I do this to eat my share of humble pie so I would be more open to the plans of other people.
I force myself to write something like this because this demonstrates something important to me.
I cannot think about everything. We all have blind spots. We can learn from other people.
Most of the time this is true but sometimes it is not. This is also a filter it allows me to just scan what other people write.
By default I try to really think deeply about stuff. This often puts me a couple of steps ahead.
Unfortunately I have observed that people here in the Philippines have a tendency to assume other people are idiots.
How this is revealed is the way a lot of Filipinos assume you are thinking of the stupidest thing when you are saying anything.
So when someone is saying something I force myself to think about the most logical or most kind phrasing of what the person is saying.
Sometimes because of this I can sometimes put words in other people's mouths. But doing this is a good way to avoid conflict or making other people look stupid.
Problem Solving the Philippines ( How I will go about analyzing things)
- Start with a problem or goal or objective: I have a problem and this is my problem. The proper framing of a problem allows some problems to be solved, some problems to be scoped, some problems to be approached with a viable plan of attack.
A goal/objective can be high level but you have to try to bring it down to as much detail later.
The main issue is that doing something unnecessary to solve something or even trying to solve the wrong thing would be more detrimental to an endeavor the more complicated/expensive/long an endeavor is.
- Write all that you know, assume, want to know, need to know. The key here is trying your best to identify what are the knowns, unknowns, knowable, unknown unknowns
From Donald Rumsfeld:
Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tends to be the difficult ones. ( "Defense.gov News Transcript: DoD News Briefing – Secretary Rumsfeld and Gen. Myers". United States Department of Defense. February 12, 2002. Archived from the original on April 6, 2016.)
(Table screenshot from wikipedia. The Rumsfeld Matrix (Chapter 13) - The Climate Demon, Saravanan R., Cambridge University Press (2021) Online ISBN 9781009039604, DOI https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009039604)
- Write the obvious solutions or formulas for solving problems. Here the more problems you have solved the more diverse and vast your toolkit should be. Resist the hammer saying. To the man with a hammer every problem looks like a nail. Ideally you have your own list and you mentally go through it. If you have been using it for a long time then you write by feel, but also force yourself to walkthrough the solutions that are non obvious. Why is that? Because we have intuition but we also have habits, and tendencies. To force yourself to go through this every Xth problem or solution makes you less susceptible to autopilot.
- Analyzing the Solutions: Here you make a table of pros, cons, cost (time money manpower), opposition, complexity, probability of success.
- Know your self and adjust score accordingly.
- When you have written this start to compare with what was implemented.
- Identify what you missed, score. Ask yourself was the decision defensible? What facts would sway you to implement what was implemented?
I wrote this because I wanted to write about facts, write about problems, write about solutions.
This is a simplified checklist that I try to follow when making decisions. or analyzing decisions. I try to make as few decisions as I can. I hate cognitive load. Any time spent not on problem solving is a waste of time. I want to waste time mindfully.
If you can think of improvements or weaknesses of this simple checklist we can improve this together.
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