Over the past five months, two Boeing 737 Max airliners have crashed, killing 346 people. Although the story is still unfolding and the investigation is underway, preliminary evidence suggests that design flaws are the cause of the crashes. Here’s a recap…
“All models are wrong but some are useful.” – George Box As an engineer, I was trained to model the world: take a complex system—say, an oil-well drillstring extending several kilometers underground—make assumptions on what matters (e.g., contact with the…
Looking for perfection isn’t necessarily desirable because it’s expensive and the end product isn’t even necessarily optimal.
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…
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….
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…
This entry is part of a multi-post case study. You’ve identified your problem. You’ve uncovered its root causes by building a why tree and by testing hypotheses. So you’ve covered the first two steps of the problem-solving process. Next, you need to identify solutions. This requires you to…
This entry is part of a multi-post case study. So, we’re back to our cables negotiation. We’ve defined the problem and identified the basic framework for breaking down the key question. Next we need to build our diagnostic tree, why…
This entry is part of a multi-post case study. So, you’ve defined your problem; well done! Now you need to look for its root cause(s). We’ll use a specific type of issue tree: a why issue tree (or diagnostic issue tree)….
In a complete problem-solving process you’ll have to build two logic trees: one “why” to find the root cause of your problem and one “how” to identify potential solutions. The good news is, you might not have to start them from…
Avoid describing processes in “how” trees… There are two ways to answer to a “how” question. The first is to describe one particular solution process to reply to the question (e.g. to the question “how to go from NYC to…
This is part 1 of our 4-part series on MECE thinking — part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4. A central tenet of structuring your problem solving is your considering all the possible answers to your question exactly…