What If You Had a Methodology to Solve Any Problem?
What does an executive have in common with a lawyer, engineer, physicist, artist, or any other profession that you can think of? They all solve problems because their degrees respond to specific needs (we need lawyers to have order in society, engineers to improve industrial procedures, managers to operate businesses, economists to effectively assign resources, actors to entertain us).
Schools aim to prepare persons for them to develop skills to approach certain sets of unsolved problems though the tools they acquired during their studies. How they approach the problem is a similar story. First, they need to understand the system from which the problem arises (how does the court, business, entertainment, and nature operate), so by understanding the rules one can identify why he or she has a problem (its causes and consequences), go deeper into the essence of the problem, and under which context it is considered a problem. Next, they learn how to represent their problems, which can be modeled, drawn, or represented by visual means for example.
By understanding the root cause and the essence of a problem, it is easier to choose an approach which bests suits the problem and test it. By making experiments, we learn and gain deeper understanding of the problem, so for each iteration which outcome is different from the rest means that you are getting closer to the solution and generating new knowledge which can be used for other problems.
In a nutshell, when solving problems, we follow these simple steps:
- Understand the problem
- Choose an approach
- Test your solution
Each profession has its own methodologies for following these steps; however, questioning is the base for generating the solution because it helps you to understand the problem, choose an approach and design experiments. Want to develop your own approaches? Discover it on the next entry.
