Skills Every Entrepreneur Needs to Develop - 1
1. Complex Problem Solving
Complexity is defined as the number of variables or inputs into a system. Take managing a team as an example. Each additional team member adds their own desires, competencies, work patterns and perspectives to the team.
This makes the team more complex. Both because of the new members added inputs but also because of interactions of their inputs with the existing inputs of the team.
Basically every new factor makes a problem exponentially more complex. Skilled people can grapple with this complexity and derive strategies and outputs from them.
Defined by Nobel Prize winner H.A Simon:
The capacity of the human mind for formulating and solving complex problems is very small compared with the size of the problem whose solution is required for objectively rational behavior in the real world or even for a reasonable approximation to such objective rationality.
Jim Collins defines complex problems as Big, Hairy, Audacious Goals. These goals; like combatting the mental health crisis in my hometown of Toronto, Canada have multiple stakeholders, root causes, semi-viable solutions and more making even understanding them incredibly complex.
Having heuristics, or frameworks to tackle understanding, framing, solving, and implementing solutions to complex problems is, and will continue to be, critical to entrepreneurs worldwide who desire to make an impact.
2. Critical Thinking
Critical thinking goes hand in hand with complex problem solving. The simple definition for critical thinking is it’s clear, logical argument construction done through clearly defining our statements and then organizing them into arguments or conclusions.
For example; If A, then B. A. So B.
A: If I make a coffee,
B: Then I will drink it.
I just made a coffee. So I’m drinking it.
This is useful and any entrepreneur should cut their teeth on basic logical argument construction. This textbook was useful for me. However there are issues projecting the critical thinking process into the chaos of solving Big, Hairy, Audacious Goals (BHAGS). That’s why I prefer the following approach.
When solving problems we create simplified models, or abstractions of reality, which help us to process the critical elements of some scenario. Because simply put we don’t have the power to handle all the variables (A, B, C etc) that come from real life. The following two steps outline how we naturally handle this variability.
1. Step one of critical thinking is our capacity to, both funnel the sensory stimulus of the world into discrete data points, and then create meaning from those data points in the form of increased understanding about reality at one moment in time.
2. Step two is to create webs over time of these data points. These webs give us an understanding of reality that’s; accurate, projectable to other situations, and consistent across time.
This process is constantly ongoing moment to moment. You’re doing it right now as you read this article. By understanding the process of processing the information dump of reality, we can more efficiently draw potent conclusions, which compounded over time give us the rich cognitive capacity to work with complex problems.
The ongoing process of honing this capability is known as Crystallized Intelligence and is defined as:
“One’s lifetime of intellectual achievement, as demonstrated largely through one’s vocabulary and general knowledge.”
3. Creativity
Creativity is defined in The Innovators DNA as:
“Your ability to generate innovative ideas is not merely a function of the mind, but also a function of five key behaviours that optimize your brain for discovery.”
These five key behaviours are:
1. Associating: drawing connections between questions, problems, or ideas from unrelated fields.
2. Questioning: posing queries that challenge common wisdom.
3. Observing: scrutinizing the behavior of customers, suppliers, and competitors to identify new ways of doing things.
4. Networking: meeting people with different ideas and perspectives.
5. Experimenting: constructing interactive experiences and provoking unorthodox responses to see what insights emerge.
This model is fascinating for a number of reasons.
1. It shows the leaps humans uniquely make, once we i) understand the problem ii) and find the patterns. Enabling us to iii) synthesize solutions.
2. Each of these individual activities can be done by anyone, and creativity is them being done in aggregate. Which means creativity can be trained.
A 2012 Adobe study on creativity shows only 1 in 4 people believe they are living up to their own creative potential. This is a key indicator of why falling rates of entrepreneurship mirror falling creativity rates.
Globalized business is accelerating the complexity of our problems, and we lack the skills to understand these systems, and to synthesize solutions to them.
However if we can learn to unlock our creativity, and further to implement the innovations we generate. We can create ventures which have an exponential impact over what was possible in the more nationalized past.