Function & Efficiency
A series on the guiding forces behind Libero founder, Amanda Daly’s, problem solving philosophy.
I didn’t set out with the intention of getting into tech, but I’m so glad I did. Once I had a taste of troubleshooting and problem solving all day, it was over. I’ve been “IT support” in every job I’ve ever worked since (family included), so it’s a skillset I get to keep fresh. Most of all though, it helped me craft a troubleshooting perspective that incorporated something I’d always observed in nature:
Everything has a function. Everything, even if that something’s function presents in ways we don’t like or fully comprehend.
To truly understand something, and therefore understand the root cause when something goes wrong, it first requires understanding something’s intended or possible function. Once that is known we can work out why something isn’t functioning, how to make it function better, what fits with current context, what doesn’t, and what we can do that either solves the apparent problem, or better leverages it to do the most good- this is where my thing for efficiency comes in.
In the context of my business, efficiency is all about leveraging your current resources to accomplish your goals, therefore minimizing the need for additional or costly (time or money) resources to accomplish the same end.
In saying that all things have a function, I must of course speak to something called functional fixedness. This is a cognitive bias that limits a person’s use of an object or tool to only the way it was originally designed or is commonly used. This is where creativity comes in - the ability to see beyond how something has been used before and how it can be applied anew in a new context. And that? That is one of my favorite games of all time.
With this and many more years of research and trial and error, I’ve cultivated a rather complex but flexible problem solving mindset and method. This model linked below is a fantastic system that is useful for solving any business or project-related problem. The structural example of how to gather data on a problem is one that I use regularly:
