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Whenever you’re facing a new, complex problem to solve, step back and reflect on your general approach from a philosophical point of view: are you aiming at solving it completely straight from the beginning or are you integrating a learning curve? Perhaps the most complicated problem ever solved was to put a man on the Moon, and maybe we can learn something from NASA’s approach. Related Posts:Chances are that sooner or later you will be leading a problem-solving team. When you do, make sure that you use the right leadership style. Just as there isn’t a single golf club that’s optimal for all shots, there isn’t one leadership style that is most effective in all situations. Instead, you must adapt your style depending on the skills and confidence of your team to do the task in hand. This is called situational leadership; it was first developed by Ken Blanchard and Paul Hersey in Management of Organizational Behavior (now in its 9th edition). Here is a variation of it. Related Posts:Solving problems in general, and building issue trees in particular, requires both an understanding of the general picture and an almost-obsessive attention to details. Usually we are good at one or the other but hardly ever at both. If you suck, you will probably need someone to tell you, so get a Devil’s advocate. Progress through critiqueThe hard part about solving problems on your own is that it requires to shift your paradigm, which isn’t the easiest thing to do, let alone by yourself. Related Posts:
If you can’t identify the right key question or the right solution to your problem, maybe you need to re-consider how you’re looking at it. A couple of days ago I quoted William Ury’s Ted Talk in a post on the importance of telling a story. He had another interesting bit; I’ll paraphrase. A farmer dies leaving his 17 camels to be split between his 3 sons. He wants the eldest to have half the camels, the second son to have a third, and the youngest to have a ninth. Related Posts:Richard Feynman, the physics Nobel Prize laureate, gave a commencement speech at CalTech in 1974. There he talked about cargo cult science: Related Posts:Simplify as much as you can, but not more. Simplify as much as you canWhen I first moved to the US in the mid-nighties, I became much smarter. At least, I felt much smarter. If I were sick, I would go to the doctor and she would explain me in English what I had, why I had it, what I could do about it, and how I could prevent having it again. Related Posts:
So you’re starting a new problem-solving project. Start developing your final presentation on the first day of your project. That will help you get to a better solution and get there more easily. Summarize your findings in a presentation form the first dayIn these days of Powerpoint—or Keynote—omnipresence, I doubt anyone of us has to face a professional problem-solving task that won’t culminate in presenting our results to an audience. The good news is that if you build your final presentation from the first day of your project, not only will you prepare for that final presentation but you’ll also improve significantly your problem-solving effectiveness and efficiency. Related Posts:This entry is part of a multi-post case study. One effective way to become better problem-solvers is to use cases, so I’ll post problems that we have solved in my class so we can criticize them (these are all real problems). Let’s start with a first example: the case of a multinational company that has problems with sourcing cables, an essential part of its products. Here is the problem identification card (PIC). Related Posts:
You embarked in a problem solving process, that requires fact gathering, analysis and communication. You might not know how long it’s going to take you and how much effort will be associated but be sure of one thing: it will be messy. Asking “so what?” consistently can help you limit the messiness… It helps you focus your thinkingAt many stages of the problem solving process you’ll have to gather data. Consistently asking “so what?” helps you decide which data is relevant. Related Posts:
The first step in the problem solving process is to identify precisely the problem you want to solve. That entails synthesizing the relevant information. Building a problem identification card can help you do so. We already discussed in another entry the information that you should use to define your problem. This entry clarifies how you should organize that information. Related Posts: |
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