Transcripts
1. Introduction: There's so many
problems all around us. You have two options. Either approach these problems
with a sense of defeat, or approach these problems
with a sense of purpose, a sense of enthusiasm. These problems are
an opportunity for you to build
your creativity. Which part sounds more
appealing to you? Defeat or enthusiasm? The second part sounds
more optimal for you. Then this beginner's
class on problem-solving is going to be very
informative for you. My name is Armand showed,
the founder of Romani talks, a media company which
helps engineers and entrepreneurs improve their
communication skills. One of the reasons
that I hope engineers specifically is because I
used to be an engineer. And during my career in
the aerospace industry, IT industry, finance industry, I learned the art of
solving problems, not just in a
message sort of way, but in a systematized
way that can be taught, repeated,
and learned. The ability to problem-solve
will help you tremendously in terms of your personal
and professional life. And the purpose of this
class is to give you the basic tools for you
to identify a problem, troubleshoot it, prioritize it, and began the journey
towards finding a solution. So an interesting if so, I look forward to
seeing you inside.
2. Problem Solving Mindset: There's a famous saying that
it goes something like this. You're either in a problem, just left one, or are
headed towards one. There's different ways
to perceive this. Quote. The way that I
perceive it is that problems are not a
bug in the system. Instead, it's a feature.
Look around you. It doesn't matter who
you're dealing with, how tall they are, what gender they are,
where they're from. One thing that you
can be certain of is that if there are human, they are absolutely
dealing with the problem. Therefore, once we
understand that problems are a feature in the complex
system of mother nature, it's much more intelligent of us to cultivate the
right attitude with it. Even though the sounds
logically to be the case, a lot of individuals
don't act like that. Instead, they behave
in a certain way. That implies that problems are bug is something that's
only happening to them. When you personalize problems, what happens is that you
become more thin skinned. You believe that the
world is out to get you. And when you think like this, what happens is that creative
mind of yours, Sure Sue, lose capacity in terms
of solving problems. Therefore, one of the most
important things that we can do is control our
emotional state. You'll be surprised by
how much intellectual, logical problem-solving
capabilities are stunted because we're angry. Instead, if we
start to cultivate an enthusiastic approach
towards problem-solving, then I guarantee
you we are going to feel much more creative. And the way that we stay enthusiastic in our
problem-solving journey is to no longer view problems as bugs, but rather features.
3. Prioritize Problems: In the last section,
we were talking about how problems are simply a feature in terms of being a human and living
on Mother Earth. Well, we have to understand
is that in terms of problems, we are rarely just going
to face one at a time. Instead, there's gonna be multiple problems hitting
us at the same time. Some of these problems
are going to be big and require our
attention immediately. While other problems are
going to be pretty small. To give you an example, let's say you have a little brother
and your brother just got pulled over
for doing something. Not so pleasant. And he says that if you pick them up
in the next ten minutes, then the cop is going to
let him off with a warning. That's one problem that
you are currently facing. Another problem that
you're facing is that it's the morning and you
want to brush your teeth. However, your
toothpaste is very low. And you're thinking,
how am I going to squeeze more toothpaste
out of this tube? You're currently facing two
problems at the moment. This is the first lesson
that we need to understand. Which problem would you
say is more important? If you close your brother, I'm hoping that you're saying the first problem the problem regarding you now having to urgently drive to
pick up your brother. The ability for an engineer
to prioritize problems is highly important and this
is something that you're going to see any
practicing engineer do. You'll often hear them
use phrases like P4, P3, P1, which means priority
for priority three, priority two, priority one. Priority one means the head
onco is the most important. This requires immediate
attention right now. You have seen this before. You ever had one of those moments when
you are about to log into Instagram and it's down. It's not only done for you, is down for everyone. This is a P1 and
this is something that the engineers are
working on at the moment. This is much more important than only one user having
login issues. From this particular video, I want you to
understand that being able to prioritize problems will help you zone your focus in
on what you want to solve. Next. The real-world,
we're going to be facing a lot of problems
at the same time. And if you cannot
prioritize accordingly, then you are going to give
yourself analysis paralysis.
4. Troubleshoot: Once we prioritize the problem, what we now have to
do is troubleshoot. Troubleshooting is done
by asking questions. What is currently going on? What should be going on? How long has this problem
been occurring for? Now, this step of troubleshooting
is something that a lot of seasoned
engineers often overlook. You will just imagine someone without
engineering experience, what they do you want to know? Would they try doing is
they try immediately fixing the problem before taking
the time to troubleshoot. The reason that this
is a mistake is because when you immediately
try to fix something, you don't necessarily know if you're even fixing
the right thing. How idiotic is that? Uh, you go into the
doctor and saying, Hey, can you please
fix my left leg? But nothing's wrong
with your left leg. Instead, you have
an ear infection. That's how a lot of people
are solving problems. Therefore, in the
troubleshooting stage, we're building more of a familiarity with the
state of the issue. The main thing that you want
to understand in regards to troubleshooting is
questions are king. Just keep asking questions. And if you're in charge
of this problem, then ask the questions
and resolve it yourself. And if you're responsible for solving the problem
for someone else, Let's say you're some sort of consultant, then ask questions. Notice little changes
in their tonality, their body language, or
how they're responding. And keep trying to get
as much information as you possibly can. One way to think of
troubleshooting is you're a detective at the scene of the crime trying to
get more information, or you're a journalist that is trying to get more information
to break the news. Do not skip troubleshooting
questions or king.
5. Articulate the Problem: Once you feel like you've done a good job troubleshooting, would you want to now do is articulate the problem out loud. There's a few reasons
you want to do this. Number one is as you're
articulating the problem, you're going to notice certain
gaps in understanding. There's a lot of
people that think that they've
troubleshooting correctly. But they skip the step of
articulating the problem, which makes them realize that they don't really
understand the problem. You'll see this a lot when
your internet goes down. There's a person that's
asking you certain questions. A lot of the times they're
over here making you restart a whole bunch of stuff
and you're doing it. You're bending down, Breaking a Sweat, doing all this work. But the more and more
that the problem goes on, the more that they realize
what they have had you doing is not needed. All they could have done
is done a little packet, restart from their end. They would've
understood the gaps in understanding if they
articulated the problems. Another thing in terms
of articulating is that when you're solving
complex problems, a lot of the times
you're going to have to get different people
involved as well. And when we're getting
them involved, in order to save time, we need to be able to
articulate the problem in a simple way that is
easy to understand. You don't want to use too
much technical jargon or too much complexity
as a whole. Simple language is
your best friend. So once you're done, troubleshooting,
articulate the problem. If you feel like you
could be a little bit more clear than
troubleshoot some more and then come back and articulate the
problem even clearer.
6. Create Direction: For articulating the problem, our goal now is to
create direction. To create direction,
we need two things. One, we have to
understand where we are. And two, we have to
understand where we're going. In a very fundamental
sort of example, let's say your computer
stops working. Right now. You are at a state where your
computer is not working. What should it do? It should be working. Although this seems simple, It's not, especially when we're dealing with
more complexity. Let's say you're trying to
solve a problem for a human. Let's say this particular human just had a very bad breakup. At this stage. They are heartbroken. But
where should they go? You of the philosophy
that they should go back to a toxic x
because they are lonely? Or are you of the
philosophy that they should ghost the toxic x
despite being lonely? Once you are trying to
figure D direction out, it's going to help you look. And depending on the problem, it will help you look out. But we want to create
the direction. So we're not going on
this wild goose chase. Instead, we're
moving with purpose.
7. Research & Experimentation: Now's the time for researching
and experimentation. Depending on the problem. Sometimes this stage
takes the longest, sometimes this stage
takes the shortest. Let's say it takes the shortest. This is probably one
of those solutions that has already been
designed for you. Because other people have
faced similar issues. You'll notice for very,
very technical issues, this stage is pretty easy in terms of researching
and experimentation. Let's say your code isn't working the way that
it's supposed to. For this sort of problem. Finding the issue is
the hardest part. Finding out how to resolve it is just a few strategic
Google searches away. If you're dealing with a problem that has been solved before. Experimentation and research
stage is rather short. But let's say your
problem is very complex and you feel like
it's more personal to you, then the research and the experimentation
stage can take longer. To give you an example of this, Let's say you're at the crews and it's eight in the morning, you're planning to eat a lot of food in this amazing cruise. However, you don't have any toothpaste coming
out of your tube. What are you going to do? We're going to experiment. You're going to try to start squeezing the tube all
the way from the end. Because, you know, when you squeeze it all
the way from the end, you generate more pressure
to get the squirt out. But if it's still not
working, what do you do? Then you start asking
different people in the cruise ship if you could borrow some of their toothpaste. This is shown to
you is that this is a problem that's very
personal to you. Sure, you could
research about it. However, others may have not had the same exact context as you. Therefore, more
experimentation is needed. Despite the differences
in these two approaches. Just understand that anytime
that we are problem-solving, research and
experimentation is a must. Therefore, you've
got to get into the battlefield and
get your hands dirty.
8. Gather Results: Now we're winding
down to the end stages of problem-solving. There's gonna be three
potential options right now. One is that you
resolve the problem. Let's say you are going
around the cruise ship and you ended up getting
your precious to paste. That means problem has been
solved and I'll tap it off by articulating the resolution just sold your
subconscious mind. Remembers the resolution
the next time you face a problem like this
again, congratulations. For the second group,
there's gonna be a stage of monitoring
which is required. Sometimes when you think you
have solved the problem, you don't fully know yet. Let's say Instagram
went down and you're the head of the
production support team, you have installed a
new software patch. Now, what you need
to do is you need to monitor as the different
users are accessing the Instagram
application again to see whether or not
Instagram falls apart. Again, sometimes you'll get your results in a
matter of hours. Other times, it's going
to take a few weeks of testing to realize whether
or not your resolution work. For this stage, you are now
monitoring your results. For the third stage. Unfortunately, you're not
able to solve the problem. If you were not able
to solve the problem, then go on to the next slide and I'll share what to do next.
9. Contact Relevant Teams: Problem-solving. You win
some, you will find some. Notice. I didn't say lose some. Because the more
data that we gather, the more debt it's
going to help us with a complex problem. Not all problems are going to be stuff that we resolve
the first time around. The more complex it is, the more experimentation
that we need to do. So you have not been able to
resolve your problem. Now. You start from the beginning. You try troubleshooting
some more. You try articulating it further. You run more experiments. Or what you do next is you
contact relevant teams. Sometimes you'll see
within an organization, you are trying your best
to resolve a problem. However, this is not something
that is solely for you. You'll see this in big, big firms where
production support, operations and software often all hate each other
because there'll be like, No, this is for you
to resolve, not us. You'll see that
one group has been trying their best to fix
the problem for so long, to realize that this other group can help them out tremendously. So do not rule out other people in your
problem-solving journey. Contact relevant
teams as needed.
10. 10 Example: I want to give you
a real-life example of problem-solving in action. This was roughly three
to four years ago. And I was volunteering
for a different team in my IT company
to help them out. The head manager of the team, he had just gotten sick and
he needed someone to fill in. So I was filling in for him and I was working
and being a sponge, seeing what was going on. As I was working with
this new group of people, I immediately saw
the manager are so sick because this
team was so lazy. They didn't want to work at all. And what they would
do with me is that they would
often have me sit in the deployments and pretty much be there until the
code was installed. For dummies. Deployment basically means that the application developers have new code that they need
to put into the system. And production support, which I was is going to monitor to make sure that everything is working smoothly and
nothing is breaking. As the deployment was
nearing the finish, I contacted the operations
team to make sure that the application was
working efficiently. As we were talking, I noticed that the operations
team was saying that, hey, something
doesn't look right. Therefore, I asked them
what doesn't look right? And they said that when
they start typing, their letters are working, but the numbers are not working. That's when I'm asking more questions about
what should be done. Therefore, I'm
troubleshooting and I'm getting more information. I find out that the letters and the
numbers should be working. And that's when I
articulate the problem. Currently operations
is able to use the letters but not the numbers. This is the issue that has occurred since the
new deployment. This is how we
found the problem. What should be done from here? We need to make sure that
the numbers are working. Therefore, we have direction. Now, from there, there was a whole bunch of research and
experimentation going in. This is when operations, production support and
application development team, we're working back and
forth, back and forth. And eventually we were able
to see the exact issue. It was a small little
bug in the code which the application development
team was able to spot. We rolled out the new code. Eventually, the
operations team was able to use the letters
and the numbers. Therefore, we were able to
solve the complex issue. And this run, I made,
it sounds simple, but this entire situation took roughly four to five hours and there's a whole bunch of
communication that was needed. But I wanted to give you
a real-world example to run you from the very
beginning to the very end. Problem-solving is
a creative venture, so allow it to be fun.
11. 11 Final Project: Now it's time for
the class project. We're going to attempt to solve a problem using the
framework that we learned in the class from all the different
problems in your life. I want you to get a general gist of prioritizing the problems. P1, P2, P3, P4. And for a quick refresher, P1 is the most important, requires the most
immediate attention, and P4 is less in
terms of importance. From there, I want you to
choose one of the priorities, whichever one you feel the
most comfortable with, then I want you to
troubleshoot the problem. What's exactly wrong with it? How long has this problem
been occurring for? Is there something that
you can do about it? Spend some time asking
the right questions. Once you are done with the
troubleshooting stage, I want you to articulate
the problem out loud. Once you have
articulated the problem, I want you to understand
where are you currently are and where you need to go
in order to set direction. Once you have set the direction, go on and get your hands
dirty, do some research, do some experimentation,
and do your best to get forward in the
direction that you just said. Once you are wrapping it up, I want you to
analyze the results. Where are you capable of
resolving the problem? Do you need to monitor
the resolution further? Or do you need to
contact another team? Once you are done
applying this framework, I wanted you to create a
very little research report explaining your findings. Talk about the priority, talk about how you
troubleshoot it. Talk about how you
articulated the problem. Talk about the
direction that you set, your research and
experimentation process and the final results. Put it on a Word document
however long you see fit and post it in the
final project section, level up your
problem-solving skills. If you enjoyed the
content in this class, be sure to check out
are monotonic.com for more content on
communication skills, critical thinking, and emotional management or Monte talks.com. I look forward to
hearing from you.
Arman Chowdhury, Confidence thru Communication
