15 useful questions to think about problems and solutions
Problem-solving is a process, combining creativity and judgement. Irrespective of the difficulty, any useful problem-solving process would include analytical, strategic and conceptual thinking elements. All three of which require asking questions. Hence questioning, posing and answer questions are necessary and important life skills.
Some useful questions are included in this article; these are not a definitive set, and more or different questions may be needed depending on your problem’s specific circumstances. However, those presented here are a starting point to help you develop your own personal decision-making process. As you work through your problem, think about other questions that might be useful to ask.
Questions have multiple uses, one of these is being an excellent method for diagnosing problems. In some regards, with the right questions a flowchart could be made, to steer your thinking in a more efficient manner. The more question you derive and “collect” over time, the more you can choose from; deploy the most relevant for each occasion and leverage the answers to give you better insights and solutions.
Questions provided here loosely follow the double diamond process of the design council (designcouncil.org). An exploratory set of questions aims to expand and the contract on a single problem definition; the process reverts to exploring solutions and the optimising towards a single solution. The double diamond approach is a well-respected problem solving approach and is worth learning more about.
The first question posed is
Do I know if there is a problem?
This may appear a silly question, but it can have significant impact. How well do you know the situation and whether there is a problem? Could it be a misinterpretation? Reading too much into a single situation? Intuition based on too little fact? So, if there is a problem then:
Can I express the problem clearly and succinctly?
Here the question is more about can you write down the problem such that it can be understood by you and others. Can someone review this and understand your thinking? Is it logical and does it make sense? If it does not make sense to you, it probably will not make sense to someone else. Also, this brings about a second point — if you can clearly understand your problem, if you can express it succinctly, you can understand it. From understanding your problem, you can start to fix it. It might be worth asking:
Am I the problem?
This is a very hard question to ask as it is uncomfortable and involves look at yourself in the mirror. But this question has an enormous transformational potential. Firstly, if you are self-aware and have enough emotional maturity to question your role in the problem — and not a self-despair self-flagellation type of masochism — just an honest willingness to appreciate your role in the situation, then this is a strong indication of your level of personal growth.
Secondly, if you are willing to ask this question then you are likely to be willing to accept answers you might not like, and you can change. This is the power of this question. If you always date psychos, losers and toxic abusive partners then the common dominator is you. Why are you picking them? What is it about you that leads you there? If so, how can you change? The answers to these questions will lead to change if you are willing to let them.
The nest question tries to get further into the detail.
What am I missing?
A very powerful question acknowledging that we do not have all the answers or all the information. It is about trying to appreciating any additional crucial facts or missing information with in your think. What is missing from the thinking that will likely strike back. This could be crucially about biases. Where are your biases and what are they doing? Are you failing to take account of the perspectives of others? What assumptions are you making and why would they be valid? How could you surface your assumptions and test them to justify them? This leads on to the following questions:
What information do I need to better understand the problem?
Am I satisfied that I understand the problem well enough to solve it?
These are crucial questions as they form the basis of self- and problem understanding. To be able to solve a problem it is important to get a handle on the understanding of it. This should not be an analysis paralysis event; it is about being confident that the problem is well understood and that to the best of your abilities there is nothing important that is missing from your thinking.
Once you are confident that you understand the problem space — and there are multiple questions that can be asked within this space — you can move towards working on solutions. The above give a few initial questions to help shape some thinking. As stated previously, it is about asking the right questions about the specific problem and then working your way towards a solid problem understanding and then working towards a solution.
But the general ideas of trying to identify and diagnose the problem should be at the heart of any questioning process. With practice and patience, you will become more adept at asking questions. If you keep applying a thinking and questioning framework it will become quicker and more effective each time. Although you cannot guarantee to get the right results every time, you will do better than average. This is crucial as it will lead to better outcomes over the long-term.
Now, once you are satisfied with your understanding of the problem, it is worth asking:
What information would I need to better understand a potential solution?
Now, the focus is on the information that that you might need to acquire to be able to start to consider solutions. It should be noted that the actual process will likely be an iterative loop with the following question:
What are the potential options and why?
Being wedded to only one solution is unwise and likely to lead into significant failure. It is worth expanding the ideation and generating some potential options.
What is the basis/ criteria on which I will make my decision?
Powerful. Here this question is asking what is important, what are your priorities, given the constraints what is most important to you. Without a basis and criteria, how will you make your decision and how will you determine if it is the best solution given the information you have? The overall criteria and weighting are subjective, based on your opinions, but nonetheless, having the process written down with some justification helps to make a better decision.
A useful tool is the Pugh Matrix — just put this into Google and you will get an array of articles and templates for you to use — the best tool will be dependent on you. Follow the process and the highest scoring decision is the one to go for. However, it would be worth waiting a little while before implementing it and then after a little break ask:
If I could redo the process, what would I change and why?
This is a useful question to ask; asking on reflection of whether there is something missing or faulty with the process. The idea here is that your thinking should be written out and you should be reviewing the thinking to determine whether you have got it correct, or if there is a fundamental flaw with your approach. But this will only become clear after you have waited for a period of at least a week and focussed on something else. This ensures that you come back to the decision with fresh eyes. Hopefully, any logical errors would be forthcoming.
Then implement your decision. After an appropriate period, at least 3 months to a year then ask:
Was the outcome of this decision as I expected?
What have I found out from this choice that I did not know before hand?
Should I maintain the current course or change to something else?
These are trying to ascertain whether the outcomes were successful and whether it was down to missing some important information beforehand. There are many uncertainties, unknowns and unknown unknowns. It is about trying to see these and understand what was missed from the initial approach.
Review this and the outcomes are necessary to consider whether you should make a change. However, not all decisions have immediate feedback, sometimes there is a need to wait a longer period to see the eventual outcomes of your decision. For instance, it might be taking longer for the benefits to arise, or there are other contingencies in the way now, which will pass later. This is a hard point, because it takes a certain level of judgement to decide when it is time to change or not and can be a matter of intuition or gut feel.
Therefore, based on the knowledge gained from deciding, it should be considered whether the decision should be revisited, or whether more time should be given for that decision to unfold.
In addition, some personal development questions should be asked to help improve your performance in the future, such as:
Given what I know now, what how would approach the same problem next time?
Are there any generic lessons that I take away from this and apply to future decisions?
These last two questions are all about learning from experience and building an improved process and decision-making tools. These are important questions that help define processes and principles — see ray Dalio’s book, Principles to get a better idea. It is always worth making continuous iterative improvements in your decision-making approaches — as these will compound and more likely lead you to where you want to be.
In conclusion, questions are a useful method for trying to understand and solve problems in a variety of context during life. The above are a few questions following the designcouncil.org double diamond process which may be a helpful starting point for you.
I hope you found this helpful; and any feedback is gratefully appreciated.
