For most of the problems you solve in your everyday life, you can safely rely on intuition. Complex problems, however, are a different breed.

For those, you might be better served following a formal process that guides you through clarifying what your problem is (the "what"), understand its root causes (the "why"), and identify alternative ways before analyzing them and deciding which is, on balance, the best (the "how"). This post on Oxford University Press's blog gives some ideas on how to do that.

Image credit: fsbraun.