Critical Thinking Skills: Ultimate Tools and Exercises from Root Cause Analysis to Problem Solving

These critical thought processes should help you question everything you do in terms of solving problems, from defining the problem, to generating recommendations, to doing your analysis, to figuring out if you've actually solved the problem, and if you're more mindful about the way you spend your time when you're doing analysis, you're going to be able to solve more problems more effectively, and more efficiently.

Focus your attention on the answers that matter.

so can you change the context in terms of how you're defining the problem? Can you change reality? Ask yourself, what if? What if I removed some of these constraints? What if I had some of these resources? What if I was able to do this instead of that?

Ask yourself, has this problem been considered in the past? What did we learn? What's different now versus the last time we looked at it? Were there challenges or issues last time this was addressed that we need to think about as we try to solve it this time around? What are the ingoing assumptions that are limiting our thinking? Who was involved in the problem solving last time?

So many times when we're asked to look into an issue, we just rush off and start solving it without really thinking through what's causing the person to ask me this question in the first place.

They couldn't solve the problem because they hadn't defined what the problem was in the first place. Take a look at a problem you're trying to solve. Is it clear what the problem statement is? Do you know what the goals are? What the boundaries, constraints, and assumptions are? Do you know who the stakeholders are?