The setting is a data center, on a Saturday night. A telecommunications distribution system fails and operations staff are called in on their weekend to quickly find the problem and restore operations as soon as possible.

As time goes on, many customers start calling, opening trouble tickets, getting upset about system outages, and increasing customer outages.

The team spends hours trying to repair a rectifier that provides DC power to a main telecom distribution switch, beginning by replacing each system component one by one in hopes of finding the faulty part. The team is very frustrated due not only to fatigue, but also to their inability to resolve the issue. After many hours, the team finally realizes that there is nothing wrong with the telecom switch or the rectifier supplying DC power to the switch. What could be the problem?

Finally, after many hours of troubleshooting, symptom hunting, and unpredictable component replacements, an electrician discovers that there is a circuit in the panel that has failed due to many years of misuse (to those electrical engineers, it was actually a circuit). that oxidized and shorted due to “over-amplifying” the circuit – no preventative maintenance or routine checks).

The incident highlighted a reality: the organization working on the problem had very little critical thinking or problem solving skills. They went after every obvious symptom, but never successfully addressed or identified the underlying problem. Great technicians, poor critical thinkers. And a true story.

While this incident was a failure to resolve data center related issues, we frequently fail to use good critical thinking not only in solving problems, but also in developing opportunities and solutions for our business users and customers. .

A few years ago I took a break from work and spent some time working on personal development. In addition to collecting certifications in TOGAF, ITIL, and other architecture-related subjects, I added a couple of extra classes, including Kepner-Tregoe (KT) and Kepner-Fourie (KF) critical thinking and problem-solving courses.

They’re not bad schools of thought, and it’s a good refresher course that reminds me of those long-forgotten sysadmin skills learned in grad school, heck, almost 30 years ago.

Here is the problem: IT systems and the business use of technologies have developed rapidly over the past 10 years, and that rate of change appears to be accelerating. Processes and standards developed 10, 15 or 20 years ago are woefully inadequate to support much of our technology and related business design, development and operations. Tacit knowledge, tacit skills, and hunches cannot be relied upon to correctly identify and resolve the problems we encounter in our fast-paced IT world.

Please note that this discussion is not only related to problem solving, but also works when considering the development of new products or solutions for new and emerging business opportunities or challenges.

Critical Thinking forces us to know what a problem (or opportunity) is, to know and apply the differences between inductive and deductive reasoning, to identify premises and conclusions, good and bad arguments, and to recognize problem descriptions and explanations (Erlandson).

Critical thinking “religions” such as Kepner-Fourie (KF) provide a process and model for problem solving. Not bad if you have time to create and follow heavy processes, or even better you can automate much of the process. However, even the study of extensive systems like KT and KF will continue to drive the need to establish an appropriate system to respond to events.

Regardless of which approach you may consider, repeated exposure to critical thinking concepts and practice will force us to move intellectually away from chasing symptoms or relying too heavily on tacit knowledge (automatic thinking) when responding to problems and challenges.

For IT administrators, think of it as an ITIL continuous improvement intellectual cycle: we always need to exercise our brain and thought process. The status quo, or relying on time-honored solutions to problems, is probably not enough to take our IT organizations into the future. We need to continue to ensure that our assumptions are based on fact and avoid undue influence, particularly from vendors, to ensure that our stakeholders have confidence in our problem or solution development process, and that we have a good understanding of the commercial and technological transformations that affect our actions. .

In addition to the critical thinking courses and approaches listed above, exposure to and study of those or any of the following can only help ensure that we continue to exercise and hone our critical thinking skills.

• A3 Management
• toyota kata
• PDSA (Plan-Do-Adjust-Study)

And many other university or related courses. For me, I keep my interest alive by reading the occasional eBook (such as Doug Erlandson’s “How to Think Clearly: A Guide to Critical Thinking” – great to read on long flights) and YouTube videos.

What do you think?”