The way of thinking to solve unknown problems

Human activities are based on the way of thinking, so what is it? The following is the relevant information I have compiled. Let's have a look!

The first method, coin toss, is used to make a series of difficult emotional decisions.

The implementation process is to flip a coin, and the pros and cons of the coin decide whether to divide it. Do a good job in psychological construction in advance and must respect God's will.

Essence: At the moment you flip a coin, you seem to already know the answer you want.

Zhi Yiou added that when you throw it once and want to throw it once, you will know the answer.

Second, marginal competitive advantage.

What determines your value is marginal value.

When two goods are similar, even if one is just a little better than you, it has a strong advantage.

For example, mobile phones, every mobile phone contains a lot of technology, but when you buy a mobile phone, you will not consider its value, but if you have a competitive advantage in the market, you will buy it.

So you can understand that if you are a little better, you have a great chance. Whether it is goods or people. So you should consider whether you have a marginal competitive advantage.

PS, this is not the same as the marginal benefit in economics. The only similarity is to think about the whole problem from a marginal point of view.

Third, the opportunity cost.

It takes time and energy to do anything. It doesn't mean that this thing is beneficial, so you will do it, because these time and energy may be more valuable when you do other things.

Opportunity cost is what you did and gave up, and what you gave up is your cost. But the opportunity cost is difficult to calculate accurately, but it does exist.

Take your salary as a reference and calculate whether you are willing to spend that money on this.

Thinking: For example, is a job with high salary and no learning valuable?

Fourth, system theory.

This is also one of the latest philosophical development directions in the west, which is to look at problems systematically. Everything can be regarded as a system, in which many members are interrelated, such as education system, * * * system, medical system and so on. Many superficial problems have deep historical reasons, not just decided by hospitals. For example, high medical expenses are not entirely the responsibility of hospitals. The education system is not the responsibility of teachers, but the historical reason of the country. Don't dig too deep

The analysis method of system theory can help you better understand the relationship between things, see the essence from the scene, and turn angry youths into good citizens. It is not enough to know only criticism and not how to build it.

Fifth, why analysis method?

The so-called 5why analysis method, also known as? "Five questions?" That is, five questions in a row? "Why?" Self-questioning, tracing its roots.

Many problems are systemic and affect the whole body. What really affects the overall situation is not the superficial problem. Only in this way can we find the root of the problem.

Jin Dian case

Taiichi ohno, former vice president of Toyota Motor Corporation, once cited an example to find out the real reason for the shutdown.

Why did the machine stop?

Answer 1: The fuse was blown because the machine was overloaded.

Why is the machine overloaded?

Answer 2: Because the bearing is not lubricated enough.

Why is the bearing insufficiently lubricated?

Answer 3: Because the lubricating pump is out of order.

Why does the lubricating pump fail?

Answer 4: Because its axle is worn out.

Why does the shaft of lubricating pump wear?

Answer 5: Because impurities went in.

After asking five times in a row? "Why?" Only in this way can we find the real cause of the problem and the solution, and install a filter on the lubricating pump.

If employees don't probe into the problem in this spirit, they may just change a fuse hastily, but the real problem has not been solved.

Sixth, 5w 1h analysis method.

For the selected project, process or operation, we should ask questions from six aspects: why, what to do, where, when, who and how.

Mainly used for project planning, or project execution and operation analysis.

Seventh, SWOT analysis.

Advantages and disadvantages are the analysis of internal environment.

Opportunities and threats are an analysis of the external environment.

This model can be used in many aspects, and anything related to commodities, trade and competition is applicable. People are also a commodity. This icon can help you sort out the current situation.

Eighth, the historical view of the problem.

If you look at this together with article 7, article 7 can help you analyze things at another point in time, but many things are continuous and need to be viewed historically.

For example, the corruption and defeat of the country, the problems of the education system and so on. , analyze historical reasons. It has only been more than 60 years since the founding of the People's Republic of China, and many things cannot be perfect at once. We want to do better, but cynics are low, so you can do it.

Only by understanding history can we know why things have developed like this and be more tolerant and understanding.

Ninth, change the environment

When you stay in an environment for too long, all your information is inside the environment, which will affect your judgment of the truth. You may have different feelings in different environments. Empathy, or experiencing life, sometimes requires frequent visits to other places.

It's used to deal with problems that have been bothering you for a long time.

Tenth, empathy.

When analyzing users' needs and solving contradictions, you can understand customers' needs and find a balance between them.

Eleventh, make full preparations. Giving gifts in advance is not a way of thinking, but it is very important.

Preparation is very important. In most cases, you study in the process of preparation, and there are not many opportunities to learn in the process of practice. Just like the exam as a child, practice is an exam, and preparation is where you really grow up. As for preparation, no matter how complete the preparation is, any preparation will become your later experience accumulation.

The death line represents production efficiency. If possible, try to die early, because there are still many troubles behind, which you didn't expect.

Basic thinking methods for solving problems

Three existentialism

What is "Three Existentialism"?

Taiichi ohno, the founder of Toyota's lean production model, believes that to solve the problem, we must "observe the place where the problem occurs, find physical evidence, and replace the viewpoint with facts and materials", which is referred to as "three realities" for short, namely "scene", "presence" and "reality".

Let's look at a short story:

There is a new kangaroo in the zoo, and the tourists like this bouncing little guy very much.

One morning, when the administrator was at work, he found the kangaroo running out of the fence and strolling to the giraffe garden next door. The administrator was so nervous that he quickly raised the fence from 2 meters to 2.5 meters.

The fence was raised, but soon the kangaroo was found to have escaped. After consulting an animal expert, the administrator raised the fence to 5 meters and bent the fence inward at the end, so that if the kangaroo climbed to the top, it would naturally fall. The next day, when the managers finished rebuilding the fence, they found the kangaroo running out again. The managers were even more puzzled and had to raise all the fences to 10 meters. Consider putting a cover on the fence.

While building the fence, giraffes leaned in to chat with kangaroos. Giraffe asked, "Do you think these people will continue to raise your fence?" "It's hard to say," replied the kangaroo, "if they always forget to close that door!"

Therefore, there is no "three realism" to talk about the mystery of kangaroo escape, which is a taboo. If you "wait", or set up a monitor and practice the "three present principles", you may have found that the door is not closed.

In Toyota's early practice, Taiichi Ono once drew a circle on the floor of the workshop, asking engineers and managers to stand inside and carefully observe the problematic operations on the spot, even without understanding and clarifying the problems. This kind of working method is called "Big Wild Circle". The disciples and grandchildren of Taiichi Ono will still often stand in the "wild circle" to observe the waste of homework and look for opportunities for improvement.

Modernism emphasizes the separation of viewpoint and fact. When solving problems, we can't replace the three existential facts and materials with viewpoints.

For example:

"Green onions have risen to eight yuan a catty. Someone is talking with a mouthful of green onions. He must be showing off his wealth. "

The above sentence "green onions rise to eight dollars" and "all green onions" is a description of the facts; And "he must be showing off his wealth" is a view.

For another example, the investigation report on safety management says that "some employees have a weak sense of safety", which is a view and needs further clarification. What employees do some employees refer to? What is the specific manifestation of weak safety awareness? Statistical data is needed to support this view, so as to analyze the reasons and formulate targeted countermeasures on the basis of facts. In addition, qualitative and descriptive words such as "massive pollution" and "serious wear and tear" should be quantified. What area does large-scale refer to? What is the specific phenomenon of serious wear and tear, and how big is the wear and tear?

The following photos deceive many people: the first five show "the brave are fearless", and the sixth is the shooting scene, where a bunch of tourists are waiting in line to play the brave. This so-called cliff is just a deliberate illusion caused by clever choice of angles when taking pictures.

Problem decomposition and stratification

Tell you a jaw-dropping news, China football team and Brazil football team played a game, and China team 10 won. . . Wait, China football? 10 wins Brazil 0? Both sides of the competition are men with sound limbs and an average age of 25? Yes, the players in China are all 25 years old, while the players in Brazil are made up of some five-year-old children and 80-year-old grandfathers, but their average age is only 25 years old. . .

The problems we encounter are often vague. We need to know the distribution of the problem, decompose and stratify the problem according to some boundary conditions, and focus on the core of the problem. We can't generalize, but also depends on the distribution of data.

Otherwise, the analysis has poor pertinence and can't completely solve the problem.

Give a chestnut: you can't swim, you have to wade across the river. The water is so turbid that you can't see the depth clearly. If someone told you that the average water depth was 60 cm, would you cross the river with peace of mind? The average water depth is only 60 cm, but is it exactly 60 cm in all areas? Or is the shallow place only 10 cm, and the deep place may be 3m? ! Therefore, it is necessary to know the distribution of water depth.

There are five people in the office, four with a monthly salary of 30 million, and the fifth with a monthly salary of 60 million. If we only look at the average, the average monthly salary of these five people is above120,000, but this does not represent the income level of everyone in their office. Ladies and gentlemen, have you lowered the local average wage again this year?

Look at a small case:

Has the housing price in Suzhou really "plummeted"? Wait a minute, childish, look at the reporter's investigation:

I see. In fact, not only did high-priced houses not reduce prices, but low-priced houses did not lose a penny. It's just that there were a lot of transactions in low-priced areas in those days, but few transactions in high-priced houses, so I accidentally looked at the transaction price information and felt that I would "plummet".

So, if someone tells you that house prices have fallen, ask him where, which building and which house have fallen? Is the high-end house reduced in price or the low-cost house liquidated? We should look at the problem decomposition in different slots, step by step and time periods, not just the statistical average.

Problem decomposition is to perceive the status quo of "shape, size, quantity, trend, distribution" and other issues, rather than cause analysis, and must not be confused with cause analysis.

Give a chestnut:

Some people are uncomfortable to see a doctor and meet a quack. The fake doctor asked, "Didn't you sleep with a quilt last night?"

The patient replied, "I covered two quilts."

The fake doctor asked, "Have you eaten stale food recently?"

The patient replied, "It's all made of fresh ingredients."

The fake doctor asked, "Did it rain yesterday?"

The patient replied, "It hasn't rained for two years. Doctor, you haven't asked me what's wrong. ! "

This fake doctor is a typical example of using cause analysis instead of investigating the current situation of the problem.

For another example, the fruit bought on Monday was found to have gone bad on Saturday, and someone went to check the reason for this:

Could it be that there is something wrong with the temperature control of the refrigerator?

Will it go bad when I buy it

Was it crushed during transportation?

All of the above are wrong practices. It is time-consuming and inefficient to investigate the reasons without knowing the current situation. Even if it happens that there are some problems in the temperature control of the refrigerator, is this the real reason? In fact, these fruits are all injected by illegal traders, and the failure of refrigerator temperature control is just a coincidence.

A more efficient and correct way is to first look at where the fruit is bad and what is the specific phenomenon of bad? If you don't fully understand the current situation of the problem, you can directly analyze the reasons, which is not easy to quickly lock the real reasons, but easy to miss the important reasons.

Another chestnut: the sales director of a mobile phone chain tried to solve the problem of declining sales performance. How to decompose and layer the problem?

We can find a breakthrough in the direction of 4W. 4W refers to what is broken down by content and type, where is broken down by region, unit, channel and link, who is broken down by people, gender and age, and when is broken down by time period. For the problem of declining sales performance, it is necessary to clarify the current situation first, and then analyze the reasons:

What: Are the performance of all mobile phone brands declining? Is there any difference? Are the performance of high-priced mobile phones and low-priced mobile phones declining at the same time? Is there a difference in the performance of different types of mobile phones?

Where: Are the performance of all chain stores declining? Is there a difference in display and sales in different areas of the store?

Who: Are the sales of customers of different ages declining? Or has the number of customers in some age groups increased? Is there any difference in the performance of different salesmen?

When: Is the performance the same every week? Every weekend is the same, okay?

Special attention should be paid not to skip the decomposition and stratification of the problem, but to directly find the reasons for the decline in performance, so as not to expand the scope of analysis.

For complex multi-input variable problems, some variables can be reduced by setting boundary conditions and hierarchical research. In the figure below, the problem is that the output is Y, and the input variables X 1 to Xn are the influencing factors of Y. If X 1 is a relatively uncontrollable variable, then the data of X 1 can be divided into several groups, so that the problem can be layered horizontally according to X 1:

For example, to reduce coal consumption in power plants, coal consumption Y is related to boiler pressure, circulating water temperature, power generation load and other input variables, but power generation load is a relatively uncontrollable variable for power plants and can be treated as a boundary condition. For example, the generation load is divided into three levels: high generation load, medium generation load and low generation load. Therefore, the coal consumption in the past year can be divided into three groups according to the power generation, and how to reduce coal consumption under high power generation load, medium power generation load and low power generation load can be studied respectively. In this way, under each boundary condition, the factor of power generation load becomes a relatively fixed constant, which is subtracted as a variable in hierarchical research.

Look for deviations from multiple angles

The so-called problem refers to the gap between the current state and the ideal state.

There are two kinds of problems: generating problems and setting problems.

What we are used to saying is that there is still a gap between the current state and the normal state, which is worse than the normal state. This kind of problem is also called "having a problem". For a problem, its ideal state is the normal state you want to restore.

If you have reached the normal state and want to pursue a higher standard than "normal", then the gap between the current normal state and the ideal state with higher standards in the future is called "formulaic problem", or a discipline. "Subject" is often a problem of conscious creation. People often say that "getting out of the comfort zone" means that people consciously set new standards to create gaps, and then narrow the gaps through improvement, so as to gradually expand the comfort zone and adapt to a larger environment.

Being unaware of the problem and unwilling to step out of the comfort zone is the biggest problem, or it can be said that no problem is the biggest problem.

The problem is a deviation, or it can be made clearer by turning the problem into an obvious deviation between the status quo and the benchmark. Benchmarks can be external best practices, internal best, the best period in history, theoretical value, design value and so on.

Give some chestnuts. A company set up some task forces to solve the problem. How can a tiger eat the sky?

Case 1 Project of "Improving the Management Level of X Enterprise": Low management level? This is an undefined and vague question. The task force needs to ask itself, what is the low management level compared with benchmark enterprises? If it is a project set up after the decline of enterprise management level, it can be compared with the period before the decline and analyzed where it is worse than before. If the management level has not decreased, but there is a gap compared with other excellent companies, then the original problem can be transformed into narrowing the management gap between the company and the benchmark company. As soon as the two are compared, the problem becomes clear.

Case 2 "Optimizing the Construction Scheme of Project X" project: Optimizing the construction scheme is also an unclear and vague problem. Since optimization is needed, it shows that there is still a gap between the existing scheme and the benchmark or goal. What is the gap between the existing construction scheme and the benchmark? Is there a gap in construction budget, progress, quality or other indicators? Turn the problem of "optimization scheme" into the problem of "narrowing and clarifying the benchmark gap", and then decompose it one by one.

Case 3 "Strengthening the Safety Management of Company X" project: Because the safety management of the company needs to be strengthened, it shows that there is still a gap with the safety management of the benchmark. If the benchmark and the gap can be clearly defined, the improvement of the project will be much easier.

The deviation may be time deviation or space deviation. The loss of raw materials of an enterprise has been rising in recent years, which is a time deviation. In the professional football match, the difference of points between the top and bottom teams is the spatial deviation.

So "low production efficiency" is not a clear "problem", but who is lower than it, or is the production efficiency sometimes low and sometimes high? In this mode of thinking, we should not spend our energy on the question "Why is the national football team's performance poor?" Instead, we should spend our energy on "Why is the national football team in Japan and South Korea better than us?" "The product can't be sold" is not a "problem". Who sells more than you is the problem, or is it always or sometimes impossible to sell?

Being able to understand the definition of a problem is very important for us to learn the basic ideas of solving problems.

Pontiac Pontiac Department of General Motors received a customer complaint letter, which said, "You may think I'm crazy, but please be patient. Our family has the habit of eating ice cream as dessert after dinner every day. But since I recently bought a new Pontiac car, strange things often happen on my way to buy ice cream. Whenever I buy vanilla ice cream, my car won't start as soon as I get out of the shop. But if I buy other flavors, the car will start smoothly. I want you to know that I am serious about this matter, although this question sounds stupid. Is this car allergic to vanilla ice cream? "

Of course, GM didn't believe this guy's car was allergic to vanilla, so they sent an engineer to check it. The engineer and the man drove together to buy vanilla ice cream. When they got back to the car, it really couldn't start quickly. The engineer came for another three nights as promised. The first night, chocolate ice cream, the car is fine. The next night, strawberry ice cream, the car is fine. On the third night, vanilla ice cream, the car can't start soon. The engineer wrote down all kinds of detailed information that happened from the beginning to the present, such as the time, the type of oil used by the car, the time when the car left and returned ... According to the data, he came to a conclusion that this guy bought vanilla ice cream less than other flavors. Why? It turns out that this is a problem with the internal setting of the ice cream shop. Because vanilla ice cream is the best-selling flavor of all ice cream flavors, in order to make customers get it quickly every time, the store displays vanilla flavors in a separate freezer and puts the freezer in the front of the store. As for other flavors, they are placed at the back end far from the cashier.

Why does this car have problems in a short time from flameout to reuse? The engineer soon found the answer: the problem lies in the radiator of the car engine. It turns out that when buying other flavors of ice cream, because it takes a long time, the engine has enough time to dissipate heat, so there is not much problem when restarting; However, when buying vanilla ice cream, the engine is too hot because of the short time, so that the radiator has enough time to dissipate heat. There will be a section of gas between oil and oil in a closed pipeline, which will block the oil circuit. People usually call it "air resistance", and the fuel absorbed by the engine will be intermittent, which will cause the engine to fail to start normally. The design department quickly made technical improvements to make up for the defects of the radiator and solve the phenomenon of air resistance.

In this story, the chief engineer did not directly analyze the problem of "why the car won't start when buying vanilla ice cream", but studied the deviation problem of "what is the difference between buying other flavors of ice cream and buying vanilla ice cream". Being able to turn "problem" into "deviation" or "gap" is a basic idea to solve the problem.

causal analysis

Causal analysis is different from the traditional "causal analysis", which does not analyze the causes of problems, but turns to analyze the deviation in the distribution of problems. Therefore, causal analysis thinking is an extension and inheritance of the previous thinking mode of "defining problems with deviations".

As mentioned above, causal analysis will not directly study why the football level in China is low, but why the football level in Japan and South Korea is higher than ours, or why our football level is different from that in Japan and South Korea. Similarly, causal analysis will not directly analyze the reasons for the high price of pork in the market, but study the reasons why the price of pork is higher than that of the same period last year.

The true story of

Aristotle, an ancient Greek scientist, once made a very famous conclusion: the speed at which an object falls is directly proportional to its mass, which means that the heavier the object, the faster it falls. For example, iron balls always fall faster than bird feathers. Autumn leaves always fall slowly, while mature apples fall quickly.

Based on Aristotle's authoritative judgment and some facts in life, it has been more than two thousand years. It can be said that almost no one has questioned this "truth". However, one day, a clever and brave young man questioned this-this man is the great Galileo. He thought, what would happen if we put a 100 pound ball and a 1 pound ball together and let them fall from a height at the same time? So, he made a famous free fall experiment on the leaning tower of Pisa. Experiments show that under the same conditions, objects with different weights will land at the same time. The famous Leaning Tower of Pisa experiment made the great Galileo a very dazzling star in the history of physics development. When we can bravely ask our own questions, it shows that we have independent thinking and better ideas on this issue. On this basis, we can find a new solution and solve the problem as soon as possible.