In the last video about analytical thinking, I talked about the four steps to the analytical thinking process, their identify the problem, the term in the problem-solving approach analyze the problem

Most people spend the majority of their time on the third and fourth steps of analyzing and solving the problem

However, spending more time on the first two steps of analytical, thinking are going to make you better at analytical reasoning and often are going to lead to a faster solution to your problem

Let's talk about each of these a little bit more first identifying the problem

This is an analytical reasoning skill that most people haven't spent that much time to develop being part of

Yes, there are some cases on sats Gres and certain classes, where you're taught to think more

Critically and talk to determine what the problem is but the vast majority of Education

Both at the elementary middle, high school and University levels is focused on presenting you with the problem and asking you to solve it

You might be given a little bit of information here and there to throw you off

But in general, there's not a lot that you have to do to determine what the problem is when it comes to real world application though, the number of variables shoots up dramatically and the clarity usually

So, how do you go about improving the skill? Look for Clues as to what needs to be solved

Ask yourself, how is this part of the bigger picture? Is this a problem? Or is this? Just a symptom of the problem? For instance, if you have a fever, the primary problem isn't that your temperature

is high? It's that there's some infection or something going on in your body, that your body is trying to fight off by raising your temperature, if you just lower the fever

There are times when you have to treat the symptoms because the symptoms of themselves can be dangerous and can lead to other problems

But the majority of the time you still go back to trying to solve the root cause of what cause those symptoms to occur

Once you've identified your problem, the next step is to identify how you're going to solve it, what are the tools techniques and methods that you're going to use to solve this problem? Is there data that

you need to solve this problem? It might seem like once you know what the problem is, it makes sense to jump straight into solving

It spend more time on a good strategy, though can make the whole process faster and it often causes you to think of factors that you might not otherwise consider

This is one area where it can be really helpful to take a sheet of paper or a whiteboard and sketch out what's going on visualizing

The problem can help you see where he might be under or over analyzing certain factors in it, it can also help you

I quickly pick out what tools and data that you might need to be able to solve the problem

Do you say, analytical reasoning skills are great? No matter what position you're in or even if you're not working the strategies, I mention the big picture overview of what's going on

And should also help prevent you from having to resolve the same problem multiple times