Problem-solving has four parts:

  1. Searching
  2. Stating
  3. Fixing
  4. Verifying

Searching

No matter the kind of problem you’re dealing with, you always begin by searching. You might look for something that’s obviously wrong. You might search the internet for something written by folks who’ve already solved the problem. You trace and triangulate. As you search, you follow the promising strands while ignoring the distracting ones. Of the four steps, searching is the most difficult and unpleasant for people because the search is often uncertain, unclear, and ambiguous. In a sense, it’s also the most important. It’s nearly impossible to solve a non-trivial problem without thoroughly exploring it first.

As the saying goes, no one trips and falls and accidentally replaces their air compressor. Okay, that’s not really a saying… I just made it up. But it should be a saying, because it’s true and it tells you something about the nature of problem solving. 

Stating

“A problem well stated is a problem half-solved.” -Charles Kettering

It’s of vital importance that once you believe you’ve completed your search and you’ve “found” the problem, you attempt to explain what the problem is. The problem must make enough sense to you for you to be able to explain it. You don’t need a total grasp on the problem, but you must be able to state it in a way that’s somewhat cogent. If you can’t, that’s a sign you’ve got more work to do before you understand it well enough to truly solve it. 

Fixing

Once you’ve found the problem and understand it well enough to state it, there’s some action you must take to fix it. It might require creativity on your part to think of the actions you could take. It might be a matter of stopping something you’ve been doing that’s created the problem. You will likely need to remove something, alter something, or add something that fundamentally alters the situation. There might be more than one legitimate way to fix the problem. At the end of the day, if you haven’t made any changes at all, there’s a good chance you haven’t solved the problem. 

The fix must fit your statement of the problem. It must fit into the theory that you’ve formed. If you can’t explain how your fix addresses the problem (as you’ve stated the problem), then there’s a much lower chance it’ll work as a solution. 

Verifying 

By the time you’ve found and applied the true fix, you’ve solved the problem, but you might not know it yet. If you go back to square one and take a look at the situation after you’ve applied the fix, you should be able to see that the problem is gone. The absence of the problem should correspond to the presence of your solution. You might need to get creative when thinking of ways to verify the fix. You might be able to temporarily remove the solution and see if the problem re-emerges. Or, you might have to be patient. Given enough time and creativity, there’s usually a way to prove you’ve fixed the problem.