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Analytical
thinking
FARIS HADDAD Faris is a Systems Project Manager at Facebook in San Francisco. He works within cross functional teams to launch, scale, and support Facebook’s review platform systems. He holds a degree in mechanical engineering from UCT and a masters degree in quantitative management from Duke University.
Whether you’re an artist or an actuary, the ability to think analytically with a process oriented, methodical approach is a critical skill to have. It allows you to navigate and solve complex problems and in turn, make effective decisions. In this article, we explore 5 tips that can help you improve your analytical thinking abilities.
Be outcome focused
Establish first principles
What is your end goal? Focus on that. It will guide your analytical thinking process around any deviations that may come up along the way. Write out the answer to the question: “What am I trying to solve?” when dealing with ambiguous problems. This may be challenging at first, but setting time aside to establish an outcome is critical to the process. It saves you both time and effort as you start to tackle the problem at hand. Your outcome should involve elements of minimising the complexity of the problem you’re solving and achieving impactful results. Being outcome focused is important in that it helps you to climb the mental barrier that is a natural reaction to solving ambiguous, complex problems.
Establish a set of first principles that can be repurposed and scaled. These will form your baseline toolkit that you can tap into when solving problems. Your analytical thinking process should include the ability to make connections between whatever complex problem you’re tackling and your set of first principles. Look back on your experience, projects, and learnings among others to start filling that toolkit. Look at trends and overarching themes among the problems you’ve previously solved and use those to further confirm your first principles. Ask yourself, which sets of formulas, rules, and theorems may be applicable to the problems I’m trying to solve? Write them down somewhere accessible and get comfortable with using them.
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