Last week, I had written about problem solving mindsets. The foxes - problem solvers who are able to solve a wide range of problems and the hedgehogs – problem solvers who are very good at specific problems. If you think about it, most of the systems in organizations have been tailored to reward the hedgehog... Continue Reading →

‘The fox knows many things; the hedgehog one big thing’ is a quote attributed to Archilocus, an ancient Greek poet (them Greeks again!). In the 1950s, philosopher Isaiah Berlin1 expanded on this idea to divide writers and thinkers into two categories: hedgehogs, who look at the world through the lens of a single defining idea;... Continue Reading →

Talk to your analyst about the biggest challenges with the adoption of Machine Learning to drive business impact and you are likely to hear data as one of them. While there has been a huge improvement in the quality and volume of data, there is also a growing sense in organizations that there is a... Continue Reading →

Last week, we looked at how quantum physics can teach us a thing or two about problem solving in small data environments. Some of the most path breaking work in Physics started with a theory, refined by mathematical models and then proved (or disproved) with experiments. This week, let’s take a look at Biology –... Continue Reading →

Richard Feynman Richard Feynman (he doesn’t need an introduction) was a consummate problem solver. When asked about his problem-solving techniques, his colleague Murray Gell-Mann (a Nobel Laureate himself) defined the ‘Feynman Problem Solving Algorithm’: Write down the problemThink very hardWrite down the answer While this was partly in jest, this to me captures why it... Continue Reading →