Hi all,
Let’s wrap up the riff off I started earlier in the week for Ken Watanabe’s Problem Solving 101.
5. Improvement means breaking down an issue until certain root causes are determined before building on the specified problem areas. For example, instead of looking at an overall average, it means looking at the components of the average to identify the biggest problem areas.
This thought addresses the difference between an aggregate statistic and the components of the aggregate. When an average goes down, it could mean that every part of it went down in tandem. It could also mean that all the components held steady while one went into freefall.
Speaking more broadly, aggregate measures hide certain truths that are blatantly obvious when examined at the component level. In the early days of TOA, I wrote this post about Simpson’s Paradox, a statistical oddity that gets at this idea in a slightly different way.
4. Sometimes constraints can help pick a solution out of a group. Think of a pepper shaker. How can we increase the amount of pepper that comes out? There are many options. We can increase the size of the top area, add more holes, increase the size of each hole, or reduce the size of the grains.
The constraint referenced here would come about if we were only allowed to consider certain types of changes. If we were told the size of the grains could not be changed, for instance, and that the overall size of the top area had to remain fixed, then our options would be to add holes or change the size of each hole. I think most people are comfortable making decisions within constraints because in these cases the best option almost picks itself.
The important extension to the idea comes when you think about altering the constraints. What if in the above example it was twice as valuable to increase the overall size of the top area? It might be easier to simply add more holes but this choice would have to be compared against the benefit of taking the extra step to alter the constraint and make the other options viable.
3. Setting a goal means clarifying as many details as possible. Saying ‘I want a computer’ isn’t as good as saying ‘I want a $500 model X computer produced by company Y’.
I think this is an important reminder because it is such an easy concept to overlook. It almost always feels better to just get started on something with basic guidelines rather than taking the extra mental effort to clarify as many of the details as possible. But I think in most cases the initial burst of effort pays off down the line.
When I was out of work for two years, I wasted a lot of time early on by not being specific enough about the details. This led me to job offers that, in hindsight, I would never have accepted. I finally got around to clarifying exactly what I was looking for and how I would measure these factors when considering an offer. This allowed me to filter out jobs that I would eventually reject and saved me a lot of time during the latter portion of my search.
2. Great teams don’t automatically mean great growth environments. Teams must work to create such places. In most teams, high performers prevent others from doing the developmental work they need to do in order to cultivate their skills.
This thought could have been its own book. It’s intuitive to think a strong organization or winning team would be the ideal place to learn and grow but it isn’t always guaranteed to work this way. Although everyone accepts the necessity of learning ‘on the job’, every employer’s tolerance for a learning curve is different. The tolerance for errors and ‘growing pains’ dictates how much an employee can learn more so than the success of the organization. The best growth environment aligns developmental work with the goals of the organization or team so that growth is not sacrificed for the sake of meeting an organization’s goals or commitments.
1. It’s forty degrees and I feel like I’m dying…
Again, the theme of thoroughness emerges in this note. A person could die for many reasons but simply citing the temperature isn’t very helpful. The unit of measurement also matters here – if we are talking Celsius, a good problem solver would immediately think of heatstroke, but Fahrenheit would probably lead to additional questions.
0. Is that really from this book???
OK, fine, that’s not from this book, it’s from Courtney Barnett’s ‘Avant Gardener’.
But who better to end a riff off?
Thanks for reading, folks.
Tim
