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.