How To Think Like A Designer_ Strategies In Problem Solving
Solve your big challenge by Establishing a new position, Making great decisions and Developing a high consulting mindset!
Do you consider yourself a problem solver? do you think carefully about how to deal with problems?
We are familiar with challenges everyday.
Problems come across and sometimes we don’t know how to handle them, even why this happens in the first place.
Feel unbelievably overwhelming about the convenient mindset, the right direction and the best decision.
Afraid of solving this problem in a particular way that leads to failure or create other one more complex than the first one!
You are looking for someone to blame if the things goes wrong so you would like to transfer responsibility to others to not feeling shame and guilty.
You have difficulty making quick decisions and have lack of certainty.
All these reasons are realistic, it’s all about mindset and psychology; how you view what you do and how you think.
But once you dig deeper and understand the real need and learn the problem solving skills, your life will become easier and you’ll see yourself improved ultimately.
3 business analysis techniques to improve your problem solving skills:
Before jumping into these techniques, let’s see what’s business needs.
There are two approaches to winning business:
- product/service needs based
- relationship _based approache
When it comes to solve business problem you need to focus on both sides the product/service and the relationship, act as a mirror to see things in different ways.
here it is 3 powerful techniques you can use today to create solutions.
1.Preserve Creative Energy with “yes,and” tool:
Creative ideas arise from the subconscious mind where there is no rule and limit.
“Yes,and” is improvisational technique, “Yes” means you accept everything regardless of what it is, you accept it at face value, “yes” creates openness, it’s affirmation. The “and” means you take idea and build directly upon it, consider taking the idea apart or approaching it from a new angle. The “and” is the bridge to your thoughts.
“yes,and” endows people with fearlessness, there’s not a mistake, there’s not a wrong way to do something. That’s the editing process where analytical thinkers, where critical thinkers have to learn to take that critical hat off and create an environment in which it’s okay for ideas to fail.
once you have the collection of ideas you start separating the sand from the gold, and the good ideas from the bad ideas then you editing those out.
2. Analyze and Find the right way of thinking:
There are a lot of ways to think some are:
- Engineering Thinking:
Engineers generally think of themselves as problem solvers, they make measurements using identical data for different reasons. So Engineering thinking is best for solving tame problems that have clear repeatable solutions.
- Optimization Thinking:
Best for solving business problems, where there is no single, right solution for example there’s no right answer to your branding or to your market share but you can optimize.
- Analytic Thinking:
Best for solving research problems using procedural methods to test hypothesis. It’s about asking the right questions and focusing on the one key metric that will produce meaningful changes.
- Design Thinking:
Best for solving wicked problems that are inherently human, messy and unpredictable.
Start with a curiosity when you do this type of thinking, what do I want to know more about? by doing the empirical embodied experiment of going out and trying things.
- ask interesting questions
- learn things
- expose your assumptions
That allows you lean into, being curious, reframing by saying what if we look at this form in another point of view. All towards action even seems impossible at the beginning.
3. Brainstorm like a designer:
Once you get good at generating ideas, you have to figure out what you’re going to do with the ideas, it’s by putting them into sort of buckets, meaning ideas would be clustered around certain themes, so naming and framing it.
Let’s say we had 100 ideas turned out they were in about six different categories, then we rank the top ideas in each category as cluster then we get finally seven ideas because we think these 7 ideas ask the most interesting questions.
That’s an actionable brainstorm instead of just generate more ideas you would be better to categorize them, after that classify them in terms of importance.
Our brains like to structure ideas around familiar core concepts, but what if you try to generate ideas that make no sense at all or sounds crazy.
For example: a guy named Muhammad Yunus said what if we give money to poor people who have nothing. They probably can’t pay it back and that’s microlending, but his big shift was instead of this trickle down thing what if we just give this women $50 and she runs a cell phone service in her village and that lifts her out of poverty. It was completely radical idea that came from upending the whole model and that’s been one of the most successful innovations in poverty reduction and in finance.
How to make Strategic Decisions
Making Strategic decisions requires understanding the capabilities of your ideas and how to use them to maximize performance.
The real question is how to apply structure to your business problems and get hypothesis that will speed up your own decision making?
That begins with 4 steps:
- Analyzing:
Defining the boundaries of the problem and breaking it down into small baby steps.
- Presenting:
Communicate your ideas clearly and concisely with ultimate structure.
- Managing:
When you work as a team you must be properly motivated and keep informed and involve others to the problem solving process.
- Implementation:
This is the hard step which requires the dedication of sufficient resources within your organization and build around these resources strong and concrete actions.
“Each problem has hidden in it an opportunity so powerful that it literally dwarfs the problem. The greatest success stories were created by people who recognized a problem and turned it into an opportunity.” — Joseph Sugarman, American Author
SEEK OPPORTUNITIES RATHER THAN PROBLEMS
Problems are inevitable in our life, so rather than seeing problems as burdensome forces of opposition, see problems as opportunities — opportunities to learn, grow, improve, or adjust in a way that leaves you better off than before the problem existed.
