Category Archives: Life

What I wrote about measure of progress is also a way to guide us to think about problem solving. What is the progress towards a problem solved? If the problem is to fell a tree, what amount of sharpening the axe is considered to constitute progress or does the progress only begin when the axe first strikes the tree. If you look at progress from that kind of visible, hole-in-tree kind of basis, then you obscure an important component of the solution which is to sharpen the axe.

If I had 1 hour to solve a problem, I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about the solutions.

Albert Einstein

Psychologically, and also our training in schools, at exams does not impart this sort of wisdom to us because we are expected to know the solution at the snap of our fingers and get on to work it out. There’s also this tendency in teaching scientific enquiry to dwell on just designing and performing experiments to test different hypotheses rather than get into the thick of how a hypothesis comes about in the first place.

So perhaps it’d be worthwhile to look through a few pieces I wrote about solving problems (here, here, here and here).

There was this story going around social media where Einstein was writing some equations on a chalkboard and when he eventually list a final one, there was an uproar in the room because of a simple mistake he made. He mused that no one praised him for the first few equations that were correct but they were reacting harshly when he was wrong.

There is just something in our nature, even towards our loved ones, to dwell on mistakes – mostly that of others but sometimes that of ourselves. It is probably that the negative catches our attention more than the positive. After all, most of our ancestors survived because the negative things caught their attention enough for them to avoid it. Those other people who were not so sensitive probably lost their lives and failed to propagate. As a result, we tend to display that sort of anxiety and inclinations towards dwelling on mistakes.

Being aware of this can help us consider our responses more carefully and whether we are giving feedback or criticisms that are building up rather than tearing down. Instead of dwelling on mistakes, challenge yourself to link the corrective actions recommended to something positive that you’ve seen displayed by the person receiving your feedback. That will help create a positive loop.

Now to the final way of solving problems in this 4-part blog post. Like I mentioned, the first step to problem-solving is always understanding a problem deeply enough. Too many of us rush to find solutions without understanding the problems we are trying to solve. Consequently, the problems are not exactly dealt with when the solutions are developed.

This final way of solving a problem has to do with understand what is the blockage. Too often, things are going on fine and people have found ways to cope with it. Then it’s more a circumstance rather than a problem. People will coexist with it and there is no blockage. Management tends to see problems where there aren’t to justify their own intelligence or activities.

So when there actually isn’t any blockages, you solve the problem by telling a story. By basically reframing that problem into something that is either worth solving or worth ignoring.

Next up in the suite of problem-solving options, is the one that we are probably most familiar with. Based on ‘reasoning by analogy’; which some thinks is the lesser way and consider it ‘copy-paste’. I disagree because while it is slightly lazier, it can be efficient and especially for cases where things are urgent and you’re not solving a very innovation-intensive new problem, that is the best way.

Again, you do really need to understand the problem a bit more, and then you need to gather brains in the room to recall various experiences. More often than not, someone in a big-enough team would have seen similar problems before. Or even dealt with them. For these people who had the benefit of hindsight, they might be able to offer ideas on some solutions or the team can brainstorm for new options based on their understanding of how it was handled previously.

There will be idiosyncrasies to account for. That’s why it is not a lazy method. The difficulty is when you start having to develop convoluted ways of adapting the solution to your particular problem. Those are the sure signs that you might have used the wrong analogous problem as a starting point. Restart your search for a similar problem.

My favourite way of solving problems; and I still find it hard though it is probably the most satisfying, is to deal with them from first principles. It involves interrogating the problem, and boiling it down to the most core assumptions and principles you can. And that allows new ideas and solutions to be revealed. The most important thing is that first principles relies more on ground-up reasoning than to try and ‘copy-paste’ solution (which by the way, will be the next blog post).

We can ask why is the problem presented a problem; and seek out the more fundamental bottleneck present. A lot of times, we can be solving a derived problem rather than the actual problem itself when we don’t think from first principles.

For example, when you have a job vacancy where there’s a particular role that you envision involving a lot of different tasks and from your understanding of the tasks the prospective staff is expected to perform, you derive various requirements such as 2-3 experience in this, and versed in particular software, having had particular paper qualifications and so on. Now you created for yourself a new problem: finding a candidate who will be a match for those requirements you just created. But are they truly the requirements for the job?

Thinking from first principles would probably involve working out a proper way of assessing candidates for the job rather than rely too much on those screening requirements. It will involve what the job really is about and what you want this role for. The ultimate solution may be surprising. It might not involve hiring at all! In some instances, it might involve parceling out the work to existing team members, automating them or using other tools to finish the work.

When thinking from first principles, you’re better at problem solving than others not because of your experience or having dealt with the same problem before. Rather, it is precisely your ability to understand and probe a problem more deeply than others ever did which helps.

Put half-baked ideas into a poorly resourced team lacking buy-in and getting them to produce results is the surest way for you to ensure the conclusion that ‘this idea doesn’t work’. What are we really trying to achieve here? How intentional are we about making something work? Or are we just in a hurry to do something? Who are you actually serving? The people who benefit from the results? Or the people who want to see the numbers? Do you care more about the numbers or actual work involved?

If we don’t have the time, the capacity and the heart for something, let’s not waste the resources we have on it. Let our intentionality drive the results.

We can have the most brilliant ideas and they don’t seem to work. People have been deployed, resources committed, plans drawn and then acted upon. Then results didn’t quite hit the spot. People didn’t seem to respond as we were all expecting. Even when assumptions made weren’t wrong. And then we convince ourselves that was probably not the right idea. We pursued the wrong one – it seemed to work intuitively but it didn’t.

Except maybe it was executed poorly. Because we didn’t have the right people executing; the partners chosen were wrong, and the processes and plans developed weren’t going deep enough. Too many things were left to chance and circumstances happened to not favour the outcome. So we got the wrong conclusion; the notion that the idea won’t work when it was just not well-executed.

This can happen because resourcing was poor. Only half of the resources required was given. People might not have been sufficiently vested in the idea and were just waiting to see it “fail” so that they can get back to life. There’s organisational inertia and conflicts of interest within the execution – consultants should have been brought in rather than doing it inhouse where staff preferred not to have anything to do with making their core job obsolete.

And that’s why the new software didn’t help us solve the problem, the process introduced was making the organisation slower rather than faster. Actually, it was just conclusions being made pre-maturely and there wasn’t sufficient buy-in on new softwares to make it work. So are we making the right conclusions when we claim to have tried something and it didn’t work?

I have been in work places full of half-baked ideas. Typically the management needs to be able to resolve something. It could be a real problem, an imaginary problem, an itch or even a personal pain. And because insufficient thought went into defining the problem, we rush into trying to come up with solutions which do not necessarily speak to the actual problem at hand.

Following that, because the problem was not well understood, it becomes much more difficult for the staff to actually develop and flesh out the ideas. When problems are well understood, the solution can be interrogated properly to make sure it tackle the critical parameters and aspects of the problem. In fact, when problems are properly articulated, the solutions would be more than obvious once proposed.

When all of these process of pondering are not present, we develop half-baked ideas. And we don’t realise that because the understanding of the problem isn’t there for us to test the ideas against. So very often when the half-baked ideas are in the more practical or implementation phase, new problems are uncovered and often we may discover new things that force us back to the drawing board. Often, it is better to interrogate ideas, think them through, flesh them out, and develop them further before committing resources. Otherwise, half-baked ideas are going to be the most resource-intensive ones.

The other day I was having a conversation with a business leader who was versed with developing pitches for his company in order to convince customers of their value proposition. He was with a software business so while there are standardised capabilities and products, everything they sell to businesses are quite bespoke and require them to go into a process with the customers.

Therefore, he was basically selling dreams that are mostly realisable but will take time. He was the one who tries to convince his customers to come on the journey with his company. Meanwhile, in order to make the sale, his technical guys will have to do the hard work of filling in technical specification forms, making sure that they fulfill specific requirements of any Request-for-Proposals (RFP). On the other hand, he had to spend time with these technical guys to also make sure what he promised was feasible, and within the delivery capabilities of the firm.

His tech guys are stretched, between trying to check the boxes for the client in terms of the specifications and producing detailed documentation, with having to invest time to help refine the overall pitch. What should they prioritise and what is more important? The industrial complex wants us to prioritise checking boxes, and meeting explicable criteria, especially those written down. Yet in reality, we know that’s not get us over the line and truly help us thrive.

So I’d argue that the technical guys will need to get good at making sure boxes can be checked but for their own benefit, they should focus on the pieces beyond that. As much as possible, we want to automate those box-checking so that intelligent people can be freed to do the creative work. And perhaps then, schools can begin to educate rather than to ‘train’ – to bring up people who do the creative work rather than be competent box-checkers.

What exactly is the question asking? That’s the first thing to find out whenever you confront a problem in school. Yet we don’t think to much about how questions are to be interpreted. After all, it is the teachers’ fault when they don’t ask the right questions or when they don’t ask questions “correctly”.

But a student is never really rewarded or recognised for asking good questions. Or finding more than one way of interpreting the questions. Indeed, students who interpret examination questions differently and then answer them in a manner different from what the teachers had expected are typically marked down. Then there are those who respond to teachers’ questions with more questions and that is generally not welcomed. The ones that stump teachers generally seem to undermine their authority, so it became the domain of class clowns and naughty kids.

Interrogating a problem is an important and useful skill. In fact, it is often the starting point of problem-solving. That is why projects are so important and too often, we overemphasize the need to come up with a solution and to do something or to produce something rather than to help students think through problems and be able to articulate them.