Why is having problem-solving skills necessary?
A common piece of advice that is often found floating around is to develop problem-solving skills. For professionals of all possible domains and industries, this is the one skill that they must have. But why are problem-solving skills necessary? What even are problem-solving skills, to begin with?
The first step as they say, in order to solving a problem is understanding it. With that train of thought developing problem-solving skills is as meta as a problem gets, in order to do it you must use the problem-solving skills that you don’t yet have. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, backtrack a little.
A problem is simply a task that requires a method or strategy to be accomplished, it could be a question that needs answering, a disease that needs a cure, an engineering build that needs optimization, and such. But in order to do any of that you need problem-solving skills.
In other words, in order to excel at what you do and be acknowledged as a professional, you must possess some degree of problem-solving skills. Without which you’ll seldom get anything done. Now that we’ve established the importance of having them- let’s take a look at some strategies to develop problem-solving skills.
Strategies to aid skill development
The first step as mentioned before is and always will be a breakdown of the problem. Step back, and look at the entire frame top-down, left and right, and backwards to understand the problem in its entirety. Make sure you can summarize the gist of it and explain the problem to your peers if need be.
If you are tackling a stratified problem, a complicated one that is actually several of them combined into one- by having the ability to understand a problem well you’ll win. Or at least you’ll have won half the battle. No matter how complicated it seems, if you can break it down- you’ll aid your problem-solving skill development two-fold.
Once you’ve got the problem down- get some analysis done. Research the strategies that might have been applied to the problem’s solution before. If it hasn’t been solved before you can learn a ton from the past attempt’s failures and formulate a better way to tackle the problem.
With a hefty amount of research, you will be able to come up with clear facts about what has worked against the problem before and what didn’t. Then start brainstorming. Brainstorming or rather critical thinking as some would call it- is one of the most essential aspects of developing problem-solving skills.
By critical thinking and sprinkling your own creativity into the mix to spice things up you can create a solution. It is to be noted that your first solution is very likely to be flawed, just like the first draft of anything is. But never let that discourage you, the more ideas and solutions you come up with that are discreet, the more avenues you can explore for a possible solution.
Sharpen your skills with real-world experience, put your solution to test
Next is where the fun part of problem-solving begins, gauge your solutions, and their merits and demerits. Pitch them together into a bowl for a battle royale and pick the solution that best fits your problem. Your solution at this stage still might be rough and a prototype at best but a prototype beats the hell out of having a blank slate.
Check the results of your prototype solution, they’ll be dirty. You’ll not achieve the best performance from your solution or the desired efficiency in one go. This is where the real skill development begins. You can be the decision-maker here and choose which way you want to go from this crossroad.
You can go back to the drawing board and come up with a new solution and cross the prototype off the list of possible solutions to be greenlit. Or you can choose to optimize and reconfigure your solution to fit your particular problem. Whichever path you choose it is very likely that you’ll develop some essential problem-solving skills along the way.
