Key points
- How we define a problem can hide better solutions.
- Expertise can lock us into assumptions that once made us successful.
- Real innovation starts by questioning the problem, not perfecting the same answer.
I’m sure you can relate to having the same argument again and again. You explain yourself differently, try a new approach, but somehow end up right back where you started. Maybe you’ve stayed in a job long after you knew it wasn’t right for you, working harder instead of asking whether effort was ever the problem. It may feel like progress, but you may be working on the wrong problem
Psychologists call this functional fixedness. Once we define a problem in a certain way, we can stop seeing that definition and begin building solutions around it without questioning the frame. The same pattern can happen in professional fields, where people spend decades chasing the same goal, such as more power, speed, or intensity, simply because it works well enough
To learn more about this, I spoke with Shlomo Assa, a technology executive who spent more than a decade working within this mindset before recognizing that the problem itself needed to be redefined. His experience offers a firsthand look at how fixed thinking takes hold and how challenging our assumptions can open the door to better solutions
What Familiarity Hides
Think about anything you’ve used the same way for years: a spare room that’s stayed “the guest room” for a decade, or a budget line nobody questions. Once something becomes associated with one purpose, your mind can stop considering what else it could be used for
Psychologist Karl Duncker demonstrated this in 1945 in his classic candle problem study. Participants were given a candle, a box of tacks, and matches, and asked to attach the candle to a wall without letting wax drip onto the table. Many struggled to see that the box itself could be used as a platform for the candle because they viewed it primarily as a container for tacks. This shows how familiarity can limit what we see as possible. Once we associate an object with one purpose, it can be difficult to imagine using it in a different way.
Why Expertise Makes It Worse
The people most likely to get stuck this way are often the most experienced in the room, which is the part nobody wants to hear. The more fluent you become in a field’s usual questions, the harder it is to notice when the questions themselves are wrong
For instance, researchsuggests that expertise can sometimes narrow how we approach problems. When people become deeply familiar with a field, they can become more attached to established ways of thinking, making it harder to consider new perspectives or alternative solutions. Experts call this cognitive entrenchment
Assa saw this in his career. “You get very good at the questions your industry has agreed to ask,” he says. “You’re competing on the same measures as everyone else, improving, so it feels like progress. What you’re not doing is asking whether the measure is right, because nobody around you is asking either. The people the technology wasn’t serving got treated as outside the market, instead of as evidence the approach was wrong.”
Breaking the Frame
This bias often works below our awareness, so simply trying to be more open-minded isn’t enough. Arecent review of over 50 studies on overcoming fixation found the same pattern every time: The techniques that worked all forced a deliberate pause to question assumptions before jumping to solutions
Assa’s approach follows that same principle. His process is to listen, observe, analyze, challenge, understand the need, and then create. He puts challenge before creation on purpose. “You have to attack your own framing before you fall for your own solution,” he says. “Otherwise, you’ll defend it without realizing it.”
For Assa, that meant questioning assumptions that had long shaped laser treatment design. Instead of accepting pain, long recovery times, and the challenges of safely treating darker skin tones as unavoidable trade-offs, he treated them as problems worth solving. Changing the question changed what was possible
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Action Steps
Here are three simple ways to recognize when you’re stuck in a fixed way of thinking and open yourself to a different approach:
- List what you’ve stopped questioning: Entrenched problems get reclassified as “just how things are.” Ask yourself what you’ve learned to tolerate that you once thought should be different.
- Name the goal, not the method: If you can’t describe what you want without describing how you pursue it, you’re still inside the frame. Separate what you want from the way you’ve always tried to get it.
- Ask someone outside your field: An outsider’s “obvious” question can expose an assumption your expertise made invisible. Sometimes the person who knows the least about your usual approach can see the possibility you’ve stopped noticing.
Bottom Line
Functional fixedness isn’t about effort or intelligence. Sometimes we get so used to one way of seeing a problem that we stop noticing other possibilities. The next time something isn’t working, before trying harder, stop and ask: Am I solving the right problem? Look at the situation from a different angle, question what you’ve been assuming, and consider what you would try if you weren’t limited by the usual approach. Sometimes a small shift in how you define the problem can change what you see as possible.
References
Duncker, K. (1945). On problem-solving. Psychological Monographs, 58(5), i–113. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0093599
Wang, S., Okada, T., & Takagi, K. (2023). How to effectively overcome fixation: A systematic review of fixation and defixation studies on the basis of fixation//doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2023.1183025
Zhang, T., Harrington, K. B., & Sherf, E. N. (2022). The errors of experts: When expertise hinders effective provision and seeking of advice and feedback. Current Opinion in Psychology, 43, 91–95. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2021.06.011
