Thinking — the right way

Problems can be critical. It could be daunting if we are not approaching them the right way. Do we have a clear understanding of the problems we face on a daily basis? Do we spend some time before we even take up challenges? Are we solving a problem or creating a new one with our recommendations?

Probably we don’t ask these questions at times we face challenges. The reason is we don’t like to complicate things which could become worse on critical analysis. Whenever you face a problem and if you tend to question someone on that, the immediate response you might get is to just go with what you get and finish the task for now. Isn’t it?

I do remember the very first time-solving programming challenges. It was right in my 11th grade. When I asked my computer science teacher what is the use in solving debugging problems and predicting the C programming output challenges. Guess what, my teacher was so productive with time and marks. She advised me not to attend such questions and continue writing theory answers offered as an alternative to these questions. You know what those long descriptive theories could be stressful to write. They consist of desktop screenshots(How do one come up with those screen UIs for each question and subtopics), shortcuts, command controls to memorize and mundane tasks to be listed. That’s was the beginning of my disgusting attitude towards teachers. Guess what, I started attempting that kind of debugging questions just to irritate her and prove that she is wrong in her approach. She used to call my parents and complain about my attitude. I even was refused to get evaluated by her during my school exams stating I was disrespectful. Things can’t get this worse

A computer science student punished for attempting programming challenges 😆

I am not a programming freak, even I am not aware of this line of career during those days but I chose that just because I am restricted from raising questions.

What is the root cause of my teacher’s approach or belief? She doesn’t want to risk my learning path. She felt that I would score high by ignoring those challenges. Does she solve the problem of making me score high? No, she just solved a symptom. Yes, you heard it right. It wasn’t a problem it’s just a symptom. This is the case in most of our life challenges we don’t take time to think critically and push ourselves to solve the problem which itself isn’t the problem at the root level.

There are various problem-solving techniques that can be applied in our daily life. But few are being used. The reason is we care only about outcomes, thus very little scope we do offer for researching possible solutions. You can solve multiple problems on the go. But the question is are we solving it effectively?

What it implies is are we thinking critically? Yes, critical thinking is crucial for problem-solving ranging from relationships to complex business problems. Let’s have a look at what thinking critically means? How it could help with productivity? What ways we could utilize it?

What is critical thinking?

Mindset + Application

If thinking is a bit deeper, helping us arrive at meaningful analysis, observations, come up with potential recommendations and examine future problems it may lead to is what we can define as critical thinking.Uhhh!

Let me make it practical. It was a completely bootstrapped startup with a clear vision and mission. As the company grows up, they planned to automate certain resources and tasks to boost productivity. They found it was becoming more and more difficult to address employee issues, facilitate proper communications, etc. So the engineering manager who is responsible for this concern decided to come up with some feasible solutions. He gathered his team and had a warming discussion. They thought critically and came up with a feasible solution. What could be the solution? In what way their critical thinking process helped them to tackle this issue? Let’s see it in detail.

When there are multiple departments contributing to a particular problem we can’t just arrive at a solution without thinking critically.No use in diving right away into the solution.What if we didn’t take time to think critically?Let’s say the engineer manager decided to buy a productivity software suite from some external firm. What if the employees are not happy with its interface?What if the subscription costs affected directly their revenue goals?What if they felt like the resources are not used to the optimal margin? This could happen in an early-stage startup very often. What was the mistake done here? The engineering lead right away jumped into some solution without thinking critically and the results are highly discouraging. What could have been done instead of this?

Break larger problems into smaller parts that are easy to solve

Yes, the engineering manager could have broken the larger problem into smaller parts and then could have researched on the necessity to solve those individually so the cost could have reduced fairly high. Let’s see one possible solution for this,

Problem: Boost productivity as we scale globally

Split-up:

Find a way to facilitate communication between employees. Facilitate smooth HR operations. Solve parking problems. Address issues related to resources such as laptops and printers. Space allotment for meeting rooms.

You can split this way to get a clear insight into the problem.

This is the first step. Define the problem statement clearly. Once you know the problem statement clearly you can ask the question behind questions. Yes, I do repeat ask questions behind questions. Don’t settle with one. That is not a good way to approach problems. Let’s take the major issue from the above ones. Space allotment for meeting rooms. Since the company is growing rapidly the meeting room space is not properly adjusted with schedules. Let’s see how we can solve this.

What is the problem?

Ans: Meeting rooms allocation

Why is it difficult so?

Ans: The people resources are increasing

What we can do about it?

Ans: We can buy software for this from some external firms offering this kind of services

How much it would cost? Is it essential to spend the money required for that particular suite of software?

Ans: The software subscription costs 40% of their company’s spend on resources. It’s not wise to go with it.

What if we developed it internally?

Ans: Its hard for employees as they would be super busy with the product works.

What if the employees can’t?Can we outsource it?

Ans: It’s quite equal to buy a software subscription

What if someone can build it for you?

Ans: That would be great. But who would actually do it for us? The other resources would-be interns, but they lack expertise in development.

Hurray! That sounds great. We can go by building our own by guiding our interns. Why this would be great?

Interns would have a strong desire to learn. They would dedicate themselves to their work irrespective of the barriers. They will have a strong attitude towards taking up challenges. The only push they would require is proper and consistent guidance from experts. That’s affordable compared to hundreds of dollars. So the manager offered this as a productive task for their interns and personally managed them as a team. They loved working with this realtime assignment and within a decent span of time, they managed to build a facility management suite from scratch. They saved a lot of time and money spent on this concern. This is all because of the multiple why’s and what if’s.

Examine the causes and care about your recommendations

The next time when someone suggests you a recommendation don’t just blindly go with it. Ask them why would you choose it? What else could we do for this? What if I didn’t follow it? What other possible ways I could approach this? You may argue to me that I complicating things. But trust me if you practiced approaching problems in a critical way it would surprise you with many productive benefits. You will never feel until you try those. What were you waiting for? Just try those. Let me offer you some techniques you could apply below.

1. Define the problem clearly
2. Ask questions behind questions
3. Examine past efforts

I would like to touch up this point a bit. It’s important to apply it on a daily basis.One or other way all problems are related.Always look for all possible angles when approaching a problem.Let me explain with an example.

Now consider the problem related to parking which we mentioned above. This was assigned to a team of intern people. Jammy was leading the team. He was thinking critically and analyzing the problem with past experiences. He met a few past interns and asked about their tasks during their intern period. One solution that closely related to their problem is our meeting room allocation problem. If you drill down a bit you would observe that both were solving the problem of resource allocation without any hassle. He got all the insights from that particular team, they explained the constraints they weren’t aware of the problem during development and how they managed to solve those later. Jammy made a clear sprint plan and explained those to his team members. They completed the task hardly in a few weeks, the fastest of all those were undertaken previously. What’s the key here? Did they use extra resources or money.No, it was their way of approaching problems critically that helped to achieve these feet.

1. Look at the problem in different possible views.
2. Always stop asking only after 5 why’s. This is called 5 why’s — rule, which could offer you clear insight on possible causes.
3. Similarly, follow 7 what’s principle for hassle-free recommendations
4. One last thing I would recommend you is the 80/20 principle, also called as Pareto principle.You will never understand it’s power until you apply them in real-life situations.

Let’s look at an example,

Are we making optimum use of our resources? Once there was a consulting firm with a bunch of projects in hand. They hardly found time to finish those projects. Initially, they struggled to take up new projects since it was difficult to prioritize those. The Head of Engineering was worried. He started to spend some time analyzing all the proposals. On critical analysis with past project proposals and tactics, he found that 80% of their revenue was from 20% of their valuable foreign clients. At the same time, he was surprised to find that the remaining 80% of their clients were contributing only to 20% of their growth. So the head decided to cut down those 80% clients for now and fully focus on 20% of their valuable clients which lead to 10% increase in their annual revenue and a steady rise in client satisfaction. In addition to this, they got a few new clients based on their performance. Thus next time if you struggling to prioritize your tasks, take some time and analyze them clearly to find those resources contributing to your 80% growth and start focussing on those primarily. It would definitely make a huge difference in productivity.

The path of 1000 miles, however, begins with 1 step

Go take your first step towards critical thinking now!