Major types of Real life problems - a classification

Variety of real life problems is endless, but we may make some sense out of this seeming sea of problems by classifying them first

We have gone through solving some problems and highlighting the principles, techniques or approaches that can be used equally effectively in real life problems. But did we ever talk about how many different types of real life problems can there be?

Though at first thought it seems that the whole world is filled to the brim with real life problems of infinite number of varieties, some sense of this seemingly intractable problem can be made.

Classification of real life problems according to the time you would get for reaching the solution

Real life problems can be classified in different ways. If we classify real-world problems according to degree of immediacy of action (or time available to solve the problem), we may have a classification as:

• Static problems – where the problem solver gets reasonable time to analyze, form a suitable strategy, evaluate feasible approaches and recommend a solution for implementation. Following are some of the Static problem sub-classes:

−     Choice problems – such as choosing a vendor, recruiting a new employee, choosing life partner, buying a new car, choosing an out-sourcing partner. AHP is an effective method for these problems

−     Ranking problems – such as ranking participants in a music competition, ranking students in a course, performance ranking of operational units in an organization, ranking universities in a country. AHP again is useful.

−      Evaluation problems – such as performance evaluation of employees, performance evaluation of telecom network. AHP is applicable here.

−     Design and R&D problems – design of a marketing campaign, design of a product, R&D problems. Most R&D problems are highly complex and inherently uncertain in nature. Need of innovation is high in these problems.

−     Strategic problems – such as forming a marketing strategy, forming a HR strategy, forming a material management strategy, making a national plan, budgeting and so on. Significant AHP applications exist in this area.

• Dynamic problems – where the events in the environment continue to happen generally independent of the decisions taken and time of decision making is short. Examples are: driving a car for going from one place to another, rectifying a poor health telecom network, counseling a patient, treating a patient. One can club tactical and operational problems in this category.
• Emergent problems – where decision making needs to be instantaneous and largely by intuition. Examples are: fire fighting, fighting at war-front, critical-care support in situations such as flood, earthquake and cyclone devastation.

We remind you again the important truth: There is no single method or strategy to deal with all kinds of problems (by problems we mean real-world problems).

Two important classes of problems that may occur in any of the above types: Multi-criteria decision making problems and Diagnostics & Cure class of problems:

·      Multi-Criteria Decision Making (or MCDM) problems: Life is full of choices and evaluations. While buying a car, you have to choose it amongst many options; while recruiting a marketing manager for your company you need to evaluate and choose one amongst the many aspirants for the positions; while selecting a location for your new factory, you need to make a hard choice between a few promising locations. Apart from choice problems, ranking, or even strategic decision making cases also fall under this category.

Solution of this class of problems involves evaluation of a set of options on the basis of a set of suitable qualitative criteria or characteristics. This class of problems is so abundant that from mid-sixties usable and effective methods were introduced and improved to treat this class problems as scientifically (with least amount of subjectivity) as possible. These problems were named separately as MCDM problems and today we have a mature set of powerful methods to deal with this special class of problems that are abundant around us.

To give the due respect it deserves, we will start a separate thread (or blog) on MCDM problem solving.

·      Diagnostics & Cure class of problems: All doctors, physicians, paramedics and related professionals work with this kind of problems. Furthermore, any artifact, that is, man-made object, or natural object that is failure prone, concerns us with this kind of problems. Artifacts at home can be your laptop, mobile device or washing machine; at work it may be a computer network, a communication network, or the sewage system; natural failure-prone object needing maintenance may be a chicken farm. If you think a while you will find that failures may occur at so many unthought-of places. Failure treatment is a separate subject.

If things fall in place, we will treat this subject in a separate thread which we term as blog here. 

Lastly we will have to mention innovation with serious intent now. It is clearly understood by most of the important people that in today’s competitive world, the most valuable resource is innovation. Accordingly we will take up a separate thread (or blog) on Innovation.

To sum up, we will shortly have two or three more additional but related blogs running in parallel. In this main blog we will continue to treat Real life Problem Solving as the situation unfolds.

Due to personal reasons, blogging may be a little slow for the next few days. Please hold your patience for a while. 

I leave you here today with best wishes .

Read my other blogs on Innovative idea generation and its basic principles and Get smart, get innovative usingTRIZ
 

Introducing the new Principle of Exhaustivity for solving real life problems

Applying Principle of Exhaustivity to solve real life problems

 

Hope you have already gone through our first two posts. We were not very specific there—it was just background building.

In this session we will tell you about one of the most important principles we found effective from our problem solving experiences.

We call this as “Principle of Exhaustivity”.

Let us take a simple problem structure. When we are faced with a problem, we have:

·         One or more than one goal or objective that we have to somehow reach. A solution to the problem is supposed to meet the goal. Usually, problems are of single goal kind.

·         Choices or options one of which we have to choose for satisfying the objective. Choosing the right option is the solution to the problem.

·         Criteria on the basis of which we will choose the right option.

Take for example the problem of purchasing a new mobile phone for yourself. At the very outset, suppose you have decided a range of prices within which you will make the purchase. Your objective is to get a phone that would give you maximum satisfaction or utility of use within the given budget.

Applying principle of exhaustivity at the level of options or choices

Now is the time to evaluate the various models of various brands that you can buy within your budget. These will be your options or choices.

How would you finally choose one phone out of possible many? In your mind you must have had some idea about that. The phone OS may be Android, iOS, Blackberry, Symbian, Windows, Ubuntu or some other. It may have larger or smaller screen size. Its battery may last long or not so long. These are a few amongst all the criteria based on which you will evaluate available choices.  

If the principle of exhaustivity is ingrained deeply in your mindset, you will exhaustively evaluate all available phones, and not just a few that are shown in a shop or a website. This situation is:

·         Application of the principle of exhaustivity at the level of identifying options or choices. It is very important to identify possible choices exhaustively as, many times the right choice remains unseen or hidden.

Sometimes hidden choices are to be unearthed or a new option needs to be created.

Applying principle of exhaustivity at the level of criteria for evaluation of choices

Similarly, after exhaustively identifying possible choices, you will sit down and carefully list out exhaustively all the important criteria on the basis of which you will evaluate the shortlisted choices. This situation is:

·         Application of the principle of exhaustivity at the level of identifying the most important evaluation criteria. At this stage if you leave out some important criteria you may finally end up in choosing a phone set you won’t like.

Here, we would like to make a strong recommendation:

·         While choosing your set of evaluation criteria, identify the evaluation criteria exhaustively, but please do not choose too many, choose only the most important ones. If you choose too many criteria, your mind and judgment may become confused.

You may wonder - how many is too many? Yes, we also wonder. There is no hard and fast rule here. But still we would generally suggest:

·         Limit the number of primary level criteria to single digit.

Yes, there may be many levels of criteria and sub-criteria for choosing your option in a more complex choice scenario. Later we will discuss this in more details.

We had to raise this issue at this point because exhaustivity was in conflict with the effectiveness of approach.

Be exhaustive, but be exhaustive in identifying only the criteria that are most important in evaluating the available choices.

Applying principle of exhaustivity at the level of goal or objective

Till now, we have seen application of the exhaustivity principle at two levels. There is one more level of application of this principle that is vitally important. That is:

·         Application of the principle of exhaustivity at the level of identifying the goal or objective itself. Though the goal in most cases is only one, sometimes you need to stop and think, carefully analyzing the problem to clearly understand what really the goal is.

It is a fact of life that many times the goal itself is wrongly defined or chosen and accordingly after a lot of effort a wrong solution is reached.

Application of the exhaustivity principle at this level may not mean you identify many goals exhaustively, or identify one goal from many. It means that you need to analyze thoroughly, giving some time in identifying the right goal.

We will take up this principle again in the next session. Interestingly this principle seems either trivial or obvious. One may ask, well we do evaluate exhaustively, is there any need to specify this as a standalone separate important principle at all?

There is no direct answer, as there is no ready-made unique solution to any real world problem. We can only say that we have encountered apparently intractable problems conquered by application of this straightforward principle. We have seen correctness assurance level of a solution (where correctness assurance was the key criteria) that could not be measured at all rise up to more than 99% just by dovetailing this principle with other known techniques being applied.

Surprisingly we have also seen experienced practitioners of problem solving in certain domains missing this key principle occasionally. This happens because of its apparent obvious nature. To get over this taken-for-granted situation, one needs to ingrain this principle deeply in one’s problem solving mindset.

We will now end this session with a cute problem for you. This is a standard problem posed to many audiences many times. We would say, try to solve it in your own way. Either you may be baffled and give up or you may suddenly discover the answer. You may find it very easy or you may not. In all cases, we would ask you to reach the solution by applying the exhaustivity principle carefully.

Problem 1:

A man and his son were involved in a car accident. The father died on the scene, but the child was rushed to the hospital. When he arrived the surgeon said, "I can't operate on this boy, he is my son!” How could this be?

Read my other blogs on Innovative idea generation and its basic principles and Get smart, get innovative usingTRIZ