In my job search, I recently interviewed with the Gallup Organization. As part of their process, they have you go through a comprehensive behavioral phone interview where they ask you all kinds of questions to gauge whether or not you'd fit into their environment.
One such question asked something like "How do you set about solving difficult problems?"
A few days later, I stumbled upon this quote on the SvN blog...
Sam found this approach “very useful in arriving at a solution”:
1. write down the problem
2. write down why it’s hard to solve
3. write down what would make it easier
4. write down possible ways to implement things that would make it easier
5. write down why those ways suck
6. then make it not suck
Ryan’s response: “yeah. in early Christopher Alexander-speak, that process pulls the forces apart so you can see the dependencies…you can evaluate all the forces that push on the problem and solution.”
I guess I had never just broken it down to a set of steps. I've always considered my self to be a problem solver, but perhaps I could be better if I were to analyze and hone my actual problem solving process. Interesting.
On a side note, it's kind of nice to be able to blog about my job search. I feel like one of those guys who works for a company that's doing something innovative and cool, but can't blog about it until "the company" says it's ok. Keeping everything under wraps was hard for me... my brain just naturally wants to get some of my observations and things out in the open. I'll be able to do that now, and in the coming days/weeks, I'll be giving further analysis of my job search.