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."