The Single Most Effective Way to Solve Any Problem

Do you ever feel so over­whelmed by a dif­fi­cult prob­lem that you don’t know where to start?

As a dead­line approaches and you haven’t even made a dint, you feel panic qui­etly ris­ing in your chest.  You doubt your abil­ity.   You start to think you’re an impos­tor and you shouldn’t really be the one with this respon­si­bil­ity.  The feel­ing of impend­ing doom is terrifying.

As you become more fran­tic, you start to find it dif­fi­cult to focus, lurch­ing from one thing to another, blindly flail­ing for an answer, for the key.

It doesn’t come.  Your self doubt begins to over­power you.  This prob­lem is just too BIG.

Add to the mix that annoy­ing per­son we all know who seems to breeze through — that per­son who seems to always come up with the answer and always suc­ceeds.  They have an uncanny abil­ity to solve prob­lems that oth­ers find baffling.

How do you solve big prob­lems, under stress, on your own?  Almost all of us strug­gle with this — it’s why we get paid for our work and it’s part of being human.

Want to know the secret?

It’s an idea so sim­ple that many peo­ple over­look it when faced with a big, hairy chal­lenge.  Do the fol­low­ing phrases sound familiar?

• Triage
• Divide & Conquer
• A jour­ney of a thou­sand miles begins with a sin­gle step
• Death by a thou­sand cuts
• Keep It Sim­ple, Stu­pid (KISS)

These every day phrases are all talk­ing about The Sin­gle Most Effec­tive Way to Solve Any Prob­lem:

First, make it smaller.

But how?

Start some­where — any­where.  Have faith that if you apply one sim­ple rule, you will get the best pos­si­ble result given your avail­able resources.  You can apply the rule of mak­ing the prob­lem smaller by using the ideas listed above .

Triage was used by French doc­tors in the First World War to treat wounded on the bat­tle­field.  If you have 1 doc­tor, and dozens or hun­dreds of wounded, where do you begin? How do you max­imise the num­ber of peo­ple who sur­vive? (Now that’s a scary prob­lem to have).

Triage has been adapted and improved upon in recent years, but in its orig­i­nal form, doc­tors would make a best guess about who to treat first by clas­si­fy­ing patients as follows:

• Those who are likely to live, regard­less of what care they receive;
• Those who are likely to die, regard­less of what care they receive;
• Those for whom imme­di­ate care might make a pos­i­tive dif­fer­ence in out­come
  (from Wikipedia)

Apply this to your prob­lem.  First, you work out what you can get away with not doing (see my post The Don’t Do List).  Sud­denly, the prob­lem gets a whole lot smaller — and you’ve barely started.  Sec­ond, work out what you can’t fix, no mat­ter what you do.  Another chunk of the prob­lem gone (there was noth­ing to be gained wor­ry­ing about that bit anyway).

What you are left with is a piece of work that is highly likely to result in a solu­tion and, as a bonus, it’s a hell of a lot smaller than when you started.  Even with that head-start though, some prob­lems are just hard to solve.  Com­puter pro­gram­mers face dif­fi­cult and com­plex prob­lems all the time, but they suc­ceed by using another method to make the prob­lem even smaller.

Divide & Con­quer is a way of main­taing polit­i­cal and mil­i­tary power by never allow­ing your ene­mies to join forces.  It works just as well on other prob­lems.  Com­puter pro­gram­mers use it to break a very com­plex cod­ing chal­lenge down into dis­crete chunks so small, that solv­ing each indi­vid­ual chunk is triv­ial.  You’re not a pro­gram­mer (or an Emperor), so how can you use Divide & Conquer?

Say you’re writ­ing a report, a school assign­ment or a blog post.  If you sit down and tackle the whole thing at once, you’ll be over­whelmed.  Even if you man­age to push through, you’ll have spent a lot of effort rehash­ing things and reor­gan­is­ing sen­tences and para­graphs over and over to make it flow.  First, break the work up into log­i­cal pieces — out­lin­ing your arti­cle achieves this.  Once the out­line is drafted, you can focus on writ­ing each sec­tion with­out hav­ing to worry about the oth­ers.  You can keep reduc­ing the chunks if needed, all the way down to indi­vid­ual para­graphs and sen­tences if it’s war­ranted.  Every­one can write a sin­gle sen­tence.  All you have to do now is repeat the triv­ial task of writ­ing 1 sen­tence enough times to com­plete all the parts of your outline.

A jour­ney of a thou­sand miles begins with a sin­gle step is cred­ited to the Chi­nese philoso­pher Lao-tzu.  What this means is start where you’re at.  We often make prob­lems harder than they need to be because we get ahead of our­selves.  Tackle what’s in front of you.  First, make it smaller, then do it again.

Death by a thou­sand cuts as an expres­sion is uni­ver­sally under­stood to be neg­a­tive (go fig­ure).  It refers both to an ancient Chi­nese form of tor­ture and the polit­i­cal con­cept of “creep­ing nor­malcy” that describes the way that peo­ple will accept major change if it hap­pens grad­u­ally enough. The anec­dote goes that a live frog placed in a pot of cool water won’t jump out to save itself, if the water is grad­u­ally brought to the boil.

Prob­lems, like frogs, can be dis­patched eas­ily if you are method­i­cal and per­sis­tant about it.  Make the prob­lem smaller by attack­ing it over time, rather than in one all out frenzy.

Keep It Sim­ple, Stu­pid (or the KISS prin­ci­ple) was used by the lead engi­neer at the Lock­heed Skunkworks to describe a fun­da­men­tal prin­ci­ple of good design: avoid unnec­es­sary com­plex­ity.  When think­ing about ways of solv­ing prob­lems, this trite lit­tle phrase sums it up.  Make it smaller.

I hope you’ve found at least one of these ways of mak­ing prob­lems smaller use­ful.  Maybe you’re a gun prob­lem solver your­self? What are your favourite prob­lem solv­ing meth­ods? Share in the com­ments sec­tion, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Related Posts:

• Busi­ness Secret Spices 1: Obsession
• The Four Hour Work Week Process
• Why The Hard­est Things Should Be The Easiest
• 5 Books That Will Make You a Bet­ter BA
• Busi­ness Secret Spices 4: People