Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies for Giant Leaps in Work and Life

When we’re familiar with a problem, and when we think we have the right answer, we stop seeing alternatives. This tendency is known as the Einstellung effect.

“Every answer,” Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen says, “has a question that retrieves it.”11 The answer is often embedded within the question itself, so the framing of the question becomes crucial to the solution. Charles Darwin would agree. “Looking back,” he wrote in a letter to a friend, “I think it was more difficult to see

This approach mistakes tactics for strategy. Although the terms are often used interchangeably, they refer to different concepts. A strategy is a plan for achieving an objective. Tactics, in contrast, are the actions you take to implement the strategy.

The difficulty lies, as John Maynard Keynes said, “not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones.”

To think like a rocket scientist is to look at the world through a different lens. Rocket scientists imagine the unimaginable and solve the unsolvable. They transform failures into triumphs and constraints into advantages. They view mishaps as solvable puzzles rather than insurmountable roadblocks. They’re moved not by blind conviction but by self-

Over time, we become a hammer, and every problem looks like a nail.

THE NEXT TIME you’re tempted to engage in problem solving, try problem finding instead. Ask yourself, Am I asking the right question? If I changed my perspective, how would the problem change? How can I frame the question in terms of strategy, instead of tactics? How do I flip the thumbtack box and view this resource in terms of its form, not its f

Often, we fall in love with our favorite solution and then define the problem as the absence of that solution. “The problem is, we need a better three-legged lander.” “The problem is, we don’t have enough incubators.”

When we reframe a question—when we change our method of questioning—we have the power to change the answers.