Using analogies can help you approach new, unfamiliar problems creatively, but they can also be constraining. To sidestep this limitation, understand your assumptions and look for alternative analogies.
Analogies can help you approach unfamiliar problems
Facing an unfamiliar problem, using an analogy (or its close cousin, the metaphor) can help you make progress. For instance, consider the obesity problem and society’s inability to cure it. Yale’s David Katz has recently suggested to treat health as wealth and obesity as drowning. This helps open the door to health management (we don’t spend our entire wealth in one go, neither should we destroy our health capital) and a different approach to managing obesity, not as a disease that needs to be treated but as something that requires prevention.
Confirmation bias—seeking and interpreting evidence partially so as to support one’s beliefs—is so destructive that it can render your analysis useless. And chances are, you are a victim of it.
Raymond Nickerson, a psychology professor at Tufts University, found evidence of confirmation bias in a number of disciplines. (His 1998 paper published in the Review of General Psychology is both enlightening and sobering: citing hundreds of sources, he makes a compelling argument that confirmation bias is everywhere.)
Chances are, you are solving the wrong problem.
Nothing personal, dear reader, as I wholeheartedly trust your instincts and impeccable judgement, but it happens to the best of us.
We all solve the wrong problem
Case in point: I’ve coached over 200 people to solve complex problems in the past five years. Not a single one decided, after thinking for a couple of weeks about the problem they brought, that their original formulation was the right one. Not one.
Working for Accenture had its ups and downs, but one great, great up was a simple idea: help others be successful.
Thinking about it after so many years, there are a couple of instances that stem out:
Decision making is a critical part of the problem-solving process. But it is also only that: a part. The process has several others; don’t overlook some at the expense of others. (This post is a summary of a guest article I did for Weighted Decision Matrices, the original is available here.)
The resolution process of CIDNI problems is sequential, with decision making appearing only within the third step. A decision matrix can be useful to decide between various competing solutions, but that decision is only as good as the ground work that prepared it.
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Integrate decision making into your overall problem-solving approach
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