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.
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