When a person is facing a problem, one of the sensible approaches for problem solving is by "searching" for solutions. This approach works fine when the problem has to be solved in a timely manner (i.e. within minutes or days) because the quality of the solution is a ratio of K * (Quality of the Solution)/(Time taken to solve). The approach makes use of past experiences as the initialization points of a solution set. Solutions that are closed to the initialization points might also be included into the final solution set. To solve the problem, pick one of solutions from the solution set that can maximize the objective.
There is an assumption in the above approach that usually goes unnoticed and that is the knowledge about the problem at hand. For instance, your boss says "We have a problem of not meeting the deadlines aggressively in the team". One might attempt to solve the problem by using the approach above. If it works fine every time, then I wouldn't blog about it :). But what if this approach fails even you and your team are trying very hard? Have you ever wondered what is the cause of the failure and explore other approaches to solve this problem?
Another approach for problem solving that I always keep in my solution bag is to redefine the problem. It goes a little bit deeper than what it sounds like. It uses common senses as the starting point of the solution set and reshape the problem by asking relevant questions. Common sense is an interesting thing; it means "what people in common would agree on". The actual definition of common sense is not very important for this approach to work well. Common sense serves primarily as an initialization tool; it allows us to look at the problem from many different perspective. Asking good questions to reshape the problem can lead to what many people called "thinking outside of the box". This is trivial using this approach because there is no box to begin with. The questions are aimed to elicit the real problem without introducing a priori assumptions about the problem at hand. Using this approach might simplify the problem tremendously especially for problems that are ill-defined.
The first two approaches might sound common to many problem solvers. The third approach that I will also consider is to use the first and second approach altogether. The problem with the second approach is that it might take very long to obtain a relatively good solution and it requires a lot of skills in order to ask those "good" questions. The third approach starts by using the first approach to acquire experience about the problem and then it uses the second approach to fine-tune the problem. Once the problem is understood better, then the first approach can be used to solve the fine-tuned problem. This process continues until a solution is found. The third approach requires an unlearning process when switching between the first approach and the second approach. Also, it requires a lot of adaptations during the process of problem solving.
Which approach you choose to solve a problem depends on what problem you are facing. However, there are some general rules to follow which I might blog about it in the future post :)
References
No comments:
Post a Comment