Tag: problem solving

How You Can Stick With A Tough Problem – Key Lessons From Cognitive Science

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David Badre shares some ideas about working on complex and challenging projects

David Badre is a professor of cognitive, linguistic and psychological sciences at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and author of On Task: How Our Brain Gets Things Done.

I have edited some of the authors’ critical points about practising problem-solving habits and added some keyword labels in bold.

In general, we can get better at structuring hard problems with experience. This is one reason that practice makes us more efficient and successful at hard tasks and that experts outperform novices. Finding work habits that encourage this process helps us to stay focused.

  • Stay with it. Finding the right structure often takes time. [Persist, Stamina, Effort]
  • Be open to reconceptualising problem structure. [Disposition, Curiosity, Perspective]
  • Take breaks. It’s not helpful to insist on trying to get everything done at once if it just isn’t working. [Pace, Time, Incubate]
  • Interact with others. Just like taking a break, interacting with others can help us conceptualise a problem in new ways. [Collaborate, Share, Connect]

I find the idea of being open to reconceptualise problem structures one that resonates with my current facilitation.

I am paying attention to moments when I shift perspective. This is often during group design and development sessions.

For example, during a recent curriculum design workshop, I asked a group of teachers:

If some of your students were here with us, what might they share about the ideas we have developed so far?

This is a deliberate facilitation move to change the perspective.

The problem structure [learning + curriculum design] was shifted [from curriculum] and seen from a different vantage point [student].

This propelled us in a different direction and led to some new ideas.

Pre-Mortem Worksheets — How to Avoid Project Catastrophe

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A Pre-Mortem is a strategic planning activity that imagines a project has failed. This type of thinking helps to identify and mitigate risks early on in the planning phase.

Exploring the worst-case scenario is traced to great Stoic philosophers, like Seneca, who called it the premeditation of evils, “premeditatio malorum”.

What is quite unlooked for is more crushing in its effect, and unexpectedness adds to the weight of a disaster. This is a reason for ensuring that nothing ever takes us by surprise. We should project our thoughts ahead of us at every turn and have in mind every possible eventuality instead of only the usual course of events.

~ Seneca

Adding the Pre-Mortem technique to your planning toolkit will help you project your thoughts ahead, comprehensively assess the challenges to a project and adapt your plans.

I have developed a set of Pre-Mortem worksheets for you to take away. It outlines all of the steps you need to follow and provides a clear structure. Before you finish make sure you subscribe and grab a copy.

👉 Jump to the download link for the worksheets.

Improve Your Planning

One of the biggest challenges to a successful project is the quality of planning. A plan is weaker when it overemphasises a positive outcome. A Pre-Mortem activity helps to balance this outlook by allowing time and space to explore failure scenarios.

If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail!

Benjamin Franklin

However, it is not negativity for its own sake. We are not simply amplifying the negative voices in a group or the whinges.

The structured Pre-Mortem process steps through how to explore each scenario, identify the causes and outlines methods that respond to each potential risk.

Prospective Hindsight

Instead of being reactive to problems, in this activity, you will use the thought experiment: Prospective Hindsight. You might even be able actually to say you are going “back to the future”.

Prospective Hindsight is casting our mind forward into a future time and then imagining what we might have wished we had learned by looking back.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing

William Blake

Prospecting is a powerful imaginative disposition when working with any strategic planning and is something I use frequently.

  • “I can imagine a time when we …”
  • “It is clear that in the future we might be…”
  • “When this is in place the benefits are likely to be…”

Strategic planning is all about prospecting, to imagine a future scenario – what Prospective Hindsight does is explore and recognise the risks and issues that might occur.

When and Who

To gain the most benefit, use the Pre-Mortem exercise with your core team at an early stage of the project planning. Potential risks and issues that you uncover may need time and resources to address.

The Pre-Mortem is a planning activity, and so unsurprisingly, it needs to occur during planning. The outcomes of the task feed into your project planning.

Instead of a post-mortem, when we look back on what went wrong, we establish this reflective practice even before the project has started.

Gather a core team who have a clear understanding of the proposed project plans so far. The outcome should be relatively straightforward and agreed upon; time should be spent exploring the risks, not what the project is about.

Disposition and Mindset

Establishing the right mindset is essential to the success of the Pre-Mortem: open to sharing risks and identifying responses to those risks.

Explicitly discussing the potential failure scenarios is a challenging type of talk. Our positive bias, especially for a project we have invested in, means we don’t like to be deliberately negative.

This deliberate and strategic negativity is a strategic muscle we are not often activating.

The Pre-Mortem also requires us to grapple with increasing uncertainty and ambiguity. This is a delicate balance and might need strong facilitation. Our tolerance for uncertainty is an indicator of our creativity.

Pre-Mortem Worksheets

Works Well With

Below I have outlined a range of other methodologies and mental models that the Pre-Mortem complements.

Playing the Devil’s Advocate

This activity works well with other mental models and planning exercises. Playing the Devil’s Advocate is something many of us have experienced.

It is a subjective version of the Pre-Mortem. An individual takes it upon themselves to imagine that something might go wrong.

The problem with that interjection is that the approach and disposition are often not mirrored by others in the group. A genuine insight might be discarded because others do not want to think negatively or are not ready for more uncertainty.

A Pre-Mortem brings the whole group into that thinking at the same time – that is its strength.

The Tenth Person Rule

The Tenth Person Rule is the deliberate opposition to a decision when everyone else agrees. If everyone else is saying “Yes”, the tenth person (or the last) is ethically bound to say “No”.

This opposition, regardless of personal belief, instigates further debate and challenge. The outcome is more coherent due to that conjecture, even if it remains the same.

The task of the Tenth Man is to explore alternative assumptions and worst-case scenarios…to challenge conventional and received wisdom. The aim is to look at things creatively, independently, and from a fresh perspective, to engage actively with and to reconsider the status quo.

How Israeli intelligence failures led to a ‘devil’s advocate’ role

The Tenth Person Rule was popularised by the film World War Z and had some real connections to approaches within Israeli Military Intelligence.

The Reversal Method

The Pre-Mortem activity works well with this creative thinking method as they both help create a new perspective.

The Reversal Method is a lateral thinking tool that encourages us to change how we think about a problem. In Lateral Thinking, Edward De Bono explains it might be used for the following reasons:

  • To escape from the absolute necessity to look at the situation in the standard way.
  • By disrupting the original way of looking at the situation one frees information that can come together in a new way.
  • The main purpose is provocation. By making the reversal one moves to a new position. Then one sees what happens.

SWOT Analysis

A SWOT Analysis is a standard managerial and leadership model used during planning and review. SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Obstacles and Threats.

The Pre-Mortem focuses its lens on Threats in a much more systematic way than the SWOT Analysis. These two methods would complement each other well.

Running a Pre-Mortem activity could be done to create the outcomes linked and included in a comprehensive SWOT for a project.

De Bono’s 6 Thinking Hats

These parallel thinking processes fit into six key areas. The Black Hat type of thinking is most relevant to the Pre-Mortem exercise. We want Pre-Mortem participants to do Black Hat thinking:

The Black Hat is judgment – the devil’s advocate or why something may not work. Spot the difficulties and dangers; things might go wrong — probably the most powerful and valuable of the Hats but a problem if overused.

What balances the planning process is the use of Green Hat thinking once potential risks are identified. A team would explore new ideas to address the problems identified during the Pre-Mortem.

The Green Hat focuses on creativity, possibilities, alternatives, and new ideas. It’s an opportunity to express new concepts and new perceptions.

Further Reading

How to Keep People at the Heart of Your Next Problem Solving Process

Design ThinkingPublished onUpdated on25 Comments on How to Keep People at the Heart of Your Next Problem Solving Process

 

Problem solving is a skill we want all of our students to be honing whilst at school. However one of the issues I stumble upon during my work is the weaker focus on problem finding.

In many ways problem finding can be more accurately and more broadly defined as the time when we check that a problem is worth solving in the first place. This is something students don’t experience enough.[1] All too often they are presented with a problem and get busy generating ideas, or as adults we assume that the problem is clear when it is not and start from a much weaker position.

I enjoyed this recent article from Emily Heyward[2] that focused attention on ensuring a problem is worth solving in the first place. Instead of immediately jumping ahead there are significant gains to be had by staying in the problem for much longer.

Staying focused on the problem also prevents you from falling into the fatal trap of assuming the world is waiting with bated breath for your product to launch. When I used to work in advertising, we would joke that the “insight” in the creative brief was often something along the lines of, “I wish there were a crunchy cereal with raisins that was healthy and also delicious.” But people do not wish this. They might have a hard time finding a quick breakfast that doesn’t make them feel fat or sluggish. And maybe your crunchy raisin cereal is the perfect response to this issue. But they are not waking up in the morning wishing for raisiny, crunchy goodness. Similarly, people are not wishing for your idea to exist, because they don’t even know it’s an option. So when you sit down to clarify what problem you’re solving, a great initial test is to imagine someone’s inner monologue. Is the problem you’ve identified something that a real human might actually be thinking?

The last line emphasises the importance of empathy in any problem solving/finding process. We have to be able to put ourselves in other people’s shoes to fully appreciate what the need is. I suppose that is the difference between something we might want and something that is a true need.

So spend longer in the problem state. Encourage your students and colleagues to remain in that state, often characterised by asking questions, for as long as you can. Technology and habits cause us to jump out of this inquiry/problem finding state all too quickly. That in itself is a habit or mindset we need to wean our students off.

John Dewey talked about inquiry in a similar way, inquiry in my opinion being synonymous with any creative process, saying that we need to protract the state of uncertainty for much longer.

To be genuinely thoughtful, we must be willing to sustain and protract that state of doubt which is the stimulus to thorough inquiry.[3]

That has always resonated strongly with me. Whether in a design agency as Heyward refers to or as a curriculum based inquiry, it is the deliberate and sustained period of doubt that most characterises an inquiry. When we experience this with an open mindset to learn and empathise with those involved we are more likely to identify a problem worth our time to try and fix.

Further into her piece Emily Heyward also refers to the 5 Whys[4] technique which we commonly use with teams we are working with. I suspect you have probably come across this too. However I like the slight change in the wording of the question, not just “Why?” but “Why does that matter?”. I think this small change resets the question back into one of relevance to the human being at the heart of the issue. It will be a small change I make when I use the 5 Whys technique in the future.

By focusing on the problem you’re solving, you move beyond a functional description of what your product is, to an emotional solution that connects with people at their core. It also keeps us honest that what we’re doing really matters…

In the start-up and design world it is critical to remain focused on the people at the heart of new ideas, but this is just as relevant for the creative inquiry we help our students experience. In many ways the core experience of “school” should be about creating something that matters. I imagine a time when that becomes a new education standard.

  1. The design thinking process emphasises this precursive step. Participants immerse themselves in an issue or topic and then synthesise the insights they gain. It is through these two significant stages that a problem is identified and ratified. You don’t start with a problem, and even if you did you still orientate yourself to ensure it is worthy of our time.  ↩
  2. Emily Heyward is s a founding partner at Red Antler, a branding consultancy specialising in start-ups and new ventures.  ↩
  3. Dewey, J. (1933). How we think: A restatement of the relation of reflective thinking to the educative process. New York: D.C. Heath and Company. (p. 16)  ↩
  4. The 5 Whys technique is used to dig deeper into the causes of an issue. You start with a simple identified problem and then ask why is that an issue and then repeat again with the answer. It deliberately opens the issue up and ensures a team identifies the root causes. The technique is commonly attributed to the Toyota Motor Corporation during the evolution of its manufacturing methodologies.  ↩