ARE WE PROBLEM SOLVERS?

Daily Post 1427

ARE WE PROBLEM SOLVERS?

As a nation, are we a nation of problem solvers? With problems abound at the time of Independence itself, we kept on adding lots all along the way. Were we quick at solving them? Our capability to solve problems on the touchstone of permanence, will entail our success as a society, economy and a nation. Are we in a habit of evading problems, given the fact that most of our problems remain unresolved. Some have gone more complex from the time we attempted to solve them. And the bigger tragedy is that most of the problems we don’t know and we don’t have any mechanism to bring it to the fore. The reality is that as nation we are scared of problems. Once you are scared of problems, even the smallest of the problems would look humungous.

You would have been taught of problem solving skills but the moot question remains, what problems these have been able to solve and where? In the unending array of the hard and soft skills, which we have acquired, have we been able to create a capability in ourselves to write the winning solution. I watched the movie titled Section 375 and with humungous efforts for the last eight years, are we anywhere in sight of even a modicum of a solution or improvement in response. Any problem can be sorted out, if we have the objective problem statement in place. The problem stated above is gigantic, do we even have the stakeholders action points, timelines and review mechanism in place. A law and certainly its amendments too, is the legal embodiment of societal conscience and its deep seated will to improve and grow.

The biggest incapability is to understand the problem in a superficial manner, and naturally so, the problem is acted upon in a superficial manner. As expected, it would get unstuck, and all stakeholders would then express amazement and the same cycle would be repeated. Who owns the problem? The problem has to be owned, there has to be one person, one agency, who would charged with the Solution Implementation of that problem. The ownership, responsibility and accountability matrix has to be written, crystal clear and fully executable. The long drawn solutions would also have its methodology, based on the milestones and timelines.

When you do reverse engineering of most of the solutions, you will discover a few levels missing, at times important stakeholders too, detailing not commensurate to the solutions to be arrived, lack of synthesis of experts, owners having outsourced both the problem finding / solution to an outside agency to name a few. Suffice to say there is a huge gap between the understanding, effort and preparation required to reach an executable blueprint (solution) compared to what has been put in. Even a perfect solution on paper has to go through agencies, human beings, protocols, deliverables, process and is easier said than done. In this quicksand we live, happily proving our exceptional successes day in and day out. The problems keep staring in our eyes. We close in reflex. At the very least, that effort should been invested into problem solving.

A PROBLEM SOLVING NATION IS A PROGRESSIVE ONE.

Sanjay Sahay

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