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From: Jasper
Date: 1/3/01
Time: 9:19:42 AM
Jean,
Your problem-solving technique is a solid one. I wish more people would do that. The trouble is, they don't. And you can't make them. If they are comfortable with the big picture they have, they don't worry about the "little" pieces that don't fit and they drop all further consideration of the issue right there. From that point on, they will either dig in their heels to defend what they did (like the LAPD) or they will declare an impasse and move on to something else. As a friend of mine was fond of saying, "I'm never going to change your mind and you're never going to change mine, so let's agree to disagee." The issue under discussion was genocide. He couldn't see it coming. I could. He said I was wrong. We were not taliking about anyone he knew.
Most people equate the "big" picture with the "important" picture and the details with "minor" details. As soon as they see a detail they don't think is important they stop paying attening and start skipping ahead to "the important things." Sometimes the important things are the details.
Sometimes you have to get nine out of ten exactly right or you have nothing. Sometimes you have to get all ten and in precisely the correct order. And sometimes you need only one--but you won't know which one until you have tested them all.
Jean, what you may not realize you're doing when you look at a quesiton with a zillion complex parts and simply KNOW the answer is actually identifying and assembling the RELEVANTdetails that make up a whole. But it happens so quickly that you can't translate what you did into words. In my work, I often see the answer to a problem before I can articulate how I arrived at it. In the process of trying to backtrack the solution to the relevant pieces and the necessory order of assembly I usually make a lot of dumb mistakes. Most people don't understand how this works and it is very difficult to get across how important is to make those mistakes and to acknowledge what happened.
A mistake is, by definition, something you do that produces an unintended result and, therefore, something you try to avoid (if you didn't, it wouldn't be a mistake). This next part is where most people miss the mark.... When you drop the ball, make the wrong turn, knock on the wrong door, etc., you learn something that you would not have experienced if you hadn't screwed up . There was a REASON that you dropped the ball, a better way to get somewhere else in the wrong turn you made, a long lost friend behind the wrong door. If you focus only on the humiliation of dropping the ball, the frustraion of making the wrong turn or the odds against meeting that old friend, you'll never learn anything new.
There are, of course, fatlal errors -- mistakes that you can only make once because when you make them you're out of options. That's what happens when people decide too early that a particular detail is unimportant (or that a particular problem-solver pays too much attention to detail -- can't see the forest for the trees) . In the end, it may have been the one detail you need in order to see what the big picture is.--Jasper