Step back, zoom in, do something right now.

Baby steps. Eating an elephent one spoonful at a time. A walk of a thousand miles starts with a single step. Reimagining.
All phrases to communicate a single idea – that large, complex problems can be tackled, first of all, by thinking about them in the right way, and then taking things one step at a time. The hardest part, though, can be deciding how to start.

Knowing where to start when trying to answer complex or difficult questions is something that I believe takes experience. Not because you get any more intelligent with age and experience, but because you are more likely to have seen something similar before. For example, with experience you might be able to immediately see how to disassemble a problem into its constituent parts because you dealt with something vaguely similar some years ago. Without that experience you would still be able to do just as good a job (eventually), but in a much more inefficient way.

There is one particular method which I think is essential in problem solving – and it is the very first thing I do when faced with a new problem

Step back. Zoom in.

When you are given a problem to solve, more than likely it will be part of a larger, nested set of problems. For example, “find a way to improve broadband speed” might actually only be part of a wider problem. Maybe the company wants to improve broadband speed because it wants to roll out a new line of business (LoB) application to remote sites. And maybe the reason for the new LOB application is due to some new legislation that is coming in.

So by stepping back you suddenly start to see the problem you have been presented with in context. The problem is actually that new legislation is being implemented and the company wants to make sure it complies. Someone has made a decision to implement some new software to do this – and this may or may not be the right decision, but at least you now understand where it has come from. You can now consider your approach to your own specific part of the problem in a more informed way. In my example, we now have a new question – can we use, for example, a web interface for the new application that would not require expensive upgrades to the broadband infrastructure. If the whole purpose of the process is to comply with legislation rather than increase sales, then expenditure really should be kept to a minimum – something we would never have considered without “Stepping Back”.

After reformulating the problem using all the new information you got by stepping back, you can now zoom in and try to start solving it. Zooming in is the process of identifying small chunks of a larger problem that can be handled discretely. I’ve not yet come across a problem that can’t be broken down into a set of much easier smaller problems. The skill comes in identifying these “sub-problems”, solving them and then combining the solutions to give you an answer to the larger problem at hand.

Sometimes you can do all of this analysis but still end up with a huge pile of questions to answer and a new problem – where to start. It’s possible to end up in a sort of cognitive dissonance where you know exactly what you need to do (pick a question and answer it) but find it almost impossible to do it (choosing which question to start with).

There are a few techniques to help with this problem, but core to them is the grading of all of the individual questions that make up your problem. You might grade them from “easy to solve” to “hard to solve”, or from “needs input from everyone” to “can solve on my own”. However you grade the questions you should end up with one pile that can/should be solved quickest. These will normally be the easy questions, or the ones that you can solve on your own, or the ones that require time-limited resources (for example, an executive who is in the office for rest of the day but will then be out of contact for the next three weeks).
Now that you have the pile of questions that you’re going to tackle first we can implement another favourite technique of mine:

What is the ONE thing I can do RIGHT NOW to move this forward

Look at each question or problem and think of one thing you can do immediately to start to solve it – and then do it. It could be something small and apparently insignificant, but that’s not really important. The purpose of this step is to solve a very small part of the bigger problem right away. And once you have done this for a few of the smaller questions the avalanche will start. You will start to find it much easier to answer the more difficult questions because you may well have gained insight from the questions you have already answered. And you will feel confidence in your solution rising. And the more confidence you have, the easier it will get to complete the solution, and the easier it is to complete the solution the more confidence you will have that you are answering the right questions in a good way. It’s a self fuelling process that can help you substantially when you come across those parts of the problem that are really difficult to solve.

Using these two techniques together in the problem solving process is incredibly powerful. First step back and zoom in. Then think “What is the one thing I can do right now to move this forward”.