The Thinker's Toolkit: 14 Powerful Techniques for Problem Solving

Our analysis usually focuses on the solution we intuitively favor; we therefore give inadequate attention to alternative solutions.

(That is precisely what happened at the meeting of Family Frozen Foods managers. Darfield began the discussion with the decision—a conclusion—that the solution to the backlog in deliveries was to expand the fleet of delivery trucks.)

Major factors and major issues are the navigational aids of analysis; they tell us where our analysis should be headed. And they will normally change as we become aware of new information and gain a deeper understanding of the problem. If we lose sight of them, we lose our way in the analytic process.

Not surprisingly, the solution we intuitively favor is, more often than not, the first one that seems satisfactory. Economists call this phenomenon “satisficing” (a merging of “satisfy” and “suffice”).

“What reason weaves, by passion is undone.”

Discussion—analysis of a problem —jumps haphazardly from one aspect to another as the conferees make points supporting their views and attacking those of others. Of course, a host of other factors also come into play to cloud the issues and defeat objective analysis, such as the differing but unstated assumptions on which the participants base thei

The quotation appears in Bolles’s book A Second Way of Knowing: “Georgia was suddenly struck by the realization that her feelings governed the way she saw the scene. It was a moment of transformation: the entire visual world, she realized, was dependent on the emotional world.”

How we define a problem usually determines how we analyze it. It sends us in a particular direction. And how we analyze a problem—the direction we take —absolutely determines whether we find a solution and what the quality of that solution is.

it. It’s the familiar trial-and-error technique. We humans therefore tend to muddle through in problem solving, enjoying moderate success, living with our failures, and trusting in better luck next time.

We view the world through a dense veil of burdensome, thought-warping emotions, biases, and mind-sets. Through this veil we sometimes perceive cause-and-effect and other “patterns” where there are none. We are prone to grace these nonexistent patterns with self-satisfying explanations with whose validity we are instinctively unconcerned. Finally, w