* Recognize that what I already tried didn't work. This sounds ridiculous, but it's really important. Most problems that come up I solve without thinking about them much; I just pattern-match subsets of the problem against solutions I know and try those solutions. It works great for quickly solving the problems it solves, but when a problem resists being handled that way it's really easy to end up in a stupid loop where I'm trying the same solutions over and over.
Mostly I take notes about what I do and what results I get.
* Make sure my feet touch bottom. If a problem is too complex for me to fully understand at one gulp, I either break it down into sub-problems which I solve independently or I come up with a simpler version of the problem. I've struggled with a lot of smarter-than-me people over the years whose attitude seems to be that if they make the problem complicated enough, everyone but them will drown in the complexity and they'll win by attrition, even if the problem itself doesn't get solved.
* Adopt different perspectives. "It ain't the things ya don't know that get ya. It's the things ya do know, that just ain't so." If I'm stuck on a problem, I start throwing out things I thought I knew, approaching it from a completely different position. "What if that were false?" "What else does this look like, and what if it were really like that thing?" etc.
* Work backwards as well as forwards. That is, not just "What might be causing this problem?" but "What might a solution look like, and how could I get to that?" (Followed by "What else might a solution look like?")
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2012-01-06 09:36 pm (UTC)* Recognize that what I already tried didn't work.
This sounds ridiculous, but it's really important. Most problems that come up I solve without thinking about them much; I just pattern-match subsets of the problem against solutions I know and try those solutions. It works great for quickly solving the problems it solves, but when a problem resists being handled that way it's really easy to end up in a stupid loop where I'm trying the same solutions over and over.
Mostly I take notes about what I do and what results I get.
* Make sure my feet touch bottom.
If a problem is too complex for me to fully understand at one gulp, I either break it down into sub-problems which I solve independently or I come up with a simpler version of the problem. I've struggled with a lot of smarter-than-me people over the years whose attitude seems to be that if they make the problem complicated enough, everyone but them will drown in the complexity and they'll win by attrition, even if the problem itself doesn't get solved.
* Adopt different perspectives.
"It ain't the things ya don't know that get ya. It's the things ya do know, that just ain't so."
If I'm stuck on a problem, I start throwing out things I thought I knew, approaching it from a completely different position. "What if that were false?" "What else does this look like, and what if it were really like that thing?" etc.
* Work backwards as well as forwards.
That is, not just "What might be causing this problem?" but "What might a solution look like, and how could I get to that?" (Followed by "What else might a solution look like?")