I'm a soldier and soldiers have to constantly solve problems. I love my team mates and the soldiers that I work with but sometimes I notice that they don't use basic problem solving concepts. I was thinking this weekend that with a little more practice at applying problem solving skills they might get more out their training, their jobs, and even their relationships.
Thank you! It can be very frustrating when a solution seems so simple and obvious but the people involved screw it up.
If you are presented with a problem what do you do? Maybe you try to understand the problem, think of basic solutions, and then you implement. But the last and most important step is often overlooked: understanding the people involved and who will implement it. What will my team, friend, boss, organization do with my solution and how will that affect it's success or failure? I need to think about that for a second. Because sometimes I come up with a great idea and then screw it up by not dealing with the people involved in the way I should to be successful.
To take a simple example, "I can't pass my PT test," is a common soldier problem. Ok so you look into the soldiers medical history, height, weight, PT schedule, personnel profile, history of performance and you come to the stunning conclusion: "You're fat and you are too slow to run 2 miles in the allotted time.
Great! You've identified the problem so you furiously develop a comprehensive daily PT regimen for the soldier, you concoct a diet plan, establish reporting standards, the soldier smiles and complies.
Problem+Plan=Solution
A month later the soldier shows up to drill, heavier, slower and more discouraged. So you step back, annoyed that your solution was stymied by this soldier. "Did you do the PT? Did you follow the diet?" the soldier looks at his boots. "Sorta." So you take "corrective action". You yell, you punish, you assign a medical evaluation and let a doctor look at the records to make a note.
Problem+Plan+Aggression=Solution
A month later soldier is back, heavier, slower, more discouraged. You look at the soldier and you don't offer a quick solution. You don't berate him. You don't pass him off to a disinterested party. You realize that you never identified the problem in the first place. The real problem was that the soldier was unconfident and too shy to do PT. Your "solution" was "solving" the wrong problem. You prescribed a cure to the symptom, and not the cause. You realize that you hadn't really ever understood the problem in the first place.
So you finally sit the soldier down. You ask him about his home life. You ask him what he is proud of. You ask him what his goals are. You listen. You hear his interests. You learn his talents. You identify his habits. He feels that you are hearing him out. He realizes that you are an advocate and not a bully. You challenge him to come up with his own solution, plans and consequences. He makes a plan. You oversee it's implementation. You talk to him every few days, ask questions, offer encouragement, enforce the standards. The next month he shows up, lighter, faster and more confident.
Problem+Understanding+Plan=Solution
It's become popular lore that Einstein, if tasked with saving the world in on hour, would spend 59 minutes understanding the problem and 1 minute implementing solutions. But understanding is painful, slow, laborious and boring. Diet pills are a great example of why something so clearly unhelpful continues to be so stubbornly alluring. It is an external solution that requires no systematic restructuring, self assessment or behavioral adjustment.
You might get an assignment to explain to your boss why a client is ending a contract with your company. You realize from the start that your boss's mismanagement of the account is the core problem that yielded this outcome. So what do you do? This is where that last step: understanding your audience and watching is so important. Do you act? What's your goal? What can you actually achieve? Where do you ethics and ambitions balance out your decision? What kind of a boss is he?
Problem+Understanding+Plan+People=Solution
I think at it's core this ability to balance situations/actions/outcomes is what we all commonly call "common sense" or "street smarts". It's being able to look at problems, see where you fit into them, knowing what you can realistically affect in the situation, and being able to execute what you decide to do.
We see two friends at the bar. The New Zealand Rugby team walks in and pushes in front of your girlfriend in line for a beer. Friend #1 says, "this is bullshit, we're throwing down right now", proceeds to mouths off at a particularly stout Prop and to gets his ass kicked. He displays an unfortunate deficit of "common sense".
Friend #1 was technically "right", but he failed to perceive the human factors at work in the situation. His assessment for how to rectify the situation was too rooted in his own ego. He overestimated his capacity to exert leverage in that terrain. So he gets an ass whooping and a dozen stitches.
Had he maintained focus on his objective of solving the fundamental problem: "I want a beer," and he may have noticed the rooftop bar upstairs without a rowdy crew and a better view. Maybe if he applied some patience, he could have mentioned the slight to the team captain later in the night, gotten an apology from the gregarious but decent Kiwis and shared a few pints with the mates with a restored sense of mutual respect. Sometimes you have to wait for the decisive moment to implement your plan before you can achieve the desired outcome.
Problem+Understanding+Plan+People+Patience=Solution
So at the end of the day what I'm saying is this: If you strip away ego, vendettas, the human idiosyncrasies from these real world problems you can get pretty close to a solution, only as long as you accept the human factors in your implementation.
Most challenges can be tackled if you make time to understand the problem, gauge the solution and the people involved, stay aware, continually readjust, and stay patient for the right conditions. But have a beer, because you can't solve everything.
0 comments:
Post a Comment