Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Defining Problems

Defining Problems

Defining a problem is a real skill. At the Command and General Staff College a vignette was given to the students and they were asked at the end...what is the problem? If there were ten (10) students in the class there were always 10 uniquely different problem statements which helps explain why this definition phase is such an important consideration. What you define is what you solve.....Get it?

In the military, the consequences of failure are so great that greater attention was decided to devote to problem solving in the cirriculum. It was already part of the war planning process. It begins with the problem statement which is formulated using this or something similar. “The problem is to determine the best way to….“

For my part I always had trouble with the word “Best.“ What it means to me is not what it means to everyone…..It is a take on the word “Good” and philosophers have been debating it forever. For my purposes I always thought of it as an optomization process.

Still the fundamental definition eluded me….”What is Good?” Finally I came up with a Percy Goodfellow, pragmatic working definition which said…. “Good is a thought or action that improves an outcome over doing nothing at all.” I must be the only person on the planet that likes this definition but it works for me.

To explain the variations, ie Good ,Better and Best I use "The Cave man on the plain example...". one of our primitive ancestors, who sees a storm coming. If he stands under the solitary oak nearby, he thinks to himself, that he can reduce the approaching strike of raindrops and the intensity of the wind by fifty percent….If he runs to a looming outcrop of rocks, that is better, where the reduction is estimated at seventy five percent and if he takes shelter in a distant cave that is best (optimal), because it reduces the effects of the wind and rain by nearly one hundred percent. Of course if he does nothing he will suffer the full effects of the storm.

So in defining the cave man's problem, he might conclude, as he watches the storm approach “I need to determine how to best (The best way) escape the effects of the storm."

Now this is only the first step in the process but a hugely important one. If he said the problem is.... "that strorms are dangerous that might be true, but this conclusion does not lend itself to a solution. If he said that storms are God’s punishment for our missdeeds and are a thing that builds character….that leads nowhere except to hunker down, wrap up in a bearskin and ride it out. If however he wanted to minimize its effects on his body he might define matters as I have suggested and do something to avoid the conditions that nature is about to present.