I’m using here as an example the problem that India faced when they had massive heat waves. Solution in the end was to paint their houses (and maybe streets?) with a light repelling paint. Super cheap and super effective.

  1. Identify pain — What’s hurting me? What am I trying to solve? (people dying from heat wave in india)

  2. List assumptions — What are my assumptions about the problem/state of the world? (heat kills people / people dying is bad / heat waves will continue to occur / we have no control over heat at the scale of cities/countries)
  
  3. Challenge assumptions — Which assumptions, if removed, change the equation? (first 3 assumptions, if removed, result in deciding to do nothing; final assumption if challenged, opens possibilities)
  
  4. Restate problem, per challenged assumption — What is the new problem definition, if I remove this assumption? (how do we make the city less hot)
  
  5. If no solutions come up either do (3) again, or go a level higher by doing (1) again.

Roughly:

1: Find out what fixed looks like. When did it stop working? Has it ever worked?

2: Form theories about why it may not be working (googling is part of forming theories)

3: Pick what you consider to be the most likely problem, or the fastest theory to test.

4: Test the theory (May require googling to figure out a falsifiable way to test)

5: if that was not the problem, consider if your test falsified any more theories or changed the liklihood of other, then move on to the next test

6: Repeat until you're out of testable theories.

7: Come up with more testable theories (if you already tried everything you could think of and google, start asking people online and reading books about the problem.)

8: Keep testing theories.

9: Fix the problem.

10: Celebrate.

* The Thinker's Toolkit: 14 Powerful Techniques for Problem Solving by Morgan Jones.

* The Model Thinker: What You Need to Know to Make Data Work for You by Scott Page.

* The Decision Book: Fifty models for strategic thinking by Krogerus & Tschappeler.

While searching for it online, I also came across https://www.uapb.edu/sites/www/Uploads/Assessment/webinar/se...

Hope those help.

    1. Write down the problem.
    2. Think very hard.
    3. Write down the answer.

"I need to solve X now" "Why?" "Because it blocks me from finishing project Y" "Why?" "Because without it I won't be able to dy Z" "Why?" "Oh"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A3_problem_solving

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIZ