Today’s solutions are not yesterday’s solutions.

We learn a lot from the past. We take those lessons into consideration as we reflect on present situations and how to avoid or solve them. But we can’t copy/paste the solutions. Situations change. Needs change. Solutions need to be reconsidered.

Especially when we’re trying to grow, we can’t solve problems the same ways they were solved in the past. There have been improvements. Sometimes we need to think broader. Problems and solutions aren’t a simple toddler game of matching.

I served at a family shelter in Israel years ago. Although it wasn’t on our original to do list, we tackled organizing a massive wall of shelving units filled to overflowing with games and puzzles. It was a woodpecker problem to the director. She saw it everyday, and it bothered her—peck, peck, peck—but there were more pressing challenges. We decided to take it on, and quite frankly, we didn’t know the scope of the task even though it was right in front of us. We started to organize it by age and type. We wanted to make sure all the pieces were in each box, because if not, it wasn’t worth keeping. (Of course, we kept all the missing pieces and incomplete boxes until the end, hoping we’d reunite some pieces to their rightful boxes.) We had to upsource the ones requiring familiarity with another language, but surely we could work on some of the preschool games. How hard would that be?

They were more challenging than we expected.

I remember a specific matching game. How difficult is matching items like a baby bottle and a baby? A lot of the matching would be universal, right? Well…until we couldn’t find a cow to match to the milk container. Oh, right. It matched with the goat instead. And what went with the grapes? The glass of wine? I’m not sure that’s in any preschool matching game in the U.S., but different facts are important in different cultures. We laughed at how ignorant we must have sounded as we tried many of the games designed for young kids.

We can take a similar approach when solving problems. “Well, this worked before, so let’s do it again.” But the problem has shifted. Or maybe it worked well the first time because it was a new idea. Sometimes we only need to tweak a solution, but sometimes we need to analyze the problem from scratch and brainstorm possibilities. When we try to impose the same solutions over changing problems, we are forcing matching game cards to pair when they don’t. You can swap out the cow and the goat to go with the milk, but you can’t swap the milk and the wine to pair with the cow.

Sometimes we get an easy match, but sometimes we have to invest more time, logic, and creativity.