PART THREE LOGIC IN PROBLEM SOLVING

You will find over time that the Situation-Complication-Question form of the introduction will become second nature to you, and you will be able to impose it automatically as you sit down to write a short document. And using the question/answer process, coupled with the disciplines for imposing order and finding summaries, you should be able relatively easily to work out the structure of your thinking.

In longer documents such as reports and presentations, however (which are usually written to give the solution to a problem), or in project plans or consulting proposals (which tell how you will go about solving the problem), the process is not quite that straightforward. There will likely have been a lengthy data gathering stage, the writing task may involve several authors and extend over a number of days (or weeks), and you can easily find yourself overwhelmed with all the facts, data, information, and ideas that need to be sorted and considered before you can determine the message you wish to communicate.

This section is written specifically for people who write these kinds of problem-oriented documents-management consultants, strategic analysts, market researchers, etc. The material covered is necessarily lengthy and complex, reflecting the nature of the subject. But the approaches have been well and truly tested, and are in daily use by consultants and analysts worldwide. If this is your field and you need to define and analyze problems before communicating the solutions in writing, you will find it worth the effort to read on.

Problem-oriented documents generally spring front a desire to answer a variation on one of the three most common questions, depending on what is known in advance by the reader:

- What should we do? (if the solution is not known)

- Should we do it? (if a solution has been suggested)

- How should we do it? I How will you do it?

(if the solution is known and accepted).

In those cases the introduction acts to define the nature of the problem that generated the question, after which the pyramid presents the "steps" or "reasons" (or sometimes the deductive argument) gleaned from having analyzed the problem and found a solution. But the thinking required to identify those steps or reasons begins well before you have any ideas whatever to communicate. Ideally you will follow a sequential process in which you

The secret to writing consulting reports efficiently is to make sure you (a) define the problem and (b) structure the gathering and analysis of your data so as to facilitate their translation into pyramid from. In other words, you want to organize your approach to the first two stages so that they lead easily through the third to the fourth-in effect to pre-structure your pyramid.

But defining the problem and structuring the analysis can be complex undertakings. The events that led up to the problem are often obscure, confused, or misstated. Vast amounts of data generally exist about all aspects of the problem, so that you are tempted to "go after everything" just to be sure. And many possible "solutions" to the problem can present themselves.

Fortunately, a number of analytical frameworks have been developed to help you minimize confusion and work efficiently.

- we recommend a framework for defining problems, useful first as a prelude to problem analysis and later as a template for determining the Situation-Complication-Question structure of the introduction.

-we describe other frameworks available to help you in thinking through and conducting the actual analysis of the problem, and in checking the validity of the ideas you generate as the solution.