Book Reviews: Are you on the lights? -- Locate the real problem

A few days ago, a blog reader asked me to recommend several books on methodology, psychology, and management in my email. At that time, the first book in the column was "are you lights on?" written by winberger. I plan to review this book today.

★Author Profile

Write book reviews by myself
By Gerald M. weberger ). This old man's position in the IT field (especially in the software engineering field) is quite high. It can be called Taishan Beidou (For details, refer to "here
). He wrote several classic books, such: "Psychology of Program Development", "becoming a technology leader", "the mysteries of consulting", and "are you on the lights" to be commented on today?. In view of the many classic works of this cool man, I plan to review the other cool classic books if I have time.
We can see ten millionNo
Biased, thinking that the books written by winberger are only for IT practitioners. In fact, he wrote many books (including this book "are you on the lights?") IntroductionMethodology
Is suitable for people from all walks of life. It is really suitable for all ages and rare!

★Why do I recommend this book?

In fact, all kinds of problems have plagued everyone's life and work. For example, I always feel that I have little money; for example, I don't have a bright future in my company; for example, I don't have a good relationship with my family; for example, I encounter a congestion on my way to work. For example ......
I believe that most people will encounter many large or small problems every day, and it takes a lot of time and effort to deal with these problems. But can most people solve the problem smoothly? Are you satisfied with the solution? A question mark is required here!
The essence of this book is: Tell you how to solve the problemMethodology
. If you carefully read this book and understand the ideas in it, you will certainly benefit from solving various problems. Because of this, this book is regarded as a Bible in the field of "problem solving. It has been nearly thirty years since its publication (the first version in 1982.

★A little story in this book

To give everyone an eye, I will reveal an example in the first chapter of this book (this story seems to be widely spread and you may have heard of it before ). The following is an illustration of the story, omitting part of the plot.
There are many companies in an office building in a big city, but there are not enough elevators and the elevator is slow. This led to strong dissatisfaction among residents and asked the Office landlords to solve the problem. If you have never heard of this story before, if you are the landlord of this property, you mayDirectly think
The following solutions:
A disregards the complaint
B. Change the old elevator to a new elevator (resizing or speeding up)
C. Several additional elevators are added (the building needs to be renovated)
D. Ask the company to change the work schedule and stagger the work peak.
HoweverDirectly think
Solution B and solution C are too costly; solution a and Solution d may lead to loss of customers. That is to say, these methods are not ideal. What should I do?
Later, a smart guy realized the following:The problem is what you expect.
Things and your experience
The difference between things

. From this point, if you want to solve the elevator problem, either change the expectation or change the experience. It is difficult to change the expectation (everyone wants the elevator to arrive as soon as possible), so they have to change the experience.
There are two ways to change the experience: 1) Shorten the actual waiting time; 2) Let the waiting personFeeling
The time has become shorter. Both the above B and C solutions aim to shorten the actual time, but the cost is very high. Therefore, we need to find a way to let people take the elevatorFeeling
The time has become shorter. As a result, this smart guy thought of setting up several mirrors in the elevator room. Out of vanity, people who take the elevator always look in the mirror and find their destination.

★What can we learn from this story?

This story is classic. I often use it to educate new employees during New Employee induction training. So what can we learn from this story? In addition to the words marked with bold and underline, I have the following experiences:
◇ The original problem description does not necessarily reflect the nature of the problem
In that story, the user described the problem as "the elevator is too slow ". In fact, this is onlySurface Problems
. For landlords,Essential Problems
Yes: "The user feels the elevator is too slow ".

◇ The first way to get into your mind is often inadequate
For the above reason, you may be blinded by the superficial expression. After being blinded, you will first thinkSurface Problems
. However, this solution cannot be completely solved.Essential Problems
Either the cost is very high, or there are side effects after the solution; ...... In short, it is not very good!

◇ There are often two perfect Methods
Our ancestor once taught us that the fish and the bear's paw cannot have both sides. Not necessarily! Most of the time (but not all the time), the key to both fish and bear's paw is to see and see through the problem.Nature
.

I wrote it here and found that it had been a long time without knowing it. Just stop it. I hope that the little story just now will trigger your impulse to read this book; I hope that you will gain a lot after reading the complete book.

Copyright Notice

All original articles in this blog are copyrighted by the author. This statement must be reprinted to keep this article complete, and the author's programming will be noted in the form of hyperlinks
And the original address of this article:

 

Http://program-think.blogspot.com/2009/07/book-review-are-your-lights-on.html