Chances are, you are not solving the problem that you should. Nothing personal, dear reader, as I wholeheartedly trust your instincts and impeccable judgment, but focusing on our perceived problem—rather than a better one—happens to the best of us. We…
Working for Accenture had its ups and downs, but one great, great up was a simple idea: help others be successful. Thinking about it after so many years, there are a couple of instances that stem out: – In my…
Decision making is a critical part of the problem-solving process. But it is also only that: a part. The process has several others; don’t overlook some at the expense of others. (This post is a summary of a guest article I did…
“Assume you’re a scientist and you have a flea with six legs”, the joke goes, “that does what you ask him to do. “So, ask him to jump, and he jumps. Next, cut off two of his legs and ask…
My good friend and mentor, stochastic processes über-guru Pol Spanos, has many wise sayings. One is: Intuition is a good servant but a terrible master. You are terribly flawed. But don’t take it personally, dear reader, we all are, suffering from…
Framing your problem well is of paramount importance, and yet, it’s easy to focus on a poor problem. Here are some guidelines to help you discover a good problem and stay on target. Think about a painting; the frame is a…
A CEO wants to increase his company’s profitability. The owner of a restaurant wants to fix the chronic saturation of his parking lot. A team managers wonders how to accommodate the workload on her team. At first look, these problems…
You can boost your organization’s innovation capacity by turning problems into contests, and inviting outsiders to pitch their solutions. “Solve our problem”, the concept goes, “and we’ll give you a ton of cash!” That’s crowdsourcing, or collaborative innovation. The practice…
Change is difficult. Yeah, what else is new? Well, change can be even more difficult in some situations. Take universities: the hierarchy is flat; the power is complete distributed. Take boards or C-level executives, same setup. Leading one of these…
Citing Baddeley (2003)*, the Oxford Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning defines working memory as ‘the ability to maintain and manipulate information in short-term memory while resisting interference.’ A recent report by the National Academy of Sciences partially dedicated to helping students with problems…
The National Academies Press recently published another of their reports—Discipline-Based Education Research: Understanding and Improving Learning in Undergraduate Science and Engineering (downloadable here). Chapter 5 of that publication is dedicated to problem solving; it advocates working forward: “[E]xpert problem solvers typically…
One handy tip I picked up at Accenture: If you have a meeting with your boss, a client, or just about anybody else higher than you in the food chain, take a few minutes beforehand to prepare the agenda. In the…
“Have the breadth to see the problems, and the depth to solve them.” — Anonymous (as reported in Tomorrow’s Professor by Richard Reis) Think of problem solving as the combination of divergent and convergent thinking. When answering a ‘how can we do…
If you are in a managerial position, you should be concerned about how to get the best people to your team and how to help them do their job optimally. A recent publication from the National Research Council looked at how…
A few years ago, Lance Armstrong finally faced doping charges. Shortly before he confessed, a number of organizations, like ESPN or the LA Times ran polls to know if people thought he had been doping. The results were pretty evenly balanced: In ESPN’s…
If 50% of success is showing up, having an effective presentation gets you at least an additional 25%. (And, of course, a good delivery accounts for the other 75%.) When it comes to good slide decks, we can all learn…
If you’re in charge of a team, your ability to get the best out of your people can mean the difference between failure and success. We talked about how you should adapt your leadership style to your team’s skills and confidence. Here…
This is part 3 of our 4-part on MECE thinking — part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4. For those of us discovering the MECE concept and those perfecting it, it can be oh-so-attractive: Finally, a way to organize my…
Moshe Vardi is a star faculty at Rice University. One day, he gave a talk called “Graduate Students, Marshmallows, and Academic Jobs.” Cute title, I thought. But the marshmallow part wasn’t just there for cuteness, it was an integral part…
If you spend any time on this site, you know I’m pretty big on engaging others into solving problems. That’s because, in my experience, teams are smarter than individuals. But there’s also value in thinking about how you compose your teams. Experts are…
Jonah Lehrer writes a thought-provoking piece in this week’s New Yorker, where he argues that brainstorming is limited. Here are my take-aways from it. Don’t work by yourself: enlist others Lehrer’s conclusion is similar to ours: you’ll be more creative if you enlist…
My good friend Paula told me how she once visited a friend who was undergoing chemotherapy at the hospital. She found him lying in bed, messing with the dial for his intravenous probe. He was in pain and wanted to…
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…
Issue trees, issue maps, logic trees, how trees, why trees, diagnostic trees, solution trees, decision trees, fact trees, hypothesis trees… How should you call your trees? Your favorite consultancy has its own terminology and so does the rest of the world. Unfortunately, they don’t…
You can approach most complex problems from various angles. Each one might give you an approximate answer; by comparing these you can estimate the overall answer. Approach your problem from different angles When I interviewed to join Accenture, I went…
No matter what problem you are solving, if it’s in an organization chances are that, at some point, you’ll have to present your recommendations to an audience and build a consensus. When you do, make sure that you pick the…
Say “root cause analysis” in any cocktail party and you’ll hear back “Ishikawa diagram.” Ok, that might work only with cocktail parties that cater to engineers, but an Ishikawa diagram is the de-facto tool of many to diagnose a problem….
In any organization, it is frequent to have a set way to make decisions, call it culture. That can be useful, but it can also be problematical. You should learn to recognize when it is to your advantage to reject the…
Tom and Ray Magliozzi—the Tappet Brothers—are MIT-educated mechanics that take calls from listeners and help them solve their car issues while making jokes about themselves, the caller, and others. The premise is straight-forward: callers describe the symptoms of their automotive…
Problem solving is about bridging the gap between where you are and where you want to be. Decision making is identifying the path you want to follow in bridging that gap. In that sense, decision making is part of the…