Problem Solving Techniques: Challenge Your Base Assumptions
One very powerful problem solving technique is to “challenge your base assumptions.”
Problem solving and critical thinking are all built upon “base assumptions.” You can apply all the creativity in the world, but if you are starting off making the wrong assumptions then all the problem solving strategies in the world will be useless. In this video, Avish explains what base assumptions are and how you can challenge them to improve your problem solving skill.
(Full Transcription Below)
Transcription:
Have you ever been trying to solve a problem and you just felt like you were spinning your wheels? Like you’re kind of in a car that isn’t going anywhere?
You know the problem might not be your creativity or your ability to generate solutions. The problem might be with your base assumptions. In this video I’m going to explain what that means and hopefully get myself out of this car.
Problem solving is a critical skill. Things will change, things will go wrong and your ability to solve those problems and adapt to those changes and unexpected events are going to directly relate to how successful you are.
Now at its core, we’re talking about its creativity; generating, creating ideas to solve your problems. Now in improv comedy, it’s all about creativity so when I’m doing an improv or when I’m teaching others to do improv, the fundamental thing we do is show people how they quickly and effectively generate ideas.
IMPROV GAME:
As our own translator, I’m going to begin telling you all a story in my native language which is English. Seanlai whenever she wants is going to go ahead and hit the translator. When she does, I’m going to have to switch into a foreign language. Now it’s going, so that I don’t offend anyone or leave anyone out, it’s going to be a foreign language that no one knows. A foreign language known as gibberish. Yes, when she hits the translator I switch to gibberish, when she hits it again I switch back to English and you’re going to see just how powerful it is as we switch back and forth. Now to prove that this is not prerecorded and this is actually the translator doing the work, I’m not going to tell you a pre-written story. I’m going to have you tell me what to tell a story about. So from this side of the room, Can I get an activity you like to do on the weekends? What’s that?
Make love. Only on the weekends, okay. And from this side of the room, can I get a, what is one of your speaking topics? Something unrelated to making love, maam. Customer service, alright. So now we’re going to see how the universal translator can translate a story about making love and how that relates to customer service. Are you ready Shawn Lee? Here we go.
Once upon a time while I was trying to get great service at a store, I realized that the women across the counter was very beautiful. I said to her you know what maam I need to return this even though I don’t have a receipt and she looked at me and she said you know what sir you should *ting* Gibberish. And I pulled out my wallet and I said inside this wallet is something that people *ting* Gibberish. And I could not believe that she was actually turned on by that line. Now what was amazing is that I said to her hey *ting* Gibberish.
END IMPROV GAME
Now here is the thing, even though improv comedians are very creative, even though I use a lot of creativity, all the creativity in the world is actually maybe meaningless if you’re answering the wrong problem.
We all have, we all make what are called “base assumptions.” We take our condition, we take the problem we’re trying to solve and we make certain assumptions about expectations, about what the situation is. If those assumptions are incorrect, we are just going to be spinning our wheels, kind of like trying to push yourself in a tiny, tiny car.
I have direct experience with making an incorrect base assumption. One that actually hurt my problem solving and really had me stumped.
This is a little shoe and it belongs to a little person. It belongs to my son who’s about sixteen months old. And one day I was taking care of him and we were hanging out in our playroom, which is also our family room as it is with many people. And I decided to take his shoes off so he’d be more comfortable. Well I took the shoes off and I threw them into the middle of the room because I wanted to keep them right in the middle where we would be able to see them. I didn’t want to throw them somewhere I couldn’t find them again later.
Well wouldn’t you know, later on that night my wife is packing up his stuff in his bag for the next day like she likes to do. And she couldn’t find his shoes. So she asks me, “where are his shoes?” and I say, “uhhh I’m not sure.”
Now of course this was a problem because I was the last person to handle the shoes and I didn’t know where they were. So I said I just threw them in the middle of the room and they weren’t there. This of course led to us looking all over the place wondering where on earth have these shoes gone.
Well my wife goes upstairs to finish getting ready, but to me this a problem. I’m like, “look I know those shoes were there, where could they have gone?”
So of course my mind assumes that because I threw the shoes probably what happened is that I threw them harder than I thought, they bounced and they maybe fell behind a bookshelf or into a toy bin or something. So I started looking all around the playroom working on that assumption thinking, “okay where?!!” I’m like doing physics equations in my head, I’m re-charting potential trajectories for the shoes, I’m looking all over the place and I cannot find them.
Later on that night we had given up. We had given up, we said, “these shoes are gone.” Well later on I’m talking to my wife and she remembers that earlier that night she had been working with some fabric. She likes to do a lot of crafting and she’s great at it and what she had done was that she laid out the fabric on the floor to work with and then when she was done she gathered it up and put it in the closet.
All of a sudden – Ding! The light bulb went off. We said, “wait a minute, maybe the shoes got wrapped up in the fabric.” So I went down to the closet, looked through the fabric and sure enough there was the shoe.
Yes, it was my wife’s fault but I’m not saying anything negative because I love her very much and she is in fact the person working the camera right now and making me look good in post-production. So honey I love you, you didn’t do anything wrong…
So here’s the deal. That whole problem came down to me making a base assumption and sticking to it. I probably looked for that shoe for fifteen to twenty minutes – in a pretty small place. I had that definition of insanity because I’m looking in the same place over and over because I stuck with the same base assumption. I was being very creative, I was thinking about different trajectories. Where could it go? Trying to backtrack. I was generating a lot of creative ideas but because the initial assumption was wrong, I was spinning my wheels, not getting anywhere.
So if you’re struggling with a problem whether it’s in business or your personal life and you can’t come up with a solution, take a step back and ask yourself, “What are the base assumptions I am making about this problem, about this situation?”
Can you question them? Even if you’re still deep down to your core convinced that those assumptions are correct, just for the sake of a creative exercise, act as if they are not. Act as if there’s something else that is happening. Act as if a different assumption is true and see how that generates new ideas and new solutions and gets you moving past those problems that are blocking you.