Problem-solving refers to the process you use when you don’t know what the correct method is. One remedy for this problem is to start by studying examples or demonstrations of how to solve the problem. This can help you understand the best methods to solve a problem before trying it yourself.

Start with Examples

Retrieval practice is the process of testing yourself with a closed book. It lets you check your knowledge, and it is one of the most effective ways to learn.A tension exists between the benefits of retrieval and studying examples. <ul><li>If the pattern for solving a problem is in your memory, retrieval practice suggests you’re better off solving the problem on your own, without help.</li><li>On the other hand, if the relevant pattern is not in memory, you will have to default to search processes which can be slow and make it harder to acquire the needed patterns.</li></ul>

Retrieve, Don’t Revisit

The spacing effect refers to the benefit of spreading studying sessions out over time.<ul><li>For factual knowledge, spacing can be accomplished easily with flashcards.</li><li>For other skills, the best way to benefit from spacing is to mix in practice of older skills while learning new ones. e.g. A ten-minute review practice to work on previous material before moving on to new skills.</li></ul>

Spread Out Your Sessions

If we don’t know what type of problem we’re solving before we attempt it, we can only rely on the features of the problem itself. This alone makes our practice more closely approximate the real thing.Problems don't come in neat packages divided by units in real life.

Mix Up Your Practice

When you make a mistake, it’s important to figure out why. The worst thing to do is simply hope that the confusion will sort itself out through repetition.Any time you face this type of mix-up, put the examples side-by-side so you can see what distinguishes them.

Put Confusing Examples Side-by-Side

When learning a new method or problem-solving procedure, always walk through and explain each step to yourself. Repeated drills can help you memorize material but don’t always facilitate understanding. So when the format of the question changes slightly, you might not be able to adjust.Effective practice is built on understanding.

Use Self-Explanations

For skills at the limits of your abilities, it’s impossible to monitor your performance and simultaneously improve it. Record yourself performing the skill and review it after.You can focus all of your precious mental bandwidth on performing the task and only later analyze the effort

Analyze Your Past Performance

You are in the right ballpark when you are correct about 85% of the time. Less than that, and you are likely making the task too difficult, thus making learning less efficient (and more frustrating).For skills with lumpier difficulty gradients, fine-tune the difficulty.

Use the 85% Rule for Sliding Difficulty

<ul><li>Direct feedback is related to the result you are trying to achieve-say sales for a product launch, bug-free code, or hitting a home run.</li><li>Indirect feedback comes from other people and is a commentary on your performance, but is more accurate.</li></ul>Seek out both types of feedback.

Improve Your Feedback

<ul><li>If you want to improve your practice efforts, get really clear on what you're trying to get good at.</li><li>Academic skills often have well-defined standards for achievement. Real-life skills are often murkier</li><li>The more ambiguous the skill, the more critical it is to move back and forth between deliberate practice and doing the real thing.</li></ul>

Match Your Practice to Real Life

Getting good at anything requires a lot of practice–but not all practice is equal.

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Personal Development

education

Learning & Education

problemsolving

Problem Solving

Practice Made Perfect: The 10 Keys to Optimize Improvement - Scott H Young

Many financial institutions have recently undergone major risk transformations that drove universal risk capability uplift and cultural shift. Uplifting risk management capability for financial institutions can be particularly challenging if the required transformation requires coordination across business areas and functions. For two decades, there has been an intense focus on nonfinancial risks (NFRs). While regional or global “super incidents” originally drove the emergence of NFRs as a theme, the evolution of NFR management is ongoing, with variations in form, region and severity.

Risk Transformation: The Premise

The implications of a super incident can be significant and include direct financial losses, fines, compensation or remediation costs, and reputational damage. Secondary effects could include reduced sales or accelerated disintermediation by other market participants (such as fintechs) due to lost trust.

A Super Incident

This environment drove financial institutions to initiate major risk transformation programs to address incidents, immediate issues, and deeper root causes. These programs have significant monetary costs. However, the opportunity cost for the organization is much higher, given the amount of management attention and organizational capacity required for successful delivery and sustainable conclusion.

The Costs Involved

The biggest challenge in starting a risk transformation is often not the “why” or the “what,” but the “how.” Questions include how to set it up and conclude it, and then transition back to enhanced business as usual. Large-scale risk transformations often fail because change is not effectively implemented across the organization: milestones are ticked off without actually improving risk management, addressing underlying culture, or reducing risk.

The Question Is How

These transformations are typically business-led, driven by embedded line-one risk and control teams. Such transformations often include process, system, and control mapping; process simplification, digitization, and automation; documenting, decommissioning, and building ideally automated, preventative controls and monitoring in critical process breakpoints; and clarifying responsibilities.

The Four Broad Categories of Risk Transformations: Business Area 

These transformations are typically business-led, driven by embedded line-one risk and control teams. Such transformations often include process, system, and control mapping; process simplification, digitization, and automation; documenting, decommissioning, and building ideally automated, preventative controls and monitoring in critical process break points; and clarifying responsibilities.

Risk-Type-Specific Capability Uplift And/or Remediation 

These transformations are typically driven by the respective risk experts (such as a money laundering reporting officer for financial crime and chief information security officer for cyber crime) and supported by the risk function. Such transformations often include risk-type framework and operating-model uplift, paired with targeted remediation of severe issues for a specific risk type. They are often triggered by severe incidents, issues, and regulatory scrutiny.

These transformations are typically driven by the risk function. Such transformations often include defining the ambition and value proposition of the risk function; improving the structure of the function (including divisions, risk-type expertise regions, and shared services); simplifying and clarifying the interactions with the business and other functional areas; and identifying and hiring capabilities to deliver.

Risk Function Operating-Model Uplift

These transformations are typically board or CEO-sponsored programs involving all businesses and functions and considering all (nonfinancial) risks. Such transformations often include<ul><li> uplifting the risk management framework and policy governance;</li><li> establishing, improving or operationalizing the risk taxonomy;</li><li> improving the risk appetite statement, in particular, for NFR metrics cascaded into business and operationalization;</li><li> uplifting and implementing a code of conduct and consistently operationalizing the three lines of defense model.</li></ul>

Holistic Enterprise-Wide Risk Transformation

Risk transformations often take two to three years of dedicated effort, with enterprise-wide transformations typically taking three to five years. While transformation setups differ, most have a central program team of five to ten full-time equivalents (FTEs) for smaller transformations, with holistic risk transformations running central teams of 15 to 50 FTEs that focus on coordination, tracking, quality assurance, sharing of best practices, and support for the most challenging problems, including the coordinated delivery of change across business areas and functions.

The Time Factor

After supporting numerous businesses through transformations, we have found that while the science of transformations is crucial to get right, it is the heart and the art that deliver transformation programs to their successful conclusion and sustainably embed the change across the organization.With science and art, the key conditions are in place for a successful risk program. But the heart is a prerequisite for deep cultural change, which is required for a sustainable enterprise-wide transformation.

What Makes A Successful Risk Program

<ul><li>Science speaks to the mechanics that need to be in place around program structure, integrated plan development, delivery mechanisms, and regulator engagement throughout the process.</li><li>Art refers to capabilities, accountability, prioritization, and the use of targeted interventions to keep the program on track.</li><li>Heart includes genuine shared motivation or purpose, a transformation mindset, a willingness to challenge cultural norms, and a program of communication that connects with the professional identity of employees. </li></ul>

The Science, The Heart, The Art

“Because the regulator wants it” is not an intrinsic motivation—one needs to dig deeper and consider the motivations of employees. Successful transformation in any circumstance will require as much of a change in mindset as in any system or process. An in-depth diagnostic of the psychology of the organization can help define a vision of change that connects to the collective motivation and purpose of the organization and ensures that the desired change will stick in the long term. “Serving our customers better” is an example of collective motivation.

Getting to The ‘Heart’: Motivation

The mindset of the transformation needs to balance delivery discipline and accountability; agility and pragmatism; continuous improvement; and a sense of chronic unease. This mindset will enable organizations to do what they say while still being able to course-correct and improve when new information becomes available and to quickly spot and address emerging challenges. If a risk transformation is initiated in response to a major incident, an honest appraisal of what drove the failures and adequate humbleness when considering the magnitude of the required cultural change is key.

Transformation Mindset

Organizations have a variety of cultural traits that help them thrive in transformation but also some that hold them back. Traits that often lead to unsuccessful or stalled transformations include being too siloed or too collaborative. This can lead to change being implemented inconsistently or stopped by a few business areas, or over-collaboration that results in a lack of productivity and missed deadlines.

Culture

Motivation must reach the hearts and minds of employees. An intensive and continuous dialogue with a broad set of stakeholders allows a transformation program to keep its finger on the pulse while also enabling staff to own challenges and drive solutions. Communication needs to build on the organization and its leadership’s personal motivation—this is what makes it genuine and effective.

Communication

<ul><li>The skills required to transform are often not those required to manage. </li><li>A risk transformation program team must have capabilities across project execution, strategy, and risk management. </li><li>The team should adopt both an inward- and outward-looking mindset that leverages the experiences of others. </li><li>Key roles in the business and the risk function may require new talent to bring fresh impetus to transform or deviate from ingrained practices (that is, breaking the mould). </li><li>Targeted external support for the expertise and ongoing challenges and advice is reasonable.</li></ul>

Appreciating the ‘Art’: Capability

Large-scale risk transformations require collective accountability: the whole executive team must stack hands to deliver the target outcome. The complexity and duration of these programs make them hard to execute; they are often costly and feel more like a burden than an opportunity. Balancing the accountabilities of individuals versus the whole organization, and linking program outcomes to remuneration, are both critical. Strong top-down authority from the board and CEO is essential in supporting prioritization, providing advice, and clearing roadblocks.

Accountability

One of the biggest challenges is managing competing priorities and ensuring that the organization can absorb the amount of change required. This requires clear articulation of short- and long-term milestones to prioritize and sequence change at regular intervals. A radical simplification lens, which addresses gold plating by particular framework teams and over-implementation by the businesses, can reduce the need to deprioritize and descope.

Prioritization

Means to anticipate hurdles and support course correction must be created: formal mechanisms to identify expected challenges in the form of regular premortem exercises and formal program reviews are essential. The central decision-making body needs the authority to rapidly course correct through reprioritizing or redeploying resources. This is also critical to address change fatigue, which will naturally occur over the course of a three-year program.

Intervention Mechanisms

Banks often consider risk transformation as the accountability of the risk function. However, this setup may just scratch the surface and fail to address root causes and systemic issues. Effective large-scale risk transformation requires particular accountability for the program to be assigned across functional leadership and business areas, where many of the inadequacies in systems, processes, and behaviours originate. Coordination between these stakeholders is essential and often driven by a neutral, central program team that sits outside of lines one and two.

Excelling At The ‘Science’: Program Structure

Implementation of complex change across the business (line one) is often where risk transformations fail. The best-designed set of change initiatives can fail without an effective delivery mechanism that supports implementation and sustainable embedment of change. Developing a mechanism to ensure appropriate engagement between lines two and one in the design of change initiatives—and a well-coordinated and considered delivery mechanism for supporting line one implementation—is critical. vv

Delivery Mechanism

Transparency and continuous dialogue with regulators are important. Proactive, professional, and respectful engagement can enable greater understanding and appreciation for regulators with respect to the challenges faced in large-scale risk transformations and can encourage offers for guidance and positive reinforcement. Regulators might share their own expectations and observations from other institutions and provide insight into their own priorities.

Regulatory Engagement

As the above three elements (heart, art, and science) demonstrate, successfully concluding a risk transformation seldom ends with just milestones in a work plan, ending a monitorship, or meeting regulatory commitments. These are important, but genuinely transformative success lies in the smooth shift from programmatic setup to sustainably uplifted business-as-usual operations with embedded mechanisms for further improvement.

The Bottom Line

business

Business

Risk transformations: The heart, the art, and the science

What defines an organization is that it says "no" more than "yes." That's because creativity is a double-edged sword. While new ideas get the juices flowing and get people excited, they also come with a real cost.
What's far more complex, is finding the capacity inside the organization to chase down that new idea. When an organization decides to pursue a new idea, it's forced to make a difficult decision. How should they go about tackling the unique opportunity? The answer is "Kill 2 and Add 1."

Kill 2 and Add 1

Few, if any, organizations have extra staff sitting on the bench, waiting idly for the next new opportunity to come along. To properly chase down that new opportunity, the organization must divert people and resources from somewhere else. And that's when the trouble starts.To make the new idea come to fruition, management might ask the team to work extra hours or find ways to become more efficient to get the work done.

The Need for Focus

The real danger here is that the more ideas you have your team chasing, not only will they risk burnout, but you will also lose focus. While it might seem like a lot of activity is happening, nothing is getting done. Every organization needs three areas of focus. Otherwise, management has committed the cardinal sin of diluting its resources.

The Real Danger

Many organizations turn to one common strategy to substitute one initiative for another. If the priority is to chase the new idea, for example, management specifies another area that should be killed off: add 1; kill 1.While this approach might make sense, it doesn't do enough to move the needle. Often it involves adding a significant new initiative and then killing off something small and inconsequential. You've still left your team under-resourced and over-burdened. They still have too many priorities to focus on.

Identifying Priorities

the most focused and effective organizations rely on what we might call the "Kill 2; Add 1" approach. In other words, if you want the team to chase down a new opportunity, then they also need to stop doing two other initiatives.While that might seem draconian, it's the overlooked secret to helping teams keep focused and effective in ways where they can execute--fast.

Doing More with Less

The discipline of removing two ideas for each one you add will provide an increasing focus for your team. Focus means the projects really matter and they will tend to get done faster, and the company gets the benefit earlier. So, the next time someone on your team comes to you with a new idea to chase, smile. And then ask the question: "OK, but what two things are we going to kill first before we start this?"The answers you get in response will go a long way to helping your team become a lean and focused execution machine.

Sustainable Innovation

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Productivity

Discover the world of business and economics.

economics

Economics

strategy

Strategy

A Simple Strategy for Keeping Your Team Focused

Being Greek meant two things: playing sports and going to the Olympic games, which was a fundamental mark of their culture.
Reaching Olympia was a humongous task as it involved a long journey covering the hostile territory. An Olympic truce in which people from enemy countries were allowed to pass through was effective though still filled with looming danger.

The Privilege Of Being An Ancient Olympic Spectator

The Ancient Olympic games were a treat for Greek spectators with 24 hour barbeques and famous historians like Herodotus reciting their new historical work.The many thousand spectators were mostly male, relishing the various elements of the games, like the sacrifice of a 100 cows to Zeus, covering their appetite for meat.

The Five Days Of Olympic Games

The first ancient Olympic Games can be traced back to Olympia in 776 BC. Full passion and extraordinary feats of athletic endeavour, the Olympic Games were the sporting, social and cultural highlight of the Ancient Greek calendar for almost 12 centuries.

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History

sports

Sports

artsandculture

Society, Arts & Culture

Welcome to the Ancient Olympic Games

Theagenes of Thasos was one of the most praised athletes in antiquity. He won the 76th Olympiad in 476BC. Born to a priest of the temple of Herakles, this giant of a man competed in ancient Games across the Mediterranean and won over 1,400 times. The people of Thasos believed Theagenes was the offspring of the god himself and erected a statue in his honour.

Pankration -a combination of wrestling and boxing

Milon of Croton was a six-time Olympic champion. He was a huge, greedy person. As part of a sacrifice during each Game, Milon carried a cow on his back into the sanctuary, killed it and ate the whole cow in one day. He reportedly once downed nine litres of red wine in one go. His life ended unexpectedly. While trying to split open a withered tree stump in the wild with his bare hands, he got tangled in the tree and was eaten by wolves.

Wrestling

Diagoras of Rhodes was the winner in the 79th Olympiad in 464BC. He was 2.2m tall and thought to be the son of a god. He never swayed out of the way of his opponent's punches. Diagoras died on the same day that his sons won their own Olympic titles. First, his one son claimed the boxing title and then the other the pankration crown. When the crowd lifted the old champion on their shoulders, one in the group shouted, "It doesn't get better than this. You may as well die now." Which he did.

Boxing

In four consecutive Games (164BC - 152BC), Leonidas of Rhodes won both sprints, the stadion and the diaulos, and the race in armour. He was said to have "the speed of a god" and was deified in his own lifetime. No one ever matched his accomplishments.

Running

Phayllos of Croton, athlete and military hero, won three victories at the Pythian Games, although it is unclear what he won at Olympia. He reportedly jumped over the entire 15.2m sandpit at the long jump competition, registering 16.2m. It is physically impossible to jump that far (the men's long jump world record is 8.95m), but since the exact distance was recorded in Antiquity, some think ancient athletes competed in the triple jump. However, scholars believe the distance was exaggerated.

Pentathlon

Kyniska of Sparta won the four-horse race in 396BC and 392BC. From an early age, the daughter of the king of Sparta wanted to partake in the Games. Despite women not being allowed to compete, custom permitted the owner of a chariot to do so, allowing Kyniska to set the way for female owners. She won 12 Olympic wreaths by the end of the Games.

Chariot racing

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Entertainment

The all-time greats of the Ancient Olympic Games

<ul>
<li>The Olympic torch is lit in the birthplace of the Olympics: Olympia, Greece.</li>
<li>It travels the globe through thousands of hands to finally reach the stadium.</li>
<li>The Olympic Games came into being in 776 BCE when the Greeks started recreational activities to take a break from war.</li>
<li>Spectators could travel safely during the games as there was a sacred truce of ‘no-war&#39; while the mega-event was going on.</li>
</ul>

The Olympic Torch

Olympia, the birthplace of the Olympic Games, has an altar and temple of the Goddess of Birth And Marriage: Hera Delos.The Olympic Torch was lit using a hollow mirror, known as the Skaphia. The flame is kept burning throughout the games to signify peace and purity.

The Goddess Of Birth And Marriage

<ul><li>The games took a 1500 year hiatus, resulting in the halting of the lighting and relay of the Torch.&nbsp;</li><li>The games restarted in 1896, and the tradition of the flame was restored in 1928.&nbsp;</li><li>The torch relay was also resumed in 1936 under Hitler.</li></ul>

No Games For 1500 Years

For a few years, the Olympic Torch flame was lit in Norway instead of the original place, Olympia. Later, a rule was formed that an Olympic flame is only when it is kindled in Olympia, under the watch of the International Olympic Committee.

The Source Of The Fire

Olympic torches represent the host country and are designed from scratch every four years. It is tested under harsh conditions, and the approved one then has thousands of replicas that are paraded across the world.Various fuels have been burned up in the Olympic torches, like gunpowder, olive oil and various metals. Modern Olympics use a mixture of propane and butane.

The Torch Design And Fuel

The Olympic torch travels by train, boats, cars, carts and even aeroplanes. It has gone in space three times and even underwater.Special protocols are used to ensure safety during transporting the flame by air, by preserving it in a ‘miner’s lamp’ and policing it by trained firefighters throughout the journey.

The Journey Of The Torch

History of Olympic Torch- Origin, Lighting and Relaying. From traveling underwater to being transported by an airplane, Olympic torch has a history of making histories..

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Leadership & Management

History of Olympic Torch- Origin, Lighting and Relaying

Based on records of stade-length races, the ancient Olympic games started in 776 B.C.E. But that era is not well-documented, so the actual date of the first Olympic Game is still contested.
The ancient Greeks told conflicting stories of the origins of the ancient Olympics. The stories were interlaced with mythology and history.

The date of the first Olympics contested

One Olympic origins story involved one of the members of the House of Atreus. Pelops was desperate to win in a chariot race against King Oinomaos of Pisa because he wanted to marry the king's daughter, Hippodamia. So Pelops replaced the king's chariot's lynch-pins with ones made of wax, and during the race, the pins melted, throwing the king from his chariot and killing him. Pelops then married Hippodamia and commemorated his victory by holding the first Olympic Games.

The House of Atreus Theory

Another theory attributes the Olympic games to the Greek hero Hercules. Hercules held the games to honour his father, Zeus after Hercules took revenge on King Augeas of Elis for not keeping to his promise.

The Herculus Theory

Pausanias says the Olympic origins stem from Zeus' victory over Cronus. A common thread in the origin stories of the Olympic games is that the games came about because of a personal or competitive victory that was supposed to honour the gods.

The Cronus Theory

The Ancient Greeks held the Olympics every four years, known as an Olympiad. The Olympics were a religious event for the Greeks. A temple dedicated to Zeus stood on the site of Olympia. Representatives of each city-state could attend the ancient Olympics. Cities considered Olympic victors as heroes. Poets attended the games and wrote victory odes for the winners.

Frequency of the Games

All free Greek men could be potential participants in the Olympics. By the Hellenistic Period, professional athletes competed. Olympic sporting events included boxing, discus, equestrian events, javelin, jumping, pankration, pentathlon, running, and wrestling. Olympic winners were crowned with an olive wreath and had their names inscribed in the official Olympic records.

The participants in the Olympics

Historians disagree on the possible origins of the Ancient Greek Olympics, but here are a few of the most compelling arguments.

The History of the Olympics

In the 8th century B.C., the first Olympic Games took place in Olympia, Greece. They were held every four years for 12 centuries and lasted five or six months. The athletes competed naked.
But in the 4th century A.D, Emperor Theodosius I banned all pagan festivals, and the Olympics came to an end.

Ancient Olympic Games

<ul><li>The first modern Olympics were held in 1896 in Greece. The official languages of the games are English and French, complemented by the host country's official language.</li><li>In 1900, women were allowed to compete in the Olympics. The 2012 London Games were the first Olympics in which all participating countries sent female athletes.</li><li>From 1924 - 1992, the Winter and Summer Olympics took place in the same year. Now they alternate every two years.</li></ul>

Olympic Games resurrected

Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the co-founder of the modern Olympic Games, designed the Olympic symbol. The five rings represent the five inhabited continents of the world.
The six colours - blue, yellow, black, green, red, and white background - were chosen because each country's national flag contains at least one of them.

The Olympic symbol

The Olympic torch is lit in the way of the ancient ceremony and the temple of Hera, Greece. Actresses wear costumes of Greek priestesses and use a parabolic mirror and sun rays to light the torch. Then the torch is usually carried by runners to the host city.
The relay torch and the Olympic flame are supposed to burn during the entire event.

The Olympic torch

Johnny Weissmuller, an athlete and actor who played Tarzan in 12 movies, won five gold medals in swimming in the 1920s. From 1912 - 1948, painters, sculptors, architects, writers, and musicians also participated in the Olympics in their respective fields.

Tarzan competed in the Olympics

Even if you don’t care much about sports, these 24 facts about the Olympics will blow your mind. Or at least keep you occupied until the pizza guy arrives.

Facts about the Olympics that will blow your mind

The Agile prioritization techniques help us break tasks into tiny subtasks and then rank them from top priority to least priority.
<ul>
<li>It is hard to prioritize a long list of tasks, all of which seem important.</li>
<li>Completing a task, no matter how insignificant, releases dopamine inside our brains, giving it a feel-good reward.</li>
<li>The Agile method makes large tasks easier to do and makes us more productive.</li>
</ul>

The Agile Method To Organize Your Life

For any task to be completed, there are three basic elements: time, scope and budget.
<ul>
<li>We generally expect that the task will be completed on time, with the required scope and within the budget.</li>
<li>However, if the timeframe and the budget is fixed, a task might have to be flexible in terms of scope.</li>
</ul>
Example:If while creating an app, the product owner has 100 requirements to be fulfilled, the development team can only complete a few of them if time and budget constraints are there.

The Three Elements Of Agile

Whether one is planning their wedding or building an online portal, there is a multitude of tasks that have to be completed on time and within the budget that has been set. 
The Agile method proposes a ranked list of priorities to accomplish the same.
Example: If there are 10 tasks in the list, one can rank each one with a number from one to ten. Only one number is allotted to a task so that two tasks cannot have the same level of priority.

Basic Agile Prioritization Technique

There are many tasks in which we might be inclined to assign the same level of priority as there is no way one task is less important than the other.
In this case, we need to assign a criticality level to the task, assigning one of the four levels:
<ol>
<li>Critical</li>
<li>High</li>
<li>Medium</li>
<li>Low</li>
</ol>
The ones with a high priority ranking and a high criticality level are to be done first and foremost, followed by lower levels and priorities. It is best to work with prioritization and criticality together.

The Second Layer Of Priority: Criticality Level

The core technique of achieving progress is to break down tasks into small, doable tasks.
<ul>
<li>One large task can appear daunting and undoable, but breaking it down to small subtasks can help us assign different levels of priority and criticality to the subset.</li>
<li>It helps to use an app that lets us set color codes and reminders to our to-do list.</li>
<li>The Agile Prioritization technique is helpful in professional and personal projects, like planning a training session, or remodeling your house.</li>
</ul>

Breaking Down The Tasks

timemanagement

Time Management

Organize Your Life with the Agile Method

Clear thinking is essential for every aspect of life, yet many of us have not really learnt how to think and make safe judgments under pressure.
When you learn to think like a detective, you can gain an advantage in the following areas:
<ul>
<li>It can help you think sharper and more creative.</li>
<li>It can make you a better listener that is less judgmental.</li>
<li>It can help you solve everyday problems.</li>
</ul>

Benefits of thinking like a detective

We tend to solve problems in superficial ways. When we make everyday decisions, our mind often only weighs the immediate information so that it can build a coherent story, even if the story is incomplete or unreliable.
<ul>
<li>WYSIATI, or "What you see is all there is" refers to the fact that we usually make our judgments according to the information we have available, even if the information is incomplete.</li>
<li>Confirmations bias compounds WYSIATI. We tend to find more evidence to support our current belief.</li>
</ul>

Common biases when solving problems

Expert detectives have two main qualities:
<ul>
<li>Detached involvement</li>
<li>The ability to keep on asking questions</li>
</ul>
Good investigators don't make quick judgements. They know that their mind will try to convince them that their first impression is right. Instead, they force themselves to walk away from a problem they want to solve. This can help when making important life decisions where it would be dangerous to jump to conclusions, such as buying a new home, hiring a new employee or planning a career move.

How to make a good decision

<ul>
<li>Assume nothing</li>
<li>Believe nothing</li>
<li>Challenge and check everything</li>
</ul>
It is hard to resist our automatic assumptions and our need for closure. Therefore, always ask yourself what you do know and what you don't know. Remind yourself that correlation does not imply causation. To help find the truth, try to disprove your conclusions.

Embrace the investigative mindset

The favoured approach is not deductive logic, which is reasoning based on known facts, but abductive logic, which identifies the best possible explanation in the absence of complete knowledge. Doctors make use of abductive reasoning. They are given a set of symptoms and diagnose on what would best explain most of the symptoms.
Always create a short outline of all the possible alternative explanations you can think of. Then plan how you will test your different reasons.

Identify all the possible explanations

Use a systematic approach to eliminate as many explanations as possible through falsification.
<ul>
<li>Collect the available information.</li>
<li>Check the facts for accuracy and relevancy.</li>
<li>Connect the dots. Do different sources say the same?</li>
<li>Construct all possible solutions.</li>
<li>Consider what information you need the most to test your remaining hypothesis.</li>
<li>Consult with somebody you trust to help narrow the scope of your investigation.</li>
</ul>

Test the alternative explanations to narrow your investigation

When constructing alternative options, you may find that you will gather more possibilities than you perhaps thought of in the beginning. To assist our minds, we need practical methods and information-handling tools to keep track. This will reduce the risk to jump to conclusions.
A mindmap or matrix can help to create transparency and allow for a second opinion of your ideas. With every bit of new information, mark on your matrix what the implications are for each hypothesis.

Use a mind map to keep track of the possibilities

We will always forget something or not have all the facts. That's why an open-minded and critical friend can be indispensable.
Evidence and new perspectives can be found where you least expect them. It is essential to hold back your own opinion, ask open-ended questions, and use silence and active listening techniques.

Recruit a critical friend

Whether you have to work out why a product launch failed, why your kid is struggling at school or why your smartphone has stopped working, it is essential to think more systematically.
But you won't always know everything and perhaps won't ever know. If you learn how to write down your understanding systematically, you'll increase the chance of finding a simple solution and avoid blunders. Practice can help to sharpen your inner detective and improve decision-making.

Thinking like a detective takes practice

The best detectives seem to have almost supernatural insight, but their cognitive toolkit is one that anybody can use

Practice Made Perfect: The 10 Keys to Optimize Improvement - Scott H Young

Risk transformations: The heart, the art, and the science

A Simple Strategy for Keeping Your Team Focused

Welcome to the Ancient Olympic Games

The all-time greats of the Ancient Olympic Games

Avery B.