“If you don’t believe in a simple solution, you are very unlikely to find it, whether it is there or not.” — Nat Greene Solution Copy Share Image
“Noticing and eliminating distractions will enable you to stay on target when you’re facing down your next complex problem.” — Nat Greene Distractions Copy Share Image
“most people believe they’re making fact-based decisions, when they are, in fact, making opinion-based ones.” — Nat Greene Decision making Copy Share Image
“Whether you believe you can do a thing or not, you are right. —HENRY FORD, AMERICAN INDUSTRIALIST” — Nat Greene Believe Copy Share Image
“Don’t ask SMEs to make business decisions for you without stepping back and considering a possible conflict of interest.” — Nat Greene Business Copy Share Image
“People are socialized not to “challenge” what respected people believe.” — Nat Greene Respect Copy Share Image
“I never guess. It is a shocking habit—destructive to the logical faculty.1 —SHERLOCK HOLMES, IN SIGN OF THE FOUR” — Nat Greene Sherlock Copy Share Image
“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. —LEONARDO DA VINCI, 15TH-CENTURY PAINTER AND INVENTOR” — Nat Greene Leonardo Copy Share Image
“The “curse of knowledge” is a cognitive bias that leads people highly informed about a topic to be unable to think about… — Nat Greene Bias Copy Share Image
“For problems of any significant difficulty, you need to start with your hands in your pockets, and your senses open. You need… — Nat Greene Adversity Copy Share Image
“By eliminating the variables closest to the primary variable, we immediately eliminate many potential root causes, and we can avoid collecting data… — Nat Greene Copy Share Image
“It is possible, with lots of hard work, dedication, and timely help, to make a good writer out of a merely competent… — Nat Greene Competent Copy Share Image
“Perhaps many aid organizations make assumptions about the problem they are solving, and throw hundreds of billions of dollars at the problem… — Nat Greene Billions Dollars Copy Share Image
“Choose wisely, for the true grail will bring you life; the false grail will take it from you.1 —THE GRAIL KNIGHT, IN… — Nat Greene Choose wisely Copy Share Image
“Don’t “solve” your problem at a high level where you throw lots of money at it to make it go away: Stay… — Nat Greene Cause Copy Share Image
“Truly great problem-solvers powerfully communicate the value of the problem-solving process and difficulty of the problem once the solution is found.” — Nat Greene Communication Copy Share Image
“So often, I see people bury themselves in mounds of data coming off their computers, hoping that some stream or other will… — Nat Greene Analysis Copy Share Image
“Embrace your ignorance. Most people try to solve problems using the knowledge they already have about a process, but it’s what you… — Nat Greene Ask questions Copy Share Image
“most methods disguise the guessing stage in some fancy language, such as “determine possible root causes.” This is making a list of… — Nat Greene Guessing Copy Share Image
“Successfully solving hard problems requires knowing what problem you’re solving. You should put great care into defining the problem in an accurate… — Nat Greene Problem solving Copy Share Image
“A great problem-solver won’t attempt to learn everything: To do so will waste tremendous time without making progress. Spending a few weeks… — Nat Greene Education Copy Share Image
“every unsolved problem is bottlenecked by not understanding the root cause at a fundamental level, and every single one needs some great… — Nat Greene Problem solvers Copy Share Image
“Clear your mind of prejudices and assumptions, and look to define the problem as something you can objectively measure to determine whether… — Nat Greene Clear your mind Copy Share Image
“In my own experience I have found that most problem-solving methods promote guessing at some point in the process, but that it… — Nat Greene Guessing Copy Share Image
“our job is to efficiently find the root cause. So instead of expanding each variable, we want to see if we can… — Nat Greene Cause Copy Share Image
“If you get from someone a list of 10 “potential” root causes, they don’t know what’s happening. If you’ve come up with… — Nat Greene Causes Copy Share Image
“To dig into the fundamentals, you’ll need to learn both the particulars of that system, and some of the science behind it.… — Nat Greene Fundamentals Copy Share Image
“When you’ve received your bachelor’s degree, you think you know everything. Once you get your master’s, you realize you don’t know anything.… — Nat Greene Degree Copy Share Image
“problem-solving that relies on pattern-finding is of no use at all. If we look at the Challenger space shuttle catastrophe, there weren’t… — Nat Greene Patterns Copy Share Image
“Truly solving the problem involves understanding what’s wrong and why it happened, through investigation and understanding—not by spending days or weeks testing… — Nat Greene Learning Copy Share Image
“When you don’t believe in a simple solution to a hard problem, you instead believe in a complex solution. These complex solutions… — Nat Greene Complex Solution Copy Share Image
“Great problem solvers develop the questions that they want to answer before they go about collecting information and data, rather than depending… — Nat Greene Answer Copy Share Image
“ask thought-provoking questions that guide you to collect information and look for very specific patterns, rather than shotgunning and looking at everything… — Nat Greene Questions Guide Copy Share Image
“learning how things work at a basic level so you can build up the understanding you need to truly solve the problem.… — Nat Greene Education Copy Share Image
