The cars were honking on the road that morning as I made my way to the park, drivers in trucks had their heads out yelling, and motorcyclists had worried expressions behind their visors as they looked ahead to see only a jam.

I walked on ahead and soon found the culprit; a little auto-rickshaw that had gotten stuck in the middle of the road. There were beads of perspiration on the driver’s face as he pulled the starter handle up, again and again and again; nothing happened.

“No petrol,” I thought to myself and then found myself getting furious, “Why doesn’t the ass move his rickshaw to the side!” I thought, so did all the others who honked and yelled and cursed.

He got up wearily, and the passenger in the rickshaw got out, a young man with a white shirt, tie and button-down collar, who was on his cell as he stood by the stalled vehicle and watched the driver try to push it uphill and to the side.

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One of the most essential life skills, both in personal lives and in the workplace, is the ability to solve problems effectively. In today’s world full of stress, tension and competition, the one who can look at every difficult situation as a problem that can be solved, emerges as a winner. People who are able to analyse the problems they see around themselves with a calm and open mind and come up with practical solutions to solve these problems, are the ones who go really far in life. Take any field, and you will see that the ones who have really made a difference are the ones who have faced and solved problems in a creative manner, whether it is Dr A. P. J. Abdul Kalam in nuclear science or Mother Teresa in social service, M. S. Dhoni in cricket or Steve Jobs in technology.

The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines a problem as, “a doubtful or difficult matter requiring a solution” or “something hard to understand or accomplish or deal with”. Problems always arise when we work to reach an objective or a goal. Problem solving therefore refers to the actions taken to overcome the obstacles in the path of reaching the goal.

The art of problem-solving

Before starting to solve a problem, it is essential to first study the problem thoroughly. Albert Einstein says, “If I had an hour to solve a problem, I would spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.” Here are some useful questions to ask before starting the process of solving a problem: Is the problem real or just in someone’s mind? Is this problem actually an opportunity to do something better? Does the problem really need solving or will it get resolved with time? Have we failed to see the ‘bigger problem’? What is the root cause of the problem?

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In a fast-paced world, the present pandemic has further accelerated change in practically all aspects of our lives.As the world continues to adapt and evolve to the ‘new normal’, new opportunities have emerged while others have faded into oblivion having lost their relevance.

The new equilibrium has nudged us to think differently to solve existing challenges and prepare ourselves for new ones. This problem-solving approach needs to emerge from a shift in mindsets that supports ‘out of the box’ thinking.

“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them,” said Albert Einstein to drive home the need to think differently. We just dabble in critical-thinking skills and problem-solving skills in our present ecosystem of learning when we undertake projects and enroll into short-term programmes outside our classrooms. We, however, need to dive deep further and should be immersed in it on a constant basis to imbibe it in the very fabric of ‘how we think’ and how we perceive and address challenges.

By 2030, most of the present senior school students would have entered the workforce. The opportunities that exist now were unheard of not just a decade ago, but even at the start of 2020! Avenues like app development, cloud computing, big data analysis and sustainability programmes didn’t even exist until a few years back. It is predicted that many jobs that will dominate by 2030 don’t even exist yet! Then how are we supposed to prepare for something that doesn’t even exist now?

The recent McKinsey Global Survey shows that the pandemic has brought in years of change in a matter of months at the organizational and industry level. For example, digitally-enabled products and portfolios in organizations have accelerated by a whooping seven years! The organizations that successfully navigated through the new economic and business environment brought in by the pandemic are those that quickly adopted new strategies and practices while speeding up their own experimentation and innovation. Interestingly, most of these changes are predicted to continue even beyond the pandemic.

In such a dynamic and evolving world the ‘how’ we learn becomes as important as ‘what’ we learn aside from ‘why’ we learn.

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