Good morning,

With the weather warming up, I decided to spend some time last weekend unpacking for the spring and summer. But as I was storing my sweaters and other winter wear into the clothes bin, I had a hard time squeezing in the final few items no matter how I arranged them. I was confused. Just last year, I had fit these same clothes into the same container. So I couldn’t understand why, this time around, the task seemed like an impossibility. 

This week, Kellogg’s Derek Rucker uses a classic experiment to show how reframing the way we view and approach problems—whether at home or in the workplace—can help us encounter a completely different outcome.

Plus, we look at career lessons from an actor’s resurgence.

Are you solving the right problem?

In a now-classic experiment, the psychologist Karl Duncker asked a group of study participants to attach a candle to a wall in a way that ensured the wax wouldn’t drip onto the table below it. The only tools they were allowed to use were a box of thumbtacks and a book of matches. 

Many of the participants tried to melt the wax and stick the candle directly onto the wall. Nearly all of them failed to complete the task. 

Then Duncker made a small change to how he presented the challenge. He took out the thumbtacks and placed them beside the box. With this setup, nearly everyone figured out how to solve the challenge almost immediately. They attached the box to the wall with the thumbtacks and then put the candle inside of it.

“When the tacks were inside the box, people saw the box as a container,” says Rucker, a professor of marketing. “The moment the tacks were separated, the box became something else—a shelf, a platform, a solution.”

The experiment is a helpful reminder for us to think outside the box, especially when we’re stuck on a problem with limited resources at hand. Rucker relates the experiment to the world of marketing, where brands often obsess over what their competitors are doing instead of focusing on the unique attributes of their product.

“The materials you need may already be on the table,” Rucker says. “The question is whether you can see them for what they are.”

Read more on LinkedIn.

Building on our strengths

But there are other ways we can approach sticky problems. One of them is to build on our strengths. 

Tim Calkins, a clinical professor of marketing at Kellogg, illustrates this approach using the example of an actor who had a successful stint on the medical drama ER but struggled to advance his career after he left. 

The actor assumed that he’d quickly get offers for leading roles on hit shows or on the big screen like his costar George Clooney did. But it didn’t turn out that way.

The problem, he came to realize, was that his identity as an actor had become inseparable from his ER character after spending 11 years on the show. 

It’s a dilemma that many people face in their career, Calkins observes. “How long should you stay in a job or with a company? There is no correct answer, but be aware that the longer you stay, the more the role and the company will define your brand.”

Nearly two decades later, the veteran actor chose to lean into his brand rather than continue to work around it. He helped produce, direct, write, and star in a new medical drama that, like ER, takes place in an emergency room, allowing his strength as an actor and his brand to really shine. 

The show? The award-winning series The Pitt. And the actor? Noah Wyle, who took home both an Emmy and a Golden Globe for best actor in a drama series.

“Everyone has different strengths, different stories, and different experiences,” Calkins says. “If you try to be someone else, you will likely stumble. If you build on your strengths, you will be unique and positioned for success.”

Read more in the Strong Brands newsletter.

“The so-called ‘Amazon effect’—the steady rise of e-commerce’s share of retail sales—is, at the moment, losing some momentum.”

See you next week,

Abraham Kim, senior research editor
Kellogg Insight