Problem Understanding Framework
Stakes
This is not as well-formed as it could be, but felt worth capturing. I’ve been struggling to describe the limit of attachment in various ways, and the concept of “stakes” seems like such a good topic to explore.
Intentionality and meaning
So far, I’ve been talking about intention as a fairly straightforward, singular thing. I have an intention, you have an intention, the bunny has the intention, and so on. As you probably suspected all along, this is at best a…
A vision and a hallucination
Talking with one of my colleagues, we found this simple lens. We both arrived independently at the idea that one of the strongest ways to instill coherence within an organization is aligning on some more or less unified intention. After…
Limits
This story builds on the one I wrote a while ago, and adds one more leg for this stool. This third leg came as a result of examining the solution loop with the question of “What are the limits to…
The problem understanding framework
With my apologies for taking a scenic route and sincere thanks for following along, I am happy to declare that we now have all the parts to return to that framework I started with. To give you a quick recap,…
Framing
When encountering an infinity-problem, we may have enough wherewithal to resist the urge to act on our caveman firmware. In such cases, we tend to employ a more sophisticated process to exit the “struggle” cycle. The typical name it goes…
Touching infinity
As we explore the process of understanding, it may not be immediately obvious why change isn’t conquerable, and why isn’t knowledge a finite resource as the siren of modernism sweetly suggests. As far as infinity goes, there are infinite stories…
Model compression and us
Often, it almost seems like if we run the process of understanding long enough, we could just stay in the applying cycle and not have to worry about learning ever again. Sure, there’s change. But if we study the nature…
Model compression
At the end of each journey in our process of understanding, we have an effective solution to the problem we were presented with. Here’s an interesting thing I am noticing. We still have a diverse, deeply nuanced mental model of…
Change
So far, I carefully avoided the topic of change, presenting my problem-solving realm in a delightfully modernist manner. “See phenomenon? Make a model of it! Bam! Now we’re cooking with gas.”
Life of a solution
Looking at the framework in the previous piece, I am noticing that the components of the tripartite loop (aka the solution loop, apologies for naming it earlier) form an interesting causal relationship. Check it out. Imagine that for every problem,…
A Solution
If we are looking at a problem, and as we learned earlier, our understanding of a problem is a model that includes us, our intention, and the phenomenon that is a subject of it, then a solution is the problem…
Understanding
Once the notion of a problem is sufficiently semantically disambiguated, we can proceed toward the next marker on our map: the concept of “understanding”. Ambitious, right?! There will be two definitions in this piece, one building on another. I’ll start…
A problem
To get a more solid grounding of the newly born decision-making framework, we need to understand what a problem is. Let’s begin with a definition. A problem is an imposition of our intention on a phenomenon.
Mental models
I use the term “mental models” a lot, and so I figured – hey, maybe it’s time to do some semantic disambiguation and write down everything I learned so far about them?
Solved, solvable, unsolvable
I have been noodling on a decision-making framework, and I am hoping to start writing things down in a sequence, Jank-in-teams style. You’ve probably seen glimpses of this thinking process in my posts over the last year or so, but…