"Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do." -Goethe
Systematic Problem Solving: Part 4
Up to this point we have looked with a little detail at the first couple of steps in our process of systematic problem solving. The first was to "determine the information" and the second was to "determine paths to solutions." When we discussed the paths to solutions, you may recall that I mentioned that we didn't want to eliminate any paths at that point in time, for pretty much any normal reason. Now there are certainly extreme cases but those were probably not really paths to solutions if pursued further.
Now we've come to the third step, "determine which path to take." In some cases, like the example we did for step 1, there's really not much debate about which path was going to be followed to come up with a successful solution, but what about more complicated problems, messier ones that may seem as if they don't really have a solution?
This is where not being too hasty in discarding solutions is important. Let's say we own and are running a small-sized company with around 5 employees. In this kind of setting, where everyone is likely on a first name basis and is quite familiar, having to make decisions may be difficult, but the impact is small and errors or misjudgements can be easily corrected. So carry along this way, doing well, and your company might grow to more of a medium-size,with say 200-300 employees. Now, you have probably maintained contact with your earlier employees, and many others too, but there are also many floating about that you haven't had a chance to talk to and may not immediately know some peoples names or even whether they work for you or are a visiting vendor or customer. Now you have many tentacles spread out through people you know, but you are becoming more detached from the impact of your decisions, and are also less able to make the same kinds of course correcting actions as you were before. As you can imagine, this level of detachment will grow as the company does. Eventually you will be at a point where the impact of decisions you make might not make it back to you until next years third quarter financial report.
So why then would we want to leave so many options from which one must be selected? At this point many decisions will impact hundreds, thousands, maybe millions of individual lives in some way. When problems grow to have such scope, hybrid solutions may sit underneath the surface that for some reason or another didn't come into the original pool of solution candidates. If we draw this back down to a lower level, this can still certainly be true. If a close friend, who happens to be a professional writer, suddenly gets cut by the magazine he's been writing for, he might look to you for help. He might even come to you with a great idea for a book featuring your comany's hottest product. However, you have been searching for someone to fill a managerial position in marketing and promotions and have narrowed it down to just a couple of candidates. With your next product still in development, you really can't risk the extra funds for your friends book idea, even though you really liked the idea, because all of above operating cost funds in the company are going towards the production of the new product and also hire one of the candidates for the marketing position.
So when you originally look at this problem, you see that you can hire your friend for his idea, or you can hire the new manager in marketing. I'm hoping that you may have seen the lurking solution there, hire the friend as the marketing manager for now and hold off on his book idea until the new product has finally launched. Well this is great, we've found another potential solution, but what are the consequences of each of them? If we hired his friend for his book idea we would either be missing out on getting someone into a position that badly needs filling or possibly busting the budget. If you hired one of the two candidates as the new manager, your friend may turn against you, or still be your friend for a while, but things could go very badly for him and you would feel responsible. What about our hybrid solution? Well it has a problem too. If you hire your friend for the position that you have open now, then you have to turn away two candidates that up to now you had found really deserving of the position.
These are the kinds of problems that really call for the third step in the framework. How do you determine which path to take?
You need to find other information to give weight to each of the options that will help you make a firm choice. Some examples here might be whether your friend has any clue about marketing? Writing for a magazine somewhat implies that he probably does, but that's no sure thing either. Does he have management experience. How much better are the original candidates. Is there another place the budget can be cut to do both? This last question would presumably have been answered already, and hopefully the other answers would have been looked at already, but you get the idea. We don't want to eliminate something that seems like it might be unethical somehow, but in some situations someone always has to lose. There's a mathematical way to represent these situations in game theory that we might cover later, if there's time perhaps.
So what's the point? Once you've gathered what should be essential information and drawn inferences and built up some solution methods, we then need to do some analysis to determine what is, or at least seems to be the best path to take. As for the case of our hypothetical business, the best solution may be the one you choose. More than likely though our hybrid solution is a good one and the one I would go with assuming that the friend has been in the magazine business for a while and has some idea about marketing. We'll look at a real example next to highlight the idea of determining which path to take, where we can get a stronger intuition for the process. Following that we'll discuss the last step, "determine whether to accept it," followed by some interesting problems (with solutions) that will let us hone our skills. After that we will return to different aspects of the process and discuss things like modularity like we have talked about before. It's sure to be fun, be sure to hang in there!
Sincerely,
Tristen
Now we've come to the third step, "determine which path to take." In some cases, like the example we did for step 1, there's really not much debate about which path was going to be followed to come up with a successful solution, but what about more complicated problems, messier ones that may seem as if they don't really have a solution?
This is where not being too hasty in discarding solutions is important. Let's say we own and are running a small-sized company with around 5 employees. In this kind of setting, where everyone is likely on a first name basis and is quite familiar, having to make decisions may be difficult, but the impact is small and errors or misjudgements can be easily corrected. So carry along this way, doing well, and your company might grow to more of a medium-size,with say 200-300 employees. Now, you have probably maintained contact with your earlier employees, and many others too, but there are also many floating about that you haven't had a chance to talk to and may not immediately know some peoples names or even whether they work for you or are a visiting vendor or customer. Now you have many tentacles spread out through people you know, but you are becoming more detached from the impact of your decisions, and are also less able to make the same kinds of course correcting actions as you were before. As you can imagine, this level of detachment will grow as the company does. Eventually you will be at a point where the impact of decisions you make might not make it back to you until next years third quarter financial report.
So why then would we want to leave so many options from which one must be selected? At this point many decisions will impact hundreds, thousands, maybe millions of individual lives in some way. When problems grow to have such scope, hybrid solutions may sit underneath the surface that for some reason or another didn't come into the original pool of solution candidates. If we draw this back down to a lower level, this can still certainly be true. If a close friend, who happens to be a professional writer, suddenly gets cut by the magazine he's been writing for, he might look to you for help. He might even come to you with a great idea for a book featuring your comany's hottest product. However, you have been searching for someone to fill a managerial position in marketing and promotions and have narrowed it down to just a couple of candidates. With your next product still in development, you really can't risk the extra funds for your friends book idea, even though you really liked the idea, because all of above operating cost funds in the company are going towards the production of the new product and also hire one of the candidates for the marketing position.
So when you originally look at this problem, you see that you can hire your friend for his idea, or you can hire the new manager in marketing. I'm hoping that you may have seen the lurking solution there, hire the friend as the marketing manager for now and hold off on his book idea until the new product has finally launched. Well this is great, we've found another potential solution, but what are the consequences of each of them? If we hired his friend for his book idea we would either be missing out on getting someone into a position that badly needs filling or possibly busting the budget. If you hired one of the two candidates as the new manager, your friend may turn against you, or still be your friend for a while, but things could go very badly for him and you would feel responsible. What about our hybrid solution? Well it has a problem too. If you hire your friend for the position that you have open now, then you have to turn away two candidates that up to now you had found really deserving of the position.
These are the kinds of problems that really call for the third step in the framework. How do you determine which path to take?
You need to find other information to give weight to each of the options that will help you make a firm choice. Some examples here might be whether your friend has any clue about marketing? Writing for a magazine somewhat implies that he probably does, but that's no sure thing either. Does he have management experience. How much better are the original candidates. Is there another place the budget can be cut to do both? This last question would presumably have been answered already, and hopefully the other answers would have been looked at already, but you get the idea. We don't want to eliminate something that seems like it might be unethical somehow, but in some situations someone always has to lose. There's a mathematical way to represent these situations in game theory that we might cover later, if there's time perhaps.
So what's the point? Once you've gathered what should be essential information and drawn inferences and built up some solution methods, we then need to do some analysis to determine what is, or at least seems to be the best path to take. As for the case of our hypothetical business, the best solution may be the one you choose. More than likely though our hybrid solution is a good one and the one I would go with assuming that the friend has been in the magazine business for a while and has some idea about marketing. We'll look at a real example next to highlight the idea of determining which path to take, where we can get a stronger intuition for the process. Following that we'll discuss the last step, "determine whether to accept it," followed by some interesting problems (with solutions) that will let us hone our skills. After that we will return to different aspects of the process and discuss things like modularity like we have talked about before. It's sure to be fun, be sure to hang in there!
Sincerely,
Tristen