In today’s corporate parlance, we become adept at a reactive form of decision making as opposed to being proactive, or creative, in our planned path forward. As skilled problem solvers, we carry around a huge problem solving hammer and then understandably see every situation as a nail. And when our hammer will not effectively ‘resolve’ the nail in front of us, we mistakenly believe that “what we need here is a bigger hammer.” For those of you who can relate to this approach and may have been nodding your head, you know better than anyone that it becomes a self-perpetuating cycle where the bigger hammer always encounters a bigger nail, which then requires a bigger hammer, etc. When we perceive that problems being solved will result in a greater possibility for our efforts, for our product, or for our customer, we have bought into our own belief that fighting fires is the same as preventing them. - Tapio Kulmala