Problem Solving 101
How we improve our critical thinking
“Life is a never ending problem-solving test”
We solve problems every day, some more complex than others. Which shampoo fit for my hair? How to get senior manages to notice my work? How to improve the gross margin for our product? and etc. Problem solving is an excellent and practical skill to have. It’s a key skill that can helps us improve our life, and to bigger picture, it can improve our society on how we do things.
If I can turn back the time to the period when I attended school, I really want to change the way I learn. Instead of to be text-book person in order to get an A from the test, I rather to have more critical thinking and ignore about get the A test just because I can’t remember the name of amoeba (on biology). Well, it’s a past.. let’s moving forward to the future!
In this article, I would like to share you the lessons I got from the book, Problem Solving 101 by Ken Watanabe”. I have read this book for several times. This book is quite simple, easy to digest and most important thing, it’s really practical. Ken Watanabe originally wrote Problem Solving 101 for Japanese schoolchildren. His goal was to help shift the focus in Japanese education from memorization to critical thinking, by adapting some of the techniques he had learned as an elite McKinsey consultant.
“If I had an hour to solve a problem, I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about the solutions.” — Albert Einstein
Ken Watanabe expands on his problem solving model, so the reader knows what to do. He recommends that when you face problems, take a step back, so you can discover the root cause and how to resolve it. It’s aligned with Einstein’s statement that we need to deep dive on root cause, before discover solutions. One of the ways to do that is to do research. Collect information to find the root cause of the problem. Watanabe uses an analogy that most people can relate to. The symptom is a headache, the root cause is a fever, and the prescription — the solution — is to take cold medicine.
What is Problem Solving?
Problem solving is a process that can be broken down into four steps:
1. Understand the current situation
At this stage, you need to identify the current situation and determine that you have a problem. For example, you face a situation that your sales is drop compare to previous month and you catch that there’s a problem in your sales.
2. Identify the root cause of the problem
At this stage, you need to list all of potential root causes of the problem. Then, develop a hypnotises for the likely root cause and determine the analyses and information required to test the hyphotesis. And the last, analyse and identify the root cause.
I got advices from my leaders in FMCG & Start Up when I worked there, in order to find the root cause, you need to ask many “Why’s”. It always begins with why and keep asking until you don’t have the answer. Then that one might be the answer. To help you on this, you can use logic tree, like below
3. Develop an effective action plans / solutions
At this stage, you need to develop a wide variety of solutions to solve the problem. You might come up with several solutions, then you need to prioritise it and develop an implementation plan. How you do prioritise which one more important the others? You can analyse on which solution is less effort but bring more impact than others.
4. Execute until the problem is solved, making modifications as necessary.
The last one, you need to ensure that your action plans are well executed. If in the process you see that it doesn’t work, you always have a room to improve and pivot the plan. Make it more agile is a key.
As you can see, problem solving is not complicated. Even if the problem you face is big & complicated, if you learn how to be break it down into small, manageable problems, you will be able to solve it. To be great at problem solving, you need to take the exercise everyday. Trying to use the framework in any decision making.
