Why can two intelligent people look at exactly the same problem and see completely different solutions?
We usually assume a difference is knowledge. One person knows something the other doesn’t. Perhaps they have more experience, better information or greater expertise. But sometimes they have access to the same information. The difference is what they see when they look at it.
That’s the interesting thing about thinking. We don’t simply observe a problem as it is. We interpret it through everything we’ve learnt before: our experience, expertise, assumptions and the approaches that have worked for us in the past.
Most of the time, that’s incredibly useful. Until the problem in front of us requires us to see something differently.
In 1854, a devastating cholera outbreak swept through London’s Soho district. At the time, the dominant belief was that cholera travelled through contaminated air. It made sense given what people knew, so doctors viewed the outbreak through that lens.
John Snow looked somewhere else.
Rather than focusing only on the disease itself, he mapped where people were becoming sick. He looked at streets, households, daily behaviour, and where residents got their water.
Eventually, a pattern emerged. Many deaths clustered around a particular water pump on Broad Street. Snow wasn’t necessarily working with more information than everyone around him. He was asking different questions. Others saw a disease problem. He also saw a geographical, a behavioural, and an infrastructure problem.
The information hadn’t changed. The lens did.
Experience is incredibly efficient. A doctor recognises symptoms they’ve seen hundreds of times. A salesperson hears hesitation in a customer’s voice. A leader notices the early signs that a project is drifting off course. We don’t have to analyse every situation from the beginning because experience teaches us which patterns matter.
But there’s a trade-off we rarely talk about.
Experience doesn’t just teach us what to notice. It can also teach us what to ignore. The more often a particular approach works, the more likely we are to reach for it again. A familiar idea is the Law of the Hammer: if the only tool you have is a hammer, everything starts looking like a nail.
But the problem isn’t always that we only have one tool. Sometimes we have plenty. We just keep reaching for our favourite.
Put the same business problem in front of a marketer, a finance expert, a psychologist and a technology specialist; each person will notice something completely different. Their expertise doesn’t only influence the solution they recommend. It influences which part of the problem captures their attention in the first place.
That’s what makes expertise so valuable. It can also become a blind spot. Expertise can make us better at solving problems. It can also make us better at solving every problem the same way.
When we can’t solve something, our instinct is often to gather more. Another report. More data. More research. Another opinion. We assume the answer must be hiding in something we haven’t discovered yet.
Sometimes it is.
But sometimes we already have the information we need. We’re simply looking at it in a way that prevents us from seeing something else. That’s what makes the John Snow story so interesting. He didn’t solve the cholera outbreak by looking harder at the symptoms everyone was already studying; he changed what he was looking for.
And that’s an important distinction.
Better thinking isn’t always about knowing more. Sometimes it’s about seeing what you already know in a different way.
This is where mental models become useful. A mental model is simply a way of understanding how something works. We already use them constantly, often without realising it.
Supply and demand give us one way to think about markets. Probability changes how we think about uncertainty and risk. Incentives help us understand why people behave differently when the consequences change. Inversion encourages us to turn a problem around and examine it from the opposite direction.
None gives us the complete picture. That’s precisely why having more than one matters.
Each gives us another place to stand while looking at the same problem.
You don’t need to become an expert in every discipline. The value comes from understanding enough different ways of thinking to recognise when your usual approach may not be the only one available. A broader mental toolbox doesn’t necessarily give you more answers. It gives you more ways to ask the question.
There’s another reason changing perspective can be difficult. The approaches we trust most usually earned that trust. They worked.
They helped us solve problems, make good decisions, and succeed in what we do. So when something stops working, our instinct isn’t necessarily to question the approach. We often double down on it.
A sales strategy stops performing, so the team makes more calls. A marketing campaign underperforms, so we allocate more money to it. When a leadership approach stops connecting with a team, we repeat the message more forcefully.
Sometimes persistence is exactly what’s needed. But sometimes more effort simply makes us more efficient at doing the wrong thing.
That’s when the better question isn’t “What else can I do?”
It’s “What am I assuming about this problem that might no longer be true?”
Thinking differently doesn’t necessarily require extraordinary creativity. Sometimes it starts with interrupting the first answer that comes to you. What would someone outside your industry notice? What if the opposite explanation were true? What have you dismissed because it doesn’t fit what you already know?
The goal isn’t to abandon expertise. Expertise gives us speed, pattern recognition and judgement that can take years to develop. The goal is to stop expertise becoming the boundary of what we’re able to see.
John Snow didn’t solve the cholera outbreak because everyone around him wasn’t thinking hard enough. The dominant explanation told people where to look.
He was willing to look somewhere else.
And the same thing happens with much more ordinary problems. When you’re stuck, the answer may not be another hour of analysis, another report or another attempt at the same solution. You might already have the information you need.
Because sometimes the problem isn’t that you can’t find the answer. It’s that your experience has taught you where to look.
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