Stop Guessing: The 9 Behaviors of Great Problem Solvers by Nat Greene

Author:Nat Greene [Greene, Nat]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Published: 2017-04-02T22:00:00+00:00

WHAT GOOD DIGGING LOOKS LIKE

Let’s say you’ve got a problem with your lawn. The grass is too long, so you’ll define your primary variable as length of grass. You want to understand what controls the length of the grass. When I ask people this question in a problem-solving workshop, they’ll typically give me a dozen perfectly valid variables that influence the length of the grass. The list might look something like this:

• Rain

• Water drainage

• Nitrates in the soil

• Temperature

• Humidity

• Worms in soil

• Destructive bugs

• Goats that eat the grass

• Weeds per square foot

• How often people walk on the grass

• Species of grass

• Height of your lawn mower blade

And all sorts of other stuff. The smarter and larger the group is, and the more time we put in, the longer a list we get—and this is just your lawn! Imagine trying to check and measure all of these variables. You may have noticed that when it’s approached this way, it looks suspiciously like brainstorming—and you know how I feel about that. Imagine something far more complex: To have any hope, we need to simplify this picture. We need to understand what variables most directly control our primary variable by understanding the science behind how the system works. Let’s look at Figure 5.1 to illustrate this.

Figure 5.1: Variables controlling the length of your grass

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