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The Nature of Problems - Part 11

It is possible, as one example, that the three men we considered earlier, who were trying to fit given units into given space, may have actually done that same job dozens of times in their lives— in packing luggage for a trip, fitting the family's luggage into the car trunk, or even fitting their home furnishings into a new house. Persons trying to solve the problems of attracting other people to a given location could draw on experience they had in high school trying to make the annual "Harvest Moon Dance" a finan­cial success; or the experience they have regularly on a church program committee in attracting members of the congregation to the various socials, dinners, and so forth. When you can get basic enough in your approaches to cut through the blocks that words, terms, and surface appearances set up, you will find that you have practically an inexhaustible storehouse of previous ex­periences in your mind which can greatly speed up your mental process of getting started on any problem.

And many times the best place to start on a problem is the most obvious, direct way of tackling it. Not only do we human beings make our own problems, we also have the faculty for overcom­plicating them:

One of the greatest naval battles in history was the battle for Leyte Gulf between the United States and the Japanese in World War II. It turned out to be the victory that changed the course of the naval war in the Pacific. Between October, 1944, and Decem­ber, 1958, more than two hundred books, including the official History of United States Naval Operations, were written refer­ring to this particular battle. Each of these books left many unanswered questions and made many assumptions as to what had happened to enable the American force to defeat the powerful Japanese force so decisively.

Finally, after fourteen years, a sixteen-year-old California high school boy decided to try the direct approach. He wrote letters to several of the Japanese admirals and simply asked them. One of the replies, from Vice Admiral Kiyohide Shima, has become a prize document of naval history. He admitted several mistakes in judgment and explained several previously unknown circum­stances about which the older, wiser, and more experienced naval historians had been making guesses and assumptions simply be­cause it never occurred to them that they could get the truth by such a simple expedient as writing a letter asking for it!

Related terms include business tools and business colleges.