Are your lights on?

is an excellent book edited by Donald Gause and Jerry Weinberg (isbn 0-932633-16-1). This is my second snippet for this book - I've set myself the goal of reading all of Jerry's books twice. As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:

The fledgling problem solver invariably rushed in with solutions before taking time to define the problem being solved. Even experienced solvers, when subjected to social pressure, yield to this demand for haste.

There are hundreds of things that can be be overlooked in any problem definition. If you can't think of even three, all that says is that you can't, or won't, think at all.

Human beings are so adaptable, they'll put up with almost any sort of misfit - until it comes to their consciousness that it doesn't have to be that way.

Are your lights on?

Bureaucracies always begin with some process of selection - a process which is never quite "natural" selection.

The source of the problem is most often within you.

These young computniks will acquire one valuable lesson from their unrelenting quest for problems to fit their solution - "solution probleming," we call it. As they quest so shall they learn. Mostly, they'll learn about problem definition.

If we seek a universal solvent, we can hardly deem it a "side effect" that it dissolves any container we try to keep it in.

Habituation allows us to cancel out the constancies in our environment, thus simplfying our lives.