Step 2 • Get the Facts - Part 1

Articles In This Section:

· Steps in Deliberate Problem Solving - Part 1

· Steps in Deliberate Problem Solving - Part 2

· Step 1 • Orienting the Problem - Part 1

· Step 1 • Orienting the Problem - Part 2

· Step 2 • Get the Facts - Part 1

· Step 2 • Get the Facts - Part 2

· Step 3 • Get Ideas

· Step 4 • Incubate!

· Step 5 • Evaluate Your Ideas - Part 1

· Step 5 • Evaluate Your Ideas - Part 2

· Step 5 • Evaluate Your Ideas - Part 3

There is a saying that "The devil you know is a lot friendlier than the devil you don't." This is especially true in problem solving. If you can gather enough facts about a problem, the facts themselves may point out what the solution to the problem will be or must be.

The human thought processes are complex. But there is one basic that cannot be ignored: they are all dependent upon a body of reliable information. The mind—even the speculative, leaping, projective creative mind—must have facts to feed upon. In the absence of some facts, you can use hypothesis. But until you can prove out the hypothesis, you must remember that it is just theory—it is not fact, and you must be prepared to relinquish your theory, no matter how beautiful, when fact comes along that is contrary.

Furthermore, any individual's thinking, on any subject, will necessarily be limited by the boundaries of his information on that subject. Thus, Leonardo da Vinci, certainly one of the great creative minds of all time, could not have built a television set. He may have thought of the idea of transmitting pictures through the air, but without the preliminary factual background of electricity, ether-wave transmission, and electronics, even this brilliant mind could not have invented television.

In gathering your facts about a particular problem, you want to look for information that can make up a part or parcel of the problem solution. You want to study the conditions of the needed solutions, and the relationships of the facts to those conditions. You want to learn to recognize truth in facts. And all "facts" that you meet up with are not true. Charles Kettering, shortly before he died, made the statement that "Forty years ago everything about fuel engines was in a row of books 18 inches long. Today not one word of that is true, because it was not true then."

There was a time when scientists believed that when the water vapor in a cloud was cooled to 32°F, the vapor would freeze, as any water would, and there would be snowflakes. But when they tried to duplicate this in the laboratory, the reality did not always work out that way. Sometimes the temperature would get down as much as 60° colder than the "freezing" temperature, and still the stubborn vapor would refuse to turn to snow. Then someone found that just a handful of dry ice would turn a whole skyful of cloud into a raging snowstorm!

The humorist Mark Twain pointed out that even the seeming bulwark of truth, the statistic, can be faulty. His example: "In 176 years, the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself 242 miles. This is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year. Therefore, anyone can see that 742 years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will have joined streets together."