Problem-Solving: Definition

Hi everybody, I’m Riccardo. I’m an iOS Engineer at Bending Spoons since 2015. My main focuses are related to App Development, Lib Development, and Tech growth.

Hi everybody. This week I’d like to talk about problem-solving.
This is the first article of a series on the topic.

Every one of us has to solve some problems in their daily life: at work, at home or in any other place. Whether you have to solve a technical problem or simply decide what to cook for dinner.
Almost every one of us has written in his CV or cover letter: “good problem-solving skills”.

But what does this really mean?

By following Ken Watanabe’s definition, it:

“is a process that can be broken in 4 steps: (1) understand the current situation; (2) identify the root cause of the problem; (3) develop an effective action plan; (4) execute until the problem is solved, making modification as necessary.”

Barbara Minto, instead, thinks that a problem is a situation we don’t like. The problem-solving activity resides in understanding what we can change — and change it — or in developing something completely new to reach the desired situation.

Whatever definition fits you the best, a structured approach will lead to the best solution. It will help you analyze clearly the situation, list all the alternatives avoiding any bias, evaluate them, and finally choose the best path of action to solve it.

In the last days, I started all my problem-solving activities by writing on a paper the 5 questions of Barbara Minto’s Pyramid Principle:

1. What’s the problem?
   Answering this question means to understand clearly the current situation and what we don’t like about it.
2. Where does it lie?
   This question pushes us to study the structure of the current situation and which are the elements responsible for the problem.
3. Why is it happening?
   This one will push us to understand the root cause of the problem.
4. What could we do about it?
   Answering this question will start a two-step process: list all the alternatives and evaluate them.
5. What should we do about it?
   It means to choose the best alternative(s) among the ones evaluated.

I do not start executing until I have replied to all these questions in an exhaustive and convincing way on the paper. I can tell you that this is really helping me in clarifying the issue to myself and in identifying the best solution possible.

In the following part of Problem-Solving, I’d like to go in deep in every one of these questions and to list a set of tools or techniques that can be used to find the best answer.

What about you? What is problem-solving for you?