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The Nature of Problems - Part 9

Another example: there is basically no difference in the prob­lem of a small town trying to attract customers from surrounding areas to its retail shopping center; the problem of getting more visitors to visit a company's booth at an industrial exhibition; the problem of boosting attendance at the games of the local baseball team; or the problem of filling a department store with customers the first day of a sale. All are really the problem of attracting people to a given location.

Being able to see such similarities lets us get to the "heart" of any problem much faster and helps us find the basic, underlying causes of troubles that may indicate the direction our search for solutions should take. For instance, when the United States was engaged in the 1958-1959 race to catch up with Russia on missiles and rockets, many theories were put forth to explain our lag. Everything from education to the congressional appropriations for basic research were being blamed. But when the famous Ger­man rocket specialist, Dr. Hermann Oberth, who had worked on the American rocket program, returned to Germany where he could take a closer look at what the Russians were actually doing, he was able to cut through the fog and point his finger at the American design problems. "The Russian rockets," he said, "re­mind me of simple alarm clocks—you can throw them at the wall and they'll keep on ticking. Compared with the Russian space vehicles, American rockets are ladies' wrist watches that look nice but tend to stop frequently."

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