Friday, October 24, 2008

Pentasolve: a problem solving approach.

I'm adopting a new technique today, Pentasolve: a problem solving approach.

Principally this means when faced with a [technical] questions I will attempt to generate five candidate answers.

I will then select the best answer. I'm doing this for a number of reasons:
  • Creativity: It will force me to consider more left-field solutions.
  • Peer pressure: It will allow any "obvious" solutions to have peers that it can be evaluated against.
  • Maturation: This process will give ideas more time to evolve before I fix on one.

Why five? no scientific answer to this - three seems too small (I can always think of three, five forces me to think). More than five seems to be overkill.

I'm about to attempt a relatively complex product development, so I will see if this technique helps or not.

PentasolveTM - solving your problems 5 steps at a time ;-)

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Have you registered that with the patent and trademark office in your country? There's a fee to own intellectual property you know ;) btw your captcha is 'ugeli' (hope its not using my built in camera to pick that word).