How can we solve problems in four ways?

We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.

— Albert Einstein

How do you approach solving a problem? I am sure that you have a proven method which you have used many times. Let’s talk specifically about business problems. Let’s take four examples. How will you approach solving each of these business problems? Imagine that —

Problem 1 — You are the new CEO of a firm. You find that in order for your firm to be competitive in the marketplace, you need to reduce costs? Which costs will you reduce? How will you reduce these costs?

Problem 2 — You are the product manager of a Pay As You Drive (PAYD) solution. You need to develop a mobile app which will be able to tell you how much does someone drive as well as how well do they drive. How will you solve this problem?

Problem 3 — You are the delivery head of a set of business operations. You have a team of about 500 people distributed across multiple locations and working in multiple shifts to do medical bill review of doctors’ prescriptions, pharmacy bills and hospital reports related to insurance claims. How will you lower the cost of doing this work?

Problem 4 — You are the underwriting head of an insurance carrier. You want a platform to make your underwriters more efficient (speed of underwriting decisions) and more effective (quality of underwriting decisions). Insurance underwriting decisions are about whether to accept a risk submitted and at what price to accept the risk. How will you specify business requirements for building this underwriting platform?

I have worked as a management consultant for most of my career. I have also had some experience of managing operations, building software products and leading solution development and implementation as an innovation head. I am sharing this brief background so that you see where I come from. For you see, I have found that the way we approach problem solving is significantly influenced by the background that we come from.

With an engineering and a management degree when I began my consulting career, for a few years I thought that I had cracked the typical problem solving method. It was simply three steps as follows:

1. Current state assessment — Where you collect data and analyze it to find where problems lie.
2. Future state definition — Where you create a blueprint of what the future will look like in say 3 years.
3. Implementation road map — Where you construct a set of initiatives with timelines, milestones and cost-benefit analysis (CBA) to go from the current state to the future state.

This methodology was both elegant and versatile. I could successfully utilize this methodology in various kinds of scenarios, from preparing a transformation road map for an insurance claims department, to post-merger IT integration of six companies to digital strategy for an insurance company.

It was good till it lasted. It lasted as my primary weapon till I remained ignorant of other problem solving methods. The good news is that I came across different kinds of problems in my career. So, I had to learn different ways of approaching them. Let me not bore you with all the gory details. Let me rather jump to the end and begin from there.

Having learnt various problem solving methods, I have found four patterns in which most of them, if not all, can be described. To describe the four patterns, I will use the typical tool of a management consultant, a 2 by 2 chart. On X-axis is Problem with two possible values, Known and Unknown. On Y-axis is Solution with two possible values, Known and Unknown. Inside the four boxes you can see the four types of problem solving methods.

Four ways to solve a problem

1. Think like a Process Expert — If both the problem and the solution are known, it still needs to be solved. It is like you knowing that force is equal to mass multiplied by acceleration (F=m*a), but for a particular scenario you still need to solve this equation to say calculate the force applied during braking your car. A process expert might do a value-stream mapping and apply six sigma and lean management concepts to solve such a problem.
2. Think like a Management Consultant — Sometimes people accuse management consultants of not recommending anything new, but of only presenting known solutions backed with facts, in a structured manner. I believe that it stems out of a misunderstanding. The reality is that in most cases, management consultants are hired by the executive management to look into a high-level objective, e.g. to increase revenue for the firm, and suggest specific problems to be solved to achieve the same, e.g. enter new markets, increase market penetration, launch new products, etc. Once you decide on the specific problems to solve, largely solutions already exist on how to do it. Management consultants use a number of tools including hypothesis-driven validation and other decision-making methods.
3. Think like a Software Engineer — A software engineer needs to work with a known problem. In fact, most software projects fail if the problem to be solved is not clear. On the other hand, if the problem is known, a software engineer will typically use algorithmic approach, sometimes combining it with a heuristic approach, to solve it. One popular example is how to sort a list, say a set of books in a library in the alphabetical order (check out this short TED Ed video on, “What’s the fastest way to alphabetize your bookshelf?”)
4. Think like a Product Designer — Say, you are a product designer who is asked to come up with a better design for a chair. How will you do it? I think that it will be safe to say that you will first try to understand what problem do you have to solve. Is it about making the chair more ergonomic, more aesthetically pleasing, simply sturdier or more economical to manufacture? Only once you decide on which problem to solve, you next move on to how to solve that problem. However, finding a concrete solution is also your job. Using a pun on the word job, you might use methods such as Jobs to be Done or JTBD (check out this article on, “Clay Christensen’s Milkshake Marketing”) or Design Thinking.

I intend to cover each of these four approaches in detail in subsequent articles. Two points before I end.

One is that I have used phrases such as “Think like a …Software Engineer / Product Designer / Process Expert / Management Consultant” instead of using words such as analytical thinking, design thinking, lean thinking and critical thinking to simply make it easier for us to imagine or visualize different types of thinking. This is not to suggest that a software engineer cannot or does not use design thinking or that other professions not referred to here ranging from building architects to accountants do not use these types of thinking.

The second point is actually a question for you to ponder over. Go back to the four problems stated at the beginning of this article. Which primary approach would you use to solve each of these problems? Go ahead and share your response. I will incorporate any responses in my next article.