Good Problem Solving Skills Examples

Having good, strong problem solving skills can make a huge difference to your career.

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Quite often, what may seem to be a single problem turns out to be a whole series of problems.

Going back to our example, substandard work could be caused by insufficient skills, but excessive workloads could also be contributing, as could excessively short lead times and poor motivation.

When your problem is simple, the solution is usually obvious, and you don't need to follow the four steps we outlined earlier.

So it follows that when you're taking this more formal approach, your problem is likely to be complex and difficult to understand, because there's a web of interrelated issues.

However, for a more comprehensive process, you can use Simplex, Appreciative Inquiry or Soft Systems Methodology (SSM).

These provide detailed steps that you can use to solve a problem effectively.At this stage, it's also important to ensure that you look at the issue from a variety of perspectives.If you commit yourself too early, you can end up with a problem statement that's really a solution instead.Whether you're solving a problem for a client (internal or external), supporting those who are solving problems, or discovering new problems to solve, the problems you face can be large or small, simple or complex, and easy or difficult.A fundamental part of every manager's role is finding ways to solve them.The articles in this section of Mind Tools therefore focus on helping you make a success of the first of these steps – defining the problem.A very significant part of this involves making sense of the complex situation in which the problem occurs, so that you can pinpoint exactly what the problem is.Appreciative Inquiry is designed to help you understand complex problems so that you can start the process of solving them.It uses four stages to help you uncover more details about what's creating the problem, and then define actions that will improve the situation.However, if you look a bit deeper, the real issue might be a lack of training, or an unreasonable workload.help you ask the right questions, and work through the layers of a problem to uncover what's really going on.