The real way to solve problems
There is a problem which has featured many times in various forms on websites which claim to teach logical thinking. It states that you are the only survivor of an airliner crash in the desert. The airliner is severely damaged, but you can access a lot of useful items. 1Drop sentence here. However, the problem states that you can only carry three of them with you from the plane when you set out to walk to the town which you spotted ten minutes before the crash.
The wording of this puzzle forces solvers to consider only a limited number of possible solutions by setting limits. 2Drop sentence here. But in many cases, when those parameters are questioned, solutions start to appear. For example, in the case of the plane crash, airliners travel at a minimum of 600 kilometres an hour, so the town that you saw shortly before the crash is over 100 kilometres away across a desert with no roads or signposts. In addition, airliners are constantly tracked by air traffic control, even over deserts. 3Drop sentence here. You can easily do this with stuff you find in the plane, such as a piece of metal, and you will almost certainly be saved.
The crashed plane puzzle is a perfect example of the cardinal error of identifying the wrong problem. 4Drop sentence here. Albert Einstein once supposedly said, ‘If I had an hour to solve a problem, I would spend 55 minutes defining the problem, and only five minutes thinking of a solution.’ 5Drop sentence here. However, defining the problem is often not so easy.
Sometimes people have solved problems by coming up with radically new solutions. There is a story that Henry Ford said, ‘If I’d asked people what they wanted before I designed the motor car, they would have said “faster horses”’. 6Drop sentence here. Indeed, most people in Ford’s time had no idea of motor cars, so they tried to solve the problem of faster travel in the only way they could conceive. So the next time you have to solve a problem, make sure you have a clear idea of the problem you are actually trying to solve.