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…
This is part 2 of our 4-part on MECE thinking — part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4. We’ve talked about how thinking in a mutually exclusive and collective exhaustive way can help you actively drive structure in complex problems….
Teaching my course in problem solving I realized that many people face the same business problems. Although you should design each issue tree with your specific situation in mind, you shouldn’t have to start it from scratch. This is what…
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…
Matthew Juniper, at Cambridge, demonstrates how to build issue trees. His approach is very similar to ours and he has an excellent video to describe it so you might want to watch it; here are the highlights I like best. Work on…
Let the primary use of your presentation dictate your slide design philosophy. Slide decks are usually the end deliverable of consulting engagements, so consultants must prepare excellent documents to justify their huge fees and looking for inspiration in how strategy…
Once you’ve identified several potential solutions for your problem, you need to choose at least one. To help you, consider comparing their expected value. To do that, you evaluate whether you can and want to implement this solution. Test whether you can…
When presenting your recommendations, the tagline of each of your slide spells out its main idea and the body of the slide supports that idea with details. You have several options to display these details including text, quantitative charts, concept visuals, tables,…