How to solve it

Being an entrepreneur can be reduced to solving problems, issues and situations that arise (tactics), and the business per se is a meta-situation, where the entrepreneur is faced with a non-liner complex situation, looking for the innovative solution delivering value to its potential audience that will become the business.

What is there was a general framework to approach any problems? Not a solve-it-all equation, nor a silver bullet, just a framework from where to approach problems. Would it still be valid?
We believe so.

George Pólya’s 1945 book How to solve it has a genius-like approach to problem solving, voided from any content, and context rich, it might be one of today’s best kept strategy secrets of the best run companies in the world.

Here’s the general framework developed by George, revolving around four principles:

1. FIRST PRINCIPLE: UNDERSTANDING THE PROBLEM
   • You have to understand the problem.
   • What is the unknown? What are the data? What is the condition?
   • Is it possible to satisfy the condition? Is the condition sufficient to determine the unknown? Or is it insufficient? Or redundant? Or contradictory?
   • Draw a figure. Introduce suitable notation.
   • Separate the various parts of the condition. Can you write them down?
2. SECOND PRINCIPLE: DEVISING A PLAN
   • Find the connection between the data and the unknown. You may be obliged to consider auxiliary problems if an immediate connection cannot be found. You should obtain eventually a plan of the solution.
   • Have you seen it before? Or have you seen the same problem in a slightly different form?
   • Do you know a related problem? Do you know a theorem that could be useful?
   • Look at the unknown! And try to think of a familiar problem having the same or a similar unknown.
   • Here is a problem related to yours and solved before. Could you use it? Could you use its result? Could you use its method? Should you introduce some auxiliary element in order to make its use possible?
   • Could you restate the problem? Could you restate it still differently? Go back to definitions.
   • If you cannot solve the proposed problem try to solve first some related problem. Could you imagine a more accessible related problem? A more general problem? A more special problem? An analogous problem? Could you solve a part of the problem? Keep only a part of the condition, drop the other part; how far is the unknown then determined, how can it vary? Could you derive something useful from the data? Could you think of other data appropriate to determine the unknown? Could you change the unknown or data, or both if necessary, so that the new unknown and the new data are nearer to each other?
   • Did you use all the data? Did you use the whole condition? Have you taken into account all essential notions involved in the problem?
3. THIRD PRINCIPLE: CARRYING OUT THE PLAN
   • Carry out your plan.
   • Carrying out your plan of the solution, check each step. Can you see clearly that the step is correct? Can you prove that it is correct?
4. FOURTH PRINCIPLE: REVIEW / EXTEND
   • Examine the solution obtained.
   • Can you check the result? Can you check the argument?
   • Can you derive the solution differently? Can you see it at a glance?
   • Can you use the result, or the method, for some other problem?

It’s not often that we find books that were written over half a century ago, that are just as valid today as they were when they were first published. Such treasures are often forgotten or written off and can become part of any entrepreneur’s (unfair) competitive advantage portfolio.

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{Photography by Corey Ann}

Tags: Book, George Pólya, Unfair Competitive Advantage, Business Plan, Brainstorming, Process

Tagged as: Book, Brainstorming, Business Plan, George Pólya, Process, Unfair Competitive Advantage