The Thinker's Toolkit: 14 Powerful Techniques for Problem Solving

Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ,

Major factors and major issues are the navigational aids of analysis; they tell us where our analysis should be headed. And they will normally change as we become aware of new information and gain a deeper understanding of the problem. If we lose sight of them, we lose our way in the analytic process.

The quotation appears in Bolles’s book A Second Way of Knowing: “Georgia was suddenly struck by the realization that her feelings governed the way she saw the scene. It was a moment of transformation: the entire visual world, she realized, was dependent on the emotional world.”

We view the world through a dense veil of burdensome, thought-warping emotions, biases, and mind-sets. Through this veil we sometimes perceive cause-and-effect and other “patterns” where there are none. We are prone to grace these nonexistent patterns with self-satisfying explanations with whose validity we are instinctively unconcerned. Finally, w

(That is precisely what happened at the meeting of Family Frozen Foods managers. Darfield began the discussion with the decision—a conclusion—that the solution to the backlog in deliveries was to expand the fleet of delivery trucks.)

Not surprisingly, the solution we intuitively favor is, more often than not, the first one that seems satisfactory. Economists call this phenomenon “satisficing” (a merging of “satisfy” and “suffice”).

Remember the anecdote about the guy who thought his water bed was leaking? He defined the problem as “How can I fix the leak?” His analysis was guided by that definition—by that statement—of the problem. As it turned out, he had defined the problem incorrectly. He should have asked, “What is the source of the water on my blanket?” He should have ma

it. It’s the familiar trial-and-error technique. We humans therefore tend to muddle through in problem solving, enjoying moderate success, living with our failures, and trusting in better luck next time.

Our analysis usually focuses on the solution we intuitively favor; we therefore give inadequate attention to alternative solutions.