Stop Guessing: The 9 Behaviors of Great Problem Solvers

Stop Guessing: The 9 Behaviors of Great Problem Solvers is a book I was assigned for work. One of those books that comes from management above with the thought that it will enable you to do your job better. It may, we will see.

The author focuses on solving tough problems, the type of problem where you could probably guess a lot of possible causes for the problem but have a very hard time arriving at a solution. The nine key points the author focuses on are:

1) Stop Guessing - pretty self-explanatory, but basically, when presented with a difficult problem do not waste time guessing at solutions or hinder yourself from discovering the root cause by guessing at what the solution should be.

2) Smell the Problem - funny name, but the idea being that you should really try and figure out what is actually wrong by observation rather than guessing.

3) Embrace Your Ignorance - as applied here it is chiefly used to encourage one to ask basic questions without making assumptions, this helps in the event your assumptions are allowing you to miss something.

4) Know What Problem You're Solving - again self-explanatory, but basically, make sure that you do not get distracted from your present problem and go down unhelpful tangents that distract you.

5) Dig Into the Fundamentals - determine what the fundamental variables of your problem are so that you can better focus on actual causes, this should be done as high level variables and then dig into only the ones that are off spec.

6) Don't Rely on Experts - rely on experts for their knowledge and insight about how something works or something you do not understand but work with them and do not rely on them to solve the problem for you based on their knowledge.

7) Believe in a Simple Solution - most problems have a simple solution underneath a difficult search to understand a root cause.

8) Make Fact-Based Decisions - this ties into 2) and 3) above heavily as well as 5) and 6) but the idea is that opinions and guesses should not be used to figure out what the root cause is, rather only use facts.

9) Stay on Target - an amalgamation of 4), 5), and 7) by keeping on target until you find your root cause and your simple solution, do not go down variable paths or add complexity that you do not need to.

All in most likely a good book that I will attempt to put into practice, the ideas seem pretty decent and logical.

My one frustration with the book is that all the information above is frequently conveyed with anecdotal evidence, which is fine, except that the author frequently gives a very tertiary view of what all went into solving the problem and provides very skeletal anecdotes that may be a lot more interesting if there was more meat on them.

Or mainly I just get frustrated when someone starts telling me a technically interesting story, then skips all the promising details to come, and states: "we solved the problem, the end."

Children of the Fleet

Children of the Fleet is yet another book in the Ender Saga. Chronologically I would place it during the events of Ender in Exile. This book is exclusively told from the perspective of Dabeet. As usual I will not be providing much in the way of plot.

In terms of the Enders Saga I feel that this book is set apart in how much and how plainly it is a coming of age story. Also, for the first time in the series the protagonist is both far more flawed than hero and has a lot to learn. In some ways this is both refreshing and also not quite as satisfying.

The story does a good job of expanding the Ender universe in terms of what was going on after the third formic war and what becomes of Battle School. We also get a lot more insight into the ongoing communications between Hyrum Graff and Andrew Wiggin.

If you are not a fan of the series or the universe there is not much for you here though.

The Universal Force: Gravity - Creator of Worlds

The Universal Force: Gravity - Creator of Worlds does a pretty good job of talking about gravity, its interpretations over time, the different ways it has been modeled, and which minds were responsible for the various theories advancement.

Essentially the book goes through the various understandings of gravity from the Ancient Greeks through Einstein resulting in our current understanding and each evolution thereof. The book is at its best when doing so. Further it conveys how the current physicist of that time was either crafting this into a more functional theory or how they were competing with what became the prevailing theory. This context in fantastic and I really enjoyed it.

If you are interested in the history and the subject matter it is a worthwhile read.

The Blue Sword

And yet another one from my picking up books my wife has left around the house. Robin McKinley is one of her favorite authors.

There is a theme amongst the heroines in the novels I have read so far. At least one parent is dead. They like reading a lot. The heroines also generally have a malcontent with their lives and yearn for something more, they would be open for an adventure.

From here on there are plot spoilers.

I liked how this story was told, if at times it came across as formal. An interesting aspect of the writing style, going against general convention, was that there were paragraphs in which two different characters both had dialogue.

There were two primary cultures presented. One was imperial and appeared to have a “women in the home” mentality. There was a queen but it appeared that women in general were meant to be “ladies”. In the other desert / mountain society it was again male dominated but there had been prior women heroines is the past, though the role of women had since subsided and they were less involved in defense and war then they had been previously. Thus, our heroine, Harry, becomes an inspiration to women in the of the desert / mountain society to play a more active role in the more honored warrior caste.

While there is a rather large cast of characters there is relatively little dialogue, the story is not very heavy on dialogue. Furthermore, as with most of McKinley’s novels I have read so far, you spend a lot of time in the head of the characters and are told how they think things through rather than being presented thought processes through dialogue.

Overall I think this made for a significantly better read than Shadows.

Shadows

Another one from my picking up books my wife has left around the house collection. Robin McKinley is one of her favorite authors. I am going to leave plot alone in this review.

Overall there is a fairly interesting story to be found within this book. But… first there are about one hundred pages of non-story. Essentially you get snippets of world building while the narrator of the book rehashes the same issues more or less over and over again and pretty much from the same angle and/or perspective. It is extremely frustrating. Throughout this section of the book I keep hearing God’s line of “GET ON WITH IT!” from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. There were a few moments later one where I felt this was true as well, but nowhere near as much as in the first hundred pages.

Sometimes we are getting a stream of consciousness narrative from the narrator. This would be fine with me if this was consistent throughout the book and was not so mundane for the first one hundred pages but we rarely get this thereafter, and not during the rising action and climax of the plot which would have perhaps added something more.

My wife admits that when she rereads this book she often skips very large sections of the book until it gets into the action. The book does ultimately present an interesting world and a good story but when over 25% of the book (by page count) is superfluous I feel like the story either needed to be shorter or have a lot more substance and consequence to it.

The Swarm

This is the first book in the second Ender’s Game prequel series which covers the Second Formic War.

What I am really enjoying about these prequel series (relating to the First Formic War and the Second Formic War) is that they are filling in a lot of history. In the original books we know that there are two formic wars, that Mazer Rackham is supposedly responsible for killing the Queen and winning the second formic war, but also having previously been severely demoted and not in a combat ship. Somehow we need to get there (or get an explanation for why it has been told to us differently before).

As someone who likes to read plot summaries of movies, books, manga, etc. before I go through them I like to have a sense as to whether or not I would find the story interesting before I devote time to exploring it. And the present books are awesome to me in that they fill in the details of this previously told story, but told in an extremely skeletal form.

As for the book itself I do not really want to give spoilers. But, what we do get is we finally have some inkling of the origin of the ansible and its early usage. Similar to Earth Unaware the Formics play a very minimal role early on.

None of the books in the Ender’s Saga have been particularly kind in their framing or opinion of military bureaucracy. I would say this books is probably the least kind to date.

If you like science fiction, particularly if you are hooked on the Ender Saga I would read this. One day I hope to read the whole series in chronological order and then I would hopefully have a good opinion as to whether the series is best read chronologically or with the prequels as a supplement once you’re already immersed in that universe.