Being a confident problem solver is really important to your success.
There are four basic steps in problem solving:
- Defining the problem
- Generating alternatives
- Evaluating and selecting alternatives
- implementing solutions
The Problem Solving menu, available at Mindtools.com, will help you to improve your approach to solving the problems that you and your team have to face.
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This is good and useful. However… there is a category of problems with which you’ll be dealing as a diplomat called Wicked Problems (look it up in Wikipedia) that don’t have a solution – they have several options for imperfect solutions to choose from. By all means get the Mindtools AND explore the concept of Wicked Problems.
Thanks for these great problem solving tips; they are the basic instructions to basic problems yet, many people panic and lose sight of solutions at the smallest hiccup.
With Ed’s comment the ante is upped and the Wicked Problem is a nightmare that no one should [or can] attempt to solve by themselves…if a solution were ever possible.
I believe that the Wicked problem is born of scaling to extremes. Things that go wrong on a Global scale or at quantum physics levels. Earth is a living organism and we are on it for the ride…trying to solve planet-wide problems that are wicked and unsolvable is like fleas trying to make its dog host change direction. Researchers that experiment at microcosmic levels also tend to get lost in the vastness of the subatomic world. Too often, looking for solutions to disease under electron microscopes and Petri dishes unleashes even more dormant diseases.
Humans have a tendency to make mountains out of molehills. I have two examples that come to mind. The first is a fire fighting exercise in Canada, that I witnessed, that went totally wrong. A building was on fire and the fire-fighters didn’t arrive on time to attack the fire from below. They set about attacking it from the top with powerful jet hoses. They ended up demolishing it with the water jets and the burning remnants of the building collapsed into the neighbouring building, setting it alight too. Another reason why top-down solutions don’t always work. 😉 In any case, the fire scaling out of control made the firemen panic and the problem was worsened.
The other example I have is the Leaning Tower of Pisa. During its 300+ year construction the tower started sinking into the soft earth. Coupled with the the poor foundations, the tower was doomed. Then work stopped, the tower settled and work continued, forcing the builders to curve the construction in order to adapt it to the lean. In this case it was again a case of a wicked problem born of time-scaling. It would have been better to demolish it and start again. Instead, let’s over think the problem and continue where we left off…time will solve the problem; let the future generations worry about it.
It just goes to show that man will always try to find complicated fixes to the most simple of problems and so, many unsolvable wicked problems wouldn’t be so much of an issue if some, early, back-to-basic solutions could be applied. Bruised egos have a lot to answer for in letting problems scale out of proportions to the point of reaching Ed’s Wicked Problem conundrum.
The example of the fire fighters related to top down solutions is a very good one!