Problem solving skills

Dealing with problems is not something that most people would want to entertain on a daily basis. Problems can be energy-sapping and nerves fraying, especially if you are endlessly stumbling from one problem to another. That’s why it is important to have good problem solving skills. Admittedly, something that I am not so much excelling at. My greatest shortcoming is my inability to find the problem perhaps that has something to do with how I have been wired. Naturally I am an optimist, see no evil hear no evil kind of person. If things are going well then they must be well or so I think. But it is not always so, behind a façade of normalcy, I have realized, problems may be simmering. What would I do then to improve this problem solving skill? PEST analysis is the tool that I would employ to help me actively look for and find potential problems. This tool exposes and analyses changes in an environment and how this can impact an individual or a business. PEST analysis look at the threats and opportunities that come with these political, social or economic changes in an environment. This will be beneficial because I will be able to smell problems from afar and thus put in mechanisms to prevent or to tackle before they get out of control.

Finding the facts is a problem solving skill that I tend to be good at. This entails looking at various angles of the problems, not being limited by what maybe obvious but trying to think outside the box about factors that contribute to the problem. A perfect example is the bad blood that existed between a colleague at work and myself. It wasn’t obvious to me why he wouldn’t miss an opportunity to do me in. Once he spread a very bad rumor about me, something that wasn’t true, moreover he never missed an opportunity to contradict or challenge my views at staff meetings .That sounded odd to me, I couldn’t immediately put a finger to it.Why he was doing that, I set out to investigate. I was determined to get as much information as possible. What I discovered was that it didn’t go down so well with him when our supervisor had asked me to help my colleague out on some assignments, apparently I did the work so well that I was publicly rewarded for it.There was even talk of having me replace him so that he could be relegated to a junior position. My colleague’s ego had been wounded, the fact is he had been working there five years before me and in that period no one had threatened his position as I did and that was the real cause of the hared