Don’t Start Problem Solving on Auto-Pilot
Are you starting your problem solving on auto-pilot? Do you need some kind of trigger to drive systemic, rigorous problem solving? Most people do, and it’s a missed opportunity.
I came across this quote from Marvin Minksy, co-founder of MIT’s AI lab:
The way people solve problems is first by having an enormous amount of common sense knowledge, like maybe 50 million anecdotes or entries, and then having some unknown system for finding among those 50 million old stories the 5 or 10 that seem most relevant to the situation. This is reasoning by analogy.
This is often thought of as problem solving through experience. There’s nothing wrong with it. This is often why we hire experience for key roles, because they come with a built-in solution set.
But here’s the failure mode of this method: it doesn’t come with a built-in circuit breaker when it’s not the right approach. As I wrote about here, we have to make a thoughtful decision between knowing the answer (implement), not knowing the answer (problem solve), or thinking we know the answer (test to learn). However, as this quote points out, our auto-pilot approach essentially robs us of this choice, taking us down a path that we don’t even know is the wrong path until we’re well down it.
We need a little pause, just enough room for the question to be asked: which pathway is best? We don’t need perfect results. This is a difficult habit to build a system around and therefore is more dependent on our self-awareness, but that awareness can be practiced and built over time.
Solving problems by taking solutions from our database isn’t inherently wrong. However, defaulting into that approach automatically will lead to both wrong and inefficient pathways to the best problem solving solutions.