Problem Solving – Causal versus Effectual Reasoning

The topic is “Problem Solving”. There are many ways that a problem could be approached.

This article splits approaches into two schools of thought:

Causal Reasoning

  1. Start with an idea.
  2. Work towards further defining it and expressing as a goal.
  3. Create the knowledge, assets and resources to achieve the goal.

Determine the ends before the means. (Quadrant 4 thinking)

Effectual Reasoning

An alternative lean agile approach is to look at the means before determining the ends.

  • Who you are.
  • What resources you can marshal.
  • Who you know and what you know.

These things are used as the basis before determining the goals. (Quadrant 2 or 3 thinking)

 

Link to full article on http://www.business2community.com

The Bureaucracy Measurement Index

An article by PWC that I found interesting

“by Eduardo Alvarez, Georges Chehade, Olaf Schirmer, Manish Mahajan
Published: June 29, 2016
Executive summary

Most large organizations struggle with bureaucracy, which can slow a company’s ability to respond to market changes and distract the company from building the differentiating capabilities it needs to grow. There is a clear need for a simpler and more aggressive approach to bureaucracy.

To address this problem, we have developed the Bureaucracy Measurement Index (BMI), a quantitative means to assess the level of bureaucracy within a company, compare it to benchmarks for that industry, and highlight problem areas.

The BMI breaks down all work that a company does into a hierarchy of processes and assigns a score to each. The score incorporates three elements:

Performance, defined as the efficiency and effectiveness by which the company can execute the process
Impact, defined as the relative weight of that process on the company’s overall mandate
Risk, defined as the probability of a negative event occurring due to process-related decisions”

link to the full article