Problem Solving
Hope you have liked my previous blog on being Job Ready. In that I have talked about several aspects and skills that one should get. I will try to give a gist on those various skills one at a time, in no particular order. In this article I will talk about Problem Solving Skills. Here are few techniques for problem solving.
0. Attitude — From my experience, first and foremost what you need for problem solving is the attitude to solve it rather than bury or run away from it. You need to have the willingness and commitment to solve a problem. And not give up till you find a proper solution in spite of any setbacks in the initial attempts.
1. Simple Solution — Even a complex problem will have a simple solution. If your initial solutions are complex (not simple), not elegant or difficult to implement, then you need to look for more alternatives.
2. Root Cause — You see a problem from the symptoms, but the solution cannot be for the symptoms. You need to go to the root cause of the problem. For example, one can get a headache for multiple reasons and for each of them the treatment is different. If you try to suppress headache to give you symptomatic relief, it’s not going to solve the root cause of the head ache. Same way you need to first understand the root cause of the problem. This is normally done through questioning and thus one can go and understand the root cause. One of the technique used for this is called Fishbone analysis (one of the article to know more about this is https://overheadwatch.com/fishbone-analysis/).
3. Divide into Smaller Problems — Many a time, the problem cannot be solved at one go. The best way to deal with that is to divide into smaller problems and you will find to solve each of the smaller ones easily and thus solving the big problem. That’s because the root cause of each of the problems could be different and thus we find difficult to solve without dividing them. Ofcourse while doing that we shouldn’t forget the big picture, as the solutions for smaller problems shouldn’t cause more issues in other areas and give rise to newer problems.
4. Look from Different Perspectives — Often when we look at the problem, we tend to see it only from one (our) perspective. That can blind us understanding the issue in total. So, for a problem, list down who are all the stake holders of that and see the issue from the perspective of all those stakeholders. Possibly the problem could be only from one or two stake holders and thus we need to look at solving the problem only from that perspective without causing an issue for others. This will also help us understand the root cause. This aspect is important to make sure our solution to a problem, shouldn’t cause an issue to many stake holders who were otherwise not having any issue. I see this kind of approach greatly lacking in the decisions made by our bureaucracy and governments, where in order to solve a problem, they actually cause problem to many more stakeholders.
5. Team involvement — It’s always best to solve a problem in a team. I found many a time, when I discussed the problem with the team, it get resolved much faster than trying to just do it myself. The reason being, somewhere someone would have encountered this kind of problem and they could give you what has worked for them. Both from the perspective gaining from the experience of others as well as picking up the ideas (which could be very different from out own) a problem can be solved much more easily and faster when a team is involved.
6. Has to be Practical — Last but not the least, the solution to the problem has to be good not only on paper but also while implementing. We need to factor that in arriving at the solution. The implementation of the solution, must be possible by the people who are going to implement it, they have requisite tools to implement it and the environment is suitable to implement that solution. Sometimes, a good solution may not be practical to implement in certain environments.
