A reoccuring meme this week for me has been the notion of solving ‘difficult’ problems.  Most recently, I came across this observation from the New York Time’s interview of Bain Capital member, Edward Conrad:

it makes no sense to look for easy solutions.  In a competitive market, all that’s left are the ruly hard puzzles.  And they require extraordinary resources.

This got me thinking about problems and methods for finding solutions which led to a cool article in wikipedia about different problem solving methods including such exotically named approaches like morphological anlaysis and method of focal objects.

I then found an article about the 8D Method of Problem Solving which lists … well, 8 steps to solve problems.  The last step is congratulate your team.

This is all very interesting, but I’m not sure what problem I’m solving with all this.