How do I teach this kind of skill?

[drwex]

I'm feeling sort of pleased with myself for coming up with an answer to a problem at work. The challenge? How do I teach this kind of thinking to anyone, particularly my kids.

At work there was a massive fire drill this morning. It could have cost us a LOT of money; the assignment for the tech folks was "Help! How bad is it?" Determining how bad it was in the end involved processing a lot of log/text files to extract the key information. Several of us were attacking different aspects of the problem. In the end, I got to a solution before someone whose day job it is to munge these kinds of things.

I got there faster not because I'm a command-line whiz kid (I'm not, he is) but because I was able to understand that the problem was, essentially, do a set difference on those two lists. I then Googled "linux command line set diff" and sure enough there's a way to do that. When I explained my solution to the tech whiz he agreed it was a good solution, but noted he never would have conceived of the problem as "find the set difference."

I don't think I'm all that much brighter than anyone else, nor am I especially creative. But I am good at this: seeing problems, analyzing them quickly, recognizing patterns, and getting rapidly to solutions. Except I haven't the foggiest idea how I do it, how I learned to do it, or how I would go about teaching that kind of skill.

Comments, thoughts, share-your-own-story all welcome.

Comments

[badseed1980.livejournal.com]

I think that problem solving isn't a skill in itself. Rather, I see it as an application for a number of different kinds of skill sets. Many people who are good at problem-solving have different skills and techniques that they use to solve problems. And, of course, the TYPE of problem makes things different as well. Thinking about it, one thing that might be universal is "simplify." Being able to get to the root of what a problem really IS, is vital. Simplifying your problem allows you to simplify your data, too, because it's easier to tell what's relevant and what isn't. That makes it easier to spot patterns and make connections.