete misdirection, we only become more entrenched in the situation we’re trying to work out.

Systems theorist Donella Meadows offers one framework we can apply to this, as she calls it, “common and distracting tendency.” She says we often “define a problem not by the system’s actual behavior, but by the lack of our favorite solution.” In my crossword example, I defined my problem by the lack of a solution to the Down clue that fit my answer to 37 Across. To solve the puzzle, I had to ditch my preferred solution of TEN and allow the Down clue to be my guide.

We all have our go-to solutions or mental shortcuts that we use to deal with a challenge. In today’s headlines, that might look like “Send in the cops” or “Kick out the homeless people.” In your business, it might sound more like “I should post more” or “I gotta jump on this new idea.” On a work team, it might appear as “Let’s schedule a meeting” or “We need to be more efficient.”

Well, when those are your preferred solutions, you’ll tend to see everything as a policing problem, or a marketing problem, or an efficiency problem. And for the latter two, that might be the case. But it’s even more likely that there is something else going on—and that trying to solve a marketing problem or an efficiency problem that doesn’t exist only exacerbates the underlying issue.

Here’s another example—this time from a work and business context.

Rethinking Strategy

In 2007, I took a job managing a new location for Bucks County Coffee Company. At that time, Bucks County Coffee was expanding its footprint by renting spaces in grocery stores around southeast and south-central Pennsylvania. The shop I managed was one of these store-within-a-store locations. Think a Starbucks-in-a-Target kind of deal.

My shop was little more than an oversized kiosk tucked into the front corner of the grocery store. It had everything you’d expect along the back counter—the espresso machine, pump pots of brewed coffee, blenders, and a rack full of sticky syrups. But the front of the shop had a distinguishing feature: a counter well filled with a dozen or more burlap sacks of whole bean coffee. As at a deli counter, customers could specify the beans they wanted in the amount they needed, and we would scoop them to order.

As a fairly recent convert to coffee snobbery, I had some qualms about this method of coffee storage. But mostly, I was excited about the opportunity it gave me to geek out with customers and introduce them to new coffee experiences.

Despite the prominent display of whole-bean coffee choices, most customers who approached my shop just wanted to treat themselves to a mocha or iced coffee while shopping for groceries. That meant most of our sales slowly registered in increments of $3 or $4. There were plenty of shifts in which the company would have barely broken even on the cost of my labor, let alone the cost of goods or overhead.

Bucks County Coffee did what I think most companies in its position would do: try to entice a larger portion of the grocery store foot traffic with new drinks and fun flavors. Marketing and signage focused on encouraging more people to opt in to that “treat yourself” moment when they walked through the sliding doors. As someone who appreciated that a busy shift was a quick shift, I was fine with this. But I started to wonder if it was really the most effective strategy.

The margin on the cost of coffee, milk, paper cup, and sweetener was quite high—often 75% or more. But each $3 or $4 coffee drink took me a few minutes to prepare. In contrast, the margin on our whole-bean coffee was also high—about 50%—but I could scoop a pound of coffee in under a minute and earn a $12 or $15 sale. What’s more, a mocha or cappuccino was almost a commodity, a product that’s essentially the same no matter where you buy it. Our whole bean coffee, on the other hand, was a fairly unique experience. The customer described what they liked, and I recommended a specific variety or blend. The customer had questions about how to best store or prepare it, and I had the answers.

What’s more, Bucks County Coffee Company was a coffee roaster first and foremost. These grocery store coffee shops were designed to expose more people to the coffee they roasted, in addition to making an errand a little more enjoyable.

So I concocted a different strategy for my little shop. I decided we needed to sell beans and a lot of them.

I borrowed a technique I learned from previous coffee shop experience and began offering coffee pairings as samples. Just like with wine, different coffees pair well with different foods. A tart lemon scone might bring out the citrus notes in a Central American coffee. A cinnamon raisin muffin might highlight the earthy, spicy notes of an Indonesian coffee. Pairing a coffee with the right food can make black coffee taste great, even to the most die-hard cream and sugar coffee drinkers.

So I would prepare a carafe of coffee, select the appropriate item from the bakery or produce section, and set up a little tasting experience on the side of my shop next to the grocery store entrance. I also displayed the whole bean coffee next to my tray of treats. When a customer approached, I’d offer the sample and explain the pairing. People were dubious but politely played along. Then, their eyes would get big, and a smile would creep across their faces. They were experiencing something they’d never experienced before. Even if they didn’t buy whole-bean coffee that day, I’d made an impression on them.

Unsurprisingly, our whole-bean coffee sales started to tick up. Our average transaction value skyrocketed. Among all the newer locations, mine was by far the highest grossing. My boss—and her boss, one of the company’s VPs—wanted to know what the heck I was doing.

Upper management had assumed, of course, that more people buying more coffee drinks was the way to increase sales and turn a profit. They were following a model similar to that of major chains, which licensed their brand names to grocery stores, bookstores, and airports. Specialty coffee was already widespread in the 2000s, but the market still had plenty of room for expansion.

I came from one of these environments. I knew this model well. But I could also see that the model wasn’t working with this particular set of variables.

I developed a different model by leveraging the core competency of my employer (coffee roasting) in conjunction with the functional environment of our location (grocery shopping), taking into account my knowledge of and interest in coffee (a lot), the financial realities of beverage sales versus whole-bean sales, and the constraints on our foot traffic and labor capacity.

There are really only two ways to increase revenue for a business: increase the number of transactions or increase the value of each transaction. “Number of transactions” was the mental model through which upper management approached the issue and devised their interventions. They viewed the current number of transactions as a lack of their preferred solution (i.e., more customers). When you see the problem as an insufficient supply of customers, you make marketing and operations decisions aimed at attracting more customers: pushier sales strategies, quotas, discounts, new products, etc.

This model of the issue wasn’t necessarily wrong—simply incomplete (as all models are). It is true that increasing the number of transactions would increase sales (if not profit). But this model failed to account for brand positioning and customer context. What’s more, if the strategy based on that model had been successful, it would have required far more labor hours to fulfill the demand—something that’s hard to pay for $3 or $4 at a time.

I evaluated the challenge of increasing sales through the “value of each transaction” lens, which led me to a different set of interventions. It’s a bit cliché, but I focused on slower, longer-term initiatives like the education of both my team members and our customers, as well as creating quality customer experiences. I had no control and very little influence on the number of people who walked into the grocery store. I had only slightly more influence on whether someone slowed down long enough to engage them. However, I had quite a bit of influence on someone who was already discussing coffee with me. That influence could easily lead to bigger sales—even if there weren’t more of them. What’s more, I could double or triple sales without incurring an extra minute of labor cost.

The point of this story is not to demonstrate my coffee business prowess or the savvy of my strategic thinking. The point is that how we think about a problem or goal really matters. The variables we include, the relationships we draw between them, the flows of influence or resources—they change the interventions we choose. They change what interventions might even be possible.

Our models for understanding the problem—the assumptions and default modes of thinking that Bucks County Coffee and I employed—led directly to the action we believed would create the results we desired. We looked at the same clues, the same confounding puzzle, but oriented our approaches to different variables.

At the risk of self-aggrandizement, Bucks County Coffee Company assumed the answer was TEN. I realized it was TOE.

Three Ways to Rethink Your Options

First, rethinking a problem begins long before you encounter it. Rethinking a problem starts with awareness of your own habits of thought. Practice noticing the assumptions you make and the mental models you use to evaluate your options. Take your thinking out of autopilot and get curious about why you make the choices you make. If something seems obvious, ask why.

Similarly, when others surprise you with an ingenious strategy, out-of-left-field choice, or unexpected analysis, consider how their mental model differed from yours and look for the assumptions that they didn’t make. Reverse engineer their thought process so you can apply it yourself in the future.

Second, laying out all of the variables can also be helpful. When I deleted TEN and answered the Down clue, I got a new variable that unlocked 37 Across for me. When I decided to focus on average dollars per transaction, I was looking at the same reports that upper management was, I just chose a different variable to pay attention to. Keep in mind that there are the variables that are clear to you—the ones driven by your preexisting mental model—and then there are variables that you’ll need to go looking for. Consider intangible variables alongside the ones that are easier to document and measure.

Finally, think beyond the current situation. Time, feedback, and adaptations that come with both always have far-reaching implications for the effectiveness of your approach. Game out any solution you come up with to look for variables that will only present themselves as the situation matures. Consider the operational, psychological, or material knock-on effects of pursuing a particular path.

Last Thing

Many years ago, I taught a workshop on… actually, I don’t remember what the subject was. I just remember that I recommended allotting time for just thinking to the business owners in attendance. Many participants were quite taken aback at the idea that an important part of the work of a business owner was thinking about their business. They’d come to expect that their job was to do stuff—whether marketing, product development, customer service, or value delivery. I mean, relatable, right?

Thinking often feels like not doing. But all action is the product of thought. Unfortunately, most of the time, the thought that produces our actions is unconsidered, subconscious, and riddled with unhelpful heuristics. Often, our thinking isn’t thinking at all; it’s rumination. And so, our actions—our doing—are less than effective or, worse, counterproductive.

Thinking and rethinking with care, curiosity, and context is critical to whatever work we do. Making time and saving energy for diligent consideration is essential.

It might seem like a luxury at first, but it’s really the difference between TEN and TOE.

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