Problem Solving blog

*Image Credit: Namida-k

Scholar Robert Chua says that we have spoken so much about decision making that we have gotten it to the point where we can no longer talk about it in a meaningful way.  However, we need to say something because we are of those that must make decisions.  I think decision making is the act of making choices in certain situations where there are knowns and unknowns.

Your boss comes to you and says can we afford to do this?  Should I do that?  You job is to reason between the two points of view and reach a conclusion.   You reason between that which we know about and that which know about.  Here is a story from my own life:

Recently I was asked what I thought about an assignment from a student… was it good enough?  When I looked at her assignment it looked to me as if it was fine so I sent back an email saying that I thought it was fine.  When marking time comes I have to apply a set of criteria.  That criteria returned an above average grade but wasn’t a ‘perfect’ grade.The student then contacted me and said, ‘You told me that I would get a better grade, you said it was fine.’  My very unpopular response was: yes the assessment was fine and that’s the grade I gave it.  To me it was good enough.  It was fine.  But it wasn’t great.
On the surface it looks like I am being nasty.  However, that student demonstrated a decision to trust me to tell her what I thought.  She gave me the criteria for making that decision.  She asked me if it was good enough.  To me it was.  But I can’t tell you what a great assignment is until I see one.  Why?  Simply because I don’t set out to make perfect assignments… as a student that’s your job.  I can give you the parameters.  I can tell you this is what I think greatness looks like, but unless you show me greatness… how will I know what it looks like?

The decision for me was based on a set of knowns in my mind.  What is good enough?  I have a set of ideas locked away in my mind that says, ‘here this is what is good enough’.  Therefore my response was framed that way.

In my way of thinking we make decisions to solve problems.  Note:
1.    A decision is made under constraints
2.    It’s based on what we think the problem is
3.    Under the constraints of 1 and 2 we make certain choices
4.    We act
For this reason when you make decisions you need to be aware that you are acting under constraints.  What kind of constraints?  What kind of process are you involved in?  What kind of pressure has your boss or employees or YOU put yourself under?  All of these things affect the way you make decisions.  A decision is something you make based on a certain criteria.

What kind of decisions do you make?

What is your role?  What are the expectations of your role?  Here is an example from my own life:

Role: I am a lecturer

Expectations: To undertake research, teaching and service to the university under given constraints.

Decisions I make and am responsible for: When to do research, how to manage students and deliver courses, when and where to help the in the university decision making process.
These are the decisions I am paid for.  Note the constraints.  These are the things I can’t control.  I can’t just make my own decisions when I find a cheat for example.  I can use judgement.  The question is am I aware of those constraints?  Do I know what I am responsible for?

Decisions are those things we have to come to a conclusion about in which we must choose a course of action.  They are based on what we know about something and unfortunately, what we don’t know.  In my life I have often made decisions on what people have known and how they have come to know it, without realising I am operating under different constraints.  That is, when I make decisions, I have thought I could copy what someone else had done and expect much the same results.  It just won’t work.  Hence, this is why we haven’t yet invented a business system that can actually do the job it was assigned to do.  Every organisation is different… every person is different.  We have different stories we tell ourselves. And on we go.

To conclude this post I want you to begin to think about the decisions you make and under what constraints you make them.  What are the rules you use to make decisions?  What pressure do you put yourself under?  Think about it… the answer may just surprise you.

I have just finished reading a book in which the author quoted Mother Theresa:

“We are not here to be successful we are here to be faithful.”

Mother Theresa was perhaps referring to her “calling” to help the poor.   When I read this quote I felt that there is a divide being suggested by Mother Theresa that is worth considering on a Sunday morning.  The question I have is this: To be successful often requires sacrifice of personal values yet most successful people are highly actualised individuals living a fairly successful life!  Take the Richard Bransons of the world.  These people are highly effective as people and quite successful.  They appear to be living in the their values and actualising their destiny.

However, I don’t really think Mother Theresa meant this saying as ROI.  I think she meant to say that, in order to follow purpose and be faithful you must learn to change the way you assess your life.  The measuring stick you use to say, “I am successful” should become “I am faithful”.  Faithfulness is an entirely different quality than success orientation.  Yet, inherent in the concepts of personal success are the exact qualities of faithfulness to personal desire we see Mother Theresa talking about.   This brings me to my point (at last): Most people I have me trade off their ‘faithfulness’ for a sense of ‘personal security’… myself included.  Here are two recent examples of people I happen to know:

Person A said to me the other day that they like to invent things and showed me a very clever device that they had built that was about tracking trajectory of bullets and recording speed etc.  I must admit I had no idea of what it could do but the concept fascinated me.   This person then went on to say something that struck me.  It would be what they would do if life didn’t get in the way.   The personal security they got from their job meant they traded off the need to be faithful to themselves.

Person B I met at a conference I was part of organising.  This individual was highly successful and very enthusiastic.  I got to talking to this person and realised when I was talking to them that they had never traded anything for faithfulness and wound up being successful anyway.  Was this some kind of accident.  No.  As I got to talking to this person I learned that he had learned at a very young age that if you want to make it, you have to take risks and follow your heart… even if it means trading off personal security for a little while.  That is, to find your life’s purpose you must never trade off your values to find personal security.

Between these two examples is an important truth.  There are some people who find success in what they do on both the level of personal security and faithfulness.  These are a rare breed.  My wife happens to be one of these people.  God bless her, you can’t make her do anything she doesn’t think she shouldn’t be doing.  Her personal conviction (shared with me) is that somebody should be home to take care of the children.  Now, I respect people who don’t share my convictions and this way of life isn’t for everyone. However, my wife has chosen in her case to live from her heart and invest time in our children instead of working.  There is a huge cost involved here and I am paying for it!  Yet, living from the heart and not trading off personal security is what Mother Theresa I think is hinting at.

I could cite others who I believe have found the nexus between personal security and faithfulness but I will leave it up to you to seek them out.  I want to finish this post today with a thought that struck me when I read that quote.  Purpose doesn’t necessarity mean riches but it does mean a level of success that goes beyond the idea of materialism and into a deeper more satisfying spiritual level.  There is no guarantee that if we quit our jobs and begin to do the things we love that we will make money.  Nevertheless, if we continue (myself included) living a life that reflects more “personal security” than “heart value” we will find a level of misery than transcends our desire for personal security.  What we must do, is find a way to express our hearts desire on a daily basis anyway while we have personal security… but that is another post for another day.

*Image Credit: jurvetson

You don’t have to look far to find a meme these days.  One at hand example is the growing popularity of things as seemingly random as the graph jam blog.  The question that strikes me is the randomness of these ideas.  They emerge and are passed around the internet and seem to make no sense.  But as Malcolm Gladwell asked in the Tipping Point… what makes these ideas stick?

Stickiness can’t be planned… but if you don’t plan you fail?

The rate at which something becomes popular on the internet is alarming.  I have seen one (yes it’s sad) of my posts be stumbled and hit 2000 unique visitors in less than an hour.  That’s small fish compared to some people I know who do that by lunch everyday.  The thing that always gets me about these peaks and valleys is the collective consciousness that drives it.  To have this kind of short term stickiness you need something that makes enough people happy… at once… for a short period of time.  The randomness of stickiness makes you wonder what it is that people love so much about things as bizarre as this poor bastard at the University of Florida.

Shared consciousness creates stickiness

What makes these things stick is the shared consciousness around the singular element of meaning… or the thing that makes us laugh at the poor tase me bro man. What sticks relates to people and how they think about that one thing.  That doesn’t mean everybody loves it… it means that equally as many people hate it.  Then when we come to see it… it divides us into a love/hate paradox.  Very few people I have ever met I have learned to think in a way that helps to see multiple intersecting dimensions (Alan is good at this).   Most people learn to enjoy a false positive narrative when it comes to life because it’s easier than admitting that stuff happens so randomly.  Yet, in the disorganisation of things, especially consciousness there is an equilibrium.  It’s there … otherwise we wouldn’t ever be able to detect the patterns that appear to us in the everyday flow of life.  We also actively create these patterns… which makes it all the more confusing.

Randomness Stickiness

Ralph Stacey used a concept called: complex adaptive systems to explain how in social networks people learn and grow through disequilibrium.  As new problems arise there is an emergent response to the crisis which we in turn find ourselves trying to manage.  We try different concepts until one sticks for no other reason that the fact that we tried it.  In affiliate marketing circles and in general most of the successful people will tell you that they make so much money because they keep on trying and until they find the random stickiness they are after.  Once the ‘hit the vien’ it’s low cost-high profit.  In between it’s trial, error and misery.

The most recent example in my life of random stickiness came when I wrote a paper for the Australasian Journal of Information Systems.  At first the editors said no but might accept it if we revised it.  We changed the title and indeed the focus of the paper and they accepted it immediately without contacting us.  Something we wrote stuck with the editors of the journal or they needed papers!

Right place at the right time is random stickiness

So is being at the wrong place at the wrong time.  The guy who started Facebook and the other one who did myspace were probably reading social trends.  I strongly doubt however they mapped out the random stickiness that happened to their sites.  That said, intuition might have had something to do with it. What about the LOLCATS people?  These are those things that for some reason large groups love and hate at the same time.  About all I can work out is four things that I have noticed that these ’sticky’ things have in common.

Four essential properties of stickiness

1. Engagement: People engaging with the core concept - interacting consciousness that engages to create a platform that people use or something that is liked as a basic concept.

2. Talkability: Something people are willing to remark on and spread the word for to whoever and whomever they please.  Reasons for this vary but I have noticed that people like sharing something that adds a certain amount of humour to the lives of others.  Most people share things because it gives them a sense of worth and creates value for the audience.

3. Passability: Something which is passable or easy to share creates the possibility of stickiness but does not absolutely guarantee it.  If it’s easy to tell people about something then it’s easy to spread.

4. Lastability: The final point about stickiness that I have noticed is the life cycle of a concept.  To me most (not all) high volume concepts, on the web at least, last a lot less longer that others.  I have seen posts on other people’s blog have an immediate hit then nothing whereas others will last a lot longer because of the inherent value of the post.   The same goes for anything.  There is a natural limit to how long something can last.  There is short term lastability (i.e. get a first life) and long term lasting(ness) which continually uses the same engagement factor to create more value from the same essential concept (i.e. problogger or digg). A short term lasting concept creates value for a shorter cycle (but might have higher initial volume) as opposed to a long term lasting concept which creates value over an extended period.  Either way the level of engagement with a concept and it’s lasting quality are important levels of stickiness.

A contrast to what I am saying here is found in the one hit wonder.  They come and then they go.  Why?  Random stickiness.  I have had no end of trying concepts that failed (especially in business) and I have to say I had never really considered the level of stickiness involved.  It’s incredibly important to do market research and find these streams… but you must remember it’s random.  If it could be continually predicted to 100% reliability (or 95% for the statisticians out there ) then we would all be rich.  We aren’t all rich.  Some of us are pretty far from rich… actually.  That aside, how something sticks and why it does is random.

Recently I have noticed a growing trend on my wife’s blog. The last group of posts have been about me and my misadventures.  The last one was about comments I made when I was marking recently.  Before that was how some old lady confused me for a dog thus giving the impression that I was cute… of course they were talking about my dog.  Before that I was buying bargain bread and destroying a possum with my awesome flatulence.

I like the one where I ended up working a long week and worked out that I was making $10.50 an hour. The other one is where I am eating snacks and leaving my rubbish in the car… priceless.   I could go on for hours… and I will.  No, I won’t.  Suffice to say that reading several posts (probably in the order of 100) of the dumb things I do.   Given that this is the problem solving blog and not my life story there is a lesson.  It’s this: it’s good to be reminded of how human you are.  You often don’t realise the silly things you do and how other people think about them. Having someone else write about you is also very surreal.

On the other hand some of those posts have left me shaking my head.  Still, it’s been interesting to read about my life from my wife’s point of view.  I am still waiting for the next suprise. Off the top of my head I can name five things that I have done that are what we call “blog worthy”!

Over the past ten years I have learned many things about life and personal development.  One of the hardest lessons I have had to learn and indeed am still learning revolves around tough decisions.  It’s more than likely true that when you make tough decisions you will have some resistance… but what happens when you don’t make these decisions?

Making tough decisions despite opposition

The ultimate goal in life is I think a simple one.  To live it as you were supposed to live it.  I think most of us were created with a purpose in mind… to find the purpose is the first part and the second part is to use that purpose for the greater good.  It’s of no use to accumulate endless reams of money if we don’t live a balanced life pursing that which we know we should.  Hence, I find myself constantly hitting a brick wall when it comes to others.   I find as a person who, for some bloody reason, see’s things happening around him before others do that I get frustrated when people don’t see things my way.

So much so that instead of doing something about it… I will capitulate.  This is a habit I am unlearning at present.  However, I have realised that sometimes when you see things it’s because you have developed a talent about something that others haven’t or for some other spiritual reason.  That doesn’t make you better at life than them… it just gives you insight.  So, I have learned that you need to develop yourself as somebody who thinks and acts accordingly.  When it’s in your power to do so… do something.  When it isn’t … don’t.  Remember, not everybody knows what you are talking about.

Making the tough decisions anyway

I like to keep people happy and tend to avoid conflict most of the time.  The reality is as I am learning, you can’t actually keep people happy.  Conflict is unavoidable and a necessary part of life.  For me it’s extremly hard to front up to a situation and have the balls to tackle it.  I would rather not.  But, you must do it.

I want to leave you with a thought.  Don’t put off the tough decisions for long.  If you have to wait.  Wait.  Use wisdom, discernment and whatever else works for you.  Remember though that you will still have to make it through at some stage.  You will have to face that tough decision even if you don’t want to.  That’s life.  What we can do is learn be afraid and take the chances we know we have to and even if we fail we can still remain happy knowing that next time we can do it all again!

*Image credit: brbankston

One of my pet hates is this idea that you can solve a problem by doing something obvious that you have already thought of.  What am I talking about?  It’s best described by an example:

“Hey Luke, did you know you can stop renting and buy a house?”

“No really how do I do that?”

“Well… all you gotta do is save up a deposit and the bank will lend you money.”

I call this kind of advice: all you gotta do is syndrome.  Over the past year my frustration has grown exponentially as I have listened to voluminous amounts of horse plop flow forth.  That’s right I said “voluminous”.  I am up to my eyeballs with advice that tells me to solve my money worries that informs me that all I need to do is live on a budget and save more.  I already know that!   How’s this gem: all you gotta do is buy a house and you won’t be renting… I KNOW THIS!

Some of my favourite all you gotta do examples:

Problem: I don’t have a job

All you gotta do is: Buy the paper and find one!

Problem: The car won’t start

All you gotta do is: have you tried the key?

Problem: I got this credit debt I can’t pay.

All you gotta do is: pay it off.

Problem: There’s this crisis in the middle east

All you gotta do is: Forge a treaty.

All you gotta do is syndrome is the taking the problem and applying the most obvious answer to the situation.  What I call “at hand” information.  I was watching television the other day and one of big financial gurus was explaining how to have wealth.  It was all good until my wife said, “where do I get the money to invest?”

And herein lies the problem… if you have no money (i.e. on the street) or you are like the 4 billion people on this planet who don’t have enough money to cover their needs what do you do with advice like that?  I can tell you that those stuck in poverty wish to God there was a way out!

Please remember that next time you are giving advice to someone don’t be afraid to say that you can’t help them because you don’t know.  I think it’s a lot worse to offer advice when you only have “at hand” answers.  Still, in some cases you need to judge that because some people really need that kind of help. However, I can bet you that most desperate people have considered most of the obvious and almost ALL of the non-obvious solutions.

This all time classic “rap” song was a hit back in the day.  I was listening to this song again and reflecting on it’s ability to infuse it’s way into my brain when suddenly the lyrics didn’t quite add up.   Here are three things that I thought you should NEVER do when attempting to solve difficult problems.

If you have a problem yo I’ll solve it…

Most shrinks that a worth a dam will tell you that you can’t solve problems for other people if you want them to grow.  As a lecturer I can tell you the answer… but what’s going to happen when you need to actually know it?  You may remember me but I doubt you will remember the answer.  So I would disagree with Ice on this point… you should never take on problems for other people soley.  Don’t get me wrong I am not saying… bail out of the deal.  I am saying… work with people collaboratively to solve problems.  Facilitate!

I’m on a roll time to go solo…

In the opposite manner a difficult problem is best solve by a group of people.  We have this sick notion in western society of the hero.  The early pragmatists believed that you could best solve problems by working with people in a team situation.  Collaborative endeavours and multiple views were the order of the day.  Fast forward a hundred or so years and now we are trying to be our very best without thinking of how we can make use of many minds.  It’s a sad state of affairs.

In WWII the war effort saw the greatest bringing together of disciplines.  Social scientists working alongside mathematicians and so on.  The concept of the mastermind group is amongst these great ideas.  If I had actual friends I think I would like to have a group of problem solvers with different ideas.  Sure, we would fight… but imagine the problems we would solve.  It would be great!  And yes, I think that economics rules the day at the moment… we need more perspectives!

Proof of concept lies in what works not what is said

Words words words!  I hear this and that about running dope and a “borrowed” hook from Under Pressure by Queen… what Vanilla doesn’t do is show me.   What we say in our problem solving efforts are largely just words… what actually works… now that’s where the money is.   The problem with ideas is that they can be thought of as being in two forms… passive (not used) and active (used).  When you take an idea and put it to work in an open environment there a many more variables than in the closed one of your mind.  That’s why the results are always different that you thought… you didn’t know the variables!

In other words, ideas are only as good as their proof of concept.  How well do they work?  This is gutsy because when you put them to work you may have an idea, data, intuition, knowledge, facts and so on.  You know that when you let them go… they are tested… much like how we stress test metal.   Imagine if that expensive car you have was not tested.   They just bolted bits and pieces on it and let it roll.  What if they went for the cheapest materials?   Stuff that works and improves things, proves the concept.  That doesn’t mean however, that we have reached the end.  We may not know the flaws for a couple of years yet!

The best thing I have heard (well one of the best) is that most people are rational.  When you see somebody doing something… there’s a reason for it most of the time.  Instead of judging you need to find out what works and why they did it.  Then you will find the concepts at work in the situation.  So in Vanilla’s case I have found a genuine concern in his ability to solve problems.  He wants to do it on his own and he wants to solve your problems.  Not only that but he talks too much and acts too little.  In short, I hope you are not the same.  I can’t say beyond conjecture why he thinks he can solve your problems… maybe he has access to metareality.  For the rest of us I would against his problem solving advice.