Problem Diagnosis Quotes

If you don't define the problem you'll never reach a painful solution.

You cannot solve a problem unless you diagnose the problem.

It is one thing to diagnose a problem; it is another to resolve it.

The first step to problem solving is figuring out who's got the problem.

Hardware: where the people in your company's software section will tell you the problem is. Software: where the people in your company's hardware section will tell you the problem is.

You always have to decide whether an international problem is like a skinned knee or an abscessed tooth. If it’s a skinned knew with a scab and you start messing with the scab you can make it worse. But if you let it alone, it will heal itself. If it is an abscessed tooth, and you leave it alone, it will only fester more and become a bigger problem.

I think the job of leadership is to expand what can be talked about and to get consensus on the nature of the problem, and that is most of the job. Because once you do that, once you have diagnosis, treatment options are obvious.

We cannot solve a problem until we understand the full extent of the problem.

Everything is relative. If you want to understand a problem you look at its cause. You don’t look at its manifestation.

Sometimes clients have a sophisticated view of their design problem, sometimes they do not. I often spend time with the client redefining the problem, going back to the beginning. Often the problem is just a symptom. Sometimes you have to move back in order to move forward to understand what the nature of the solution should be.

The fact that it wasn't tells me that we've got a much more fundamental problem of understanding what went wrong, and we've got to figure out what was there. And that's what I call fundamental fault analysis.

Major changes become possible if you work in a participatory manner, listen to local people, diagnose what the problems are, provide training and identify where there are opportunities for mobilizing local resources to take action.

For me, one of the major reasons to move beyond just the planting of trees was that I have tendency to look at the causes of a problem. We often preoccupy ourselves with the symptoms, whereas if we went to the root cause of the problems, we would be able to overcome the problems once and for all.