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Behavioral Science and Problem-Solving

I.                                       I.                 Introduction.                Concerning our general behavior, it’s high about time we all had some understanding of how we operate on ourselves, and it is just as important how we are operated on by others. This is the wheelhouse of behavioral sciences. It is a vast subject. It touches our lives constantly. It’s influence is pervasive and can be so subtle we never notice it. Behavioral sciences profoundly affect our ability and success at problem-solving, from the elementary level to highly complex wicked problems. This is discussed in Section IV. We begin with the basics of behavioral sciences, Section II, and then through the lens of multiple categories and examples, Section III. II.     ...
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ARE YOU A GOOD PROBLEM-SOLVER?

  What are the factors that make you a good problem solver? We give a comprehensive list of about 20 items below. This is not to say you must have them all. However, every leader, problem-solver, scholar, office manager, mechanic, physician, coach, and more has more than a few of these. 1.      General intelligence. The IQ test is only a small part of this. 2.      Emotional intelligence 3.      Tolerance for ambiguity 4.      Pattern recognition 5.      Systems thinking 6.      Curiosity 7.      Family values and habits 8.      Reading by parents and independently 9.      Observational ability 10.  Excellent memory 11.  Broad knowledge 12.  Conceptual comprehension 13.  Inven...
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ODD THOUGHTS FOR FRIDAY (6/13/25), learning, solving, success

A.     Learning is like climbing a mountain. When you get to the top, you wonder why it seemed so hard to get there. B.     “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” --- Albert Einstein*. C.     If you’re smart enough, you can fail your way to success. * Compare with…   No man ever steps in the same river twice”  --- ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus.
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The “What If” Stage of Problem-Solving

1. Introduction. The setting is that you have a problem to solve. Not from the textbook, this problem is possibly open-ended and has no straightforward solution. It’s complicated, involving what you know and what assumptions you can make, constraints on resources you can use, and your time to solution. At the beginning, you consider what you can assume is true, you need to consider testing your solutions, and a host of other factors. Let’s look at the assumptions state. This is more familiarly called the "what if" stage.  It is a crucial phase in the creative and exploratory dimension of inquiry. It represents the moment when a problem-solver steps beyond what is already known to speculate, imagine, or hypothesize possibilities. It is driven by curiosity, imagination, and the desire to simplify and explore alternative explanations or pathways. Hopefully, you may discover you already follow these steps. Yet, in real-life problems they happen, almost always without an instruct...
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