When you get stuck on a hard problem, here are 6 questions that might help get you unstuck.
- If I had all the time, resources and money in the world, how would I solve this problem?
- Often un-bounding yourself from known limitations will provide insights that could apply within your limitations
- Where else has this problem had to be solved before (i.e. other industry or discipline)?
- Most progress/innovation comes from applying lessons from one discipline to another
- Does the problem, as it is defined, really need to be solved? Is it the right question/problem?
- Lots of energy can be wasted solving the wrong problems
- What are other ways to define/describe the problem? Could you describe the problem without using any industry/discipline-specific jargon?
- A common approach in math is to use placeholders or representations of elements to make manipulating/performing operations on the other elements more intuitive. Can you use this or a similar approach in your problem?
- How would (an artist, a professor, a philosopher, a customer, a competitor, a famous expert) think about the problem?
- It can be surprising how taking a step back and looking at the problem through someone else’s lens can bring new insights
- What are the fewest, simplest, yet technically accurate, words you could use to define the problem?
- It’s so easy to get wrapped up in artificial complexity (i.e. knowing too much)