At least, not solving them yourself.
The November issue of Fast Company magazine, the Made to Stick feature has some wisdom, that is unfortunately not too common, to pass on. What Dan Heath and Chip Heath have to say is:
We approach problem solving almost completely backwards and with a good dose of tunnel vision.
According to the article, as well as personal experience, most of the time problem solving goes like this:
Your company has a problem. You can't seem to fix it.
So you go to your peers/colleagues. They can't seem to fix it.
Then you go to the top experts in the field. Still no cigar. In fact, not even close. And now you are out the money for the consult.
In the words of Karl Malden, "What will you do? What will you do?"
You should go looking for help outside your tunnel, meaning that solutions can come from many places. All that has to happen is for you to make the connection with someone (or something) that has already solved this problem. Then take that solution and adapt it to your needs.
It's called "looking for analogs". Rather than trying to solve the problem using only ideas and tools from within your industry, you need to define the problem in a more basic way. You need to determine what the end-result needs to be in a more basic way. You need to put it into terms of where and how this type of problem has been solved before, by somebody or something else, and with an end-result like the one you need. A is to B as Blank is to D. Fill in the blank, mimic or copy the method used for the original problem to solve yours.
The authors of this article have several examples of who or what has been tapped to solve a problem in a completely different area. In one instance, it was making the connection between a certain type of fish, what it eats, and where it lives, to help solve the problem of creating a detergent that will work well in cold-water, which has to include getting oils out of clothing.
Introducing the icefish, who happens to live in water that is very close to being ice and who happens to need to digest the oils of its prey. The process this fish uses is very much along the lines of what happens during laundering oily substances on fabric with detergent. (This method is called biomimicry, where you try to copy solutions from nature.)
Et, Voila! A solution that already existed for your problem. Saves a lot time and money when this happens. Now you only need to solve the problem of how to find the thing or person who has the solution you need all worked out. Is this easy? No. It impossible? No.
Think of parallels and patterrns. Think of who might have had a similar problem to yours but in a different field or industry. The Heath's example (besides the icefish)? Swimwear designers looking to NASA's aerospace engineers to develop swimsuits with very little drag.
So don't limit yourself to finding solutions in your own backyard. Look across the fence, down the block, at the zoo, to see if your problem has already been fixed.
BTW, Dan Heath and Chip Heath are not only the authors of the feature I mentioned in Fast Company magazine. They wrote an entire book titled "Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die."
Time to broaden those horizons.