The Alternative Manager’s Guide to Problem Solving

This story is excerpted from the cover story from INSTORE’s January 2026 edition, “The Alternative Manager’s Toolkit” by Chris Burslem.

Challenge/Task: Problem Solving

Traditional Playbook: Most managers believe that providing ample resources — money, tools, time, or personnel — is the best way to solve problems. The idea is that more resources will enable staff to fix issues faster and more effectively.

The Problem: There’s a saying in business that if you have enough money to fix a problem, you don’t have a genuine problem — you have a resource allocation issue. Moreover, relying on resources can lead to dependency, inefficiency, and sometimes wasted efforts. Sometimes, too many resources can dilute focus or encourage spending rather than innovation. Money is also rarely the answer to systemic or long-term issues like cultural problems or ensuring your business’s long-term viability. “Real” problems like process re-engineering or a strategic pivot often require innovative solutions that go beyond funding.

The Alternative Manager’s Fix: Use artificial constraints — deliberately impose limits on time, budget, or scope — to drive creativity and resourcefulness. Constraints spark innovation by forcing teams to think differently, prioritize ruthlessly, and come up with clever solutions within tight parameters, often more effective than simply throwing resources at a problem. Behind all this is the counterintuitive insight that discipline and structure are often the path to freedom, not its enemy.

How to Make It Happen

• Limit the budget or parameters intentionally, encouraging creative solutions that do more with less. In an essay “17 Questions That Changed My Life”, blogger Tim Ferriss writes: “The question I found most helpful was, ‘If I could only work two hours per week on my business, what would I do?’ Honestly speaking, it was more like, ‘Yes, I know it’s impossible, but if I had a gun to my head or contracted some horrible disease, and I had to limit work to two hours per week, what would I do to keep things afloat?'” Confronted with such a constraint, you may be surprised at the ideas you, or your team, come up with.
• Limit decision options: Restrict the number of choices available during planning or design to force prioritization and creativity. Create “rules of the game” that restrict the tools or resources that can be used to prompt out-of-the-box thinking.
• Use random constraints or inputs: Introduce unpredictable elements like specific materials or themes to stimulate novel ideas.
• Apply the “Inverse Thinking” technique: Pose questions like, “What if I couldn’t do the obvious solution?” to discover unconventional approaches.
• Encourage cross-disciplinary constraints: Combine principles or constraints from different fields to inspire innovative solutions.
• Frame constraints as a game. Not only are games about fun, but they are distinguished by the rules that govern them. And about winning.