Scribd
Upload
10 views4 pages

Six Rules

six ruled

Uploaded by

muazzam22
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
10 views4 pages

Six Rules

six ruled

Uploaded by

muazzam22
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 4

Six Rules for Better

Thinking

A Reprise of Chapter 6 from


The Art of Practical Thinking

Fred Nickols

© Fred Nickols 2003


All rights reserved

www.nickols.us
[email protected]
Six Rules for Better Thinking

This article originally appeared in the September 1995 issue of Performance & Instruction.

Introduction
I spend many pleasant and profitable hours browsing the shelves in used-book stores. My search
is usually for older books pertaining to management and business, but problem solving, too, holds
my interest and, recently, I chanced upon a rather remarkable book.

The Art of Practical Thinking was written in 1940. The author, Richard Weil, Jr., was president
of Bambergers at the time. He was generally and genuinely unimpressed with the quality of the
thinking displayed by his contemporaries and acquaintances and hoped, through his book, to
make some modest contribution toward improving the quality of thinking in general.

Weil's concern about the quality of thinking was well founded. His book is instructive and rich in
practical examples drawn from his experiences in the business world. Of particular interest to me
is Chapter Six, where Weil set forth six general rules for better thinking. These rules are actually
rules for solving problems. Weil's exposition is as timely and relevant today as when he first
wrote it more than 50 years ago. So, without further ado, here are Richard Weil's six general rules
for better thinking.

Rule 1: Establish immediately your best possible priority of problems.


Here, Weil was using priority in its sense of ordering. His counsel was first to be very clear about
what he termed one's "hierarchy" of purposes, and then to be very clear about where in this hie-
rarchy a given problem fit. Some problems, he observed, are more important than others, and
some problems are not worth solving. More than 50 years after Weil expressed dismay at the
alarming frequency with which people failed to prioritize the problems facing them, his counsel is
still sound.

Rule 2: State your problem.


Weil attached great significance to the actual wording used to state the problem. Clearly an afi-
cionado of the then burgeoning field of semantics, Weil's emphasis on the words used to state the
problem was far from "semantic quibbling." His concern with the words used to state the problem
drove deeper, to the goal of the effort, to the result to be achieved or, in more technical terms, to
the solved state. Weil's example, one of department store executives trying to choose between
two sales incentive systems when they should have been focusing on all the factors affecting
sales, could be brought forward the 50-plus years since he reported it and no one would be the
wiser.

Rule 3: Separate, as far as possible, all emotional influences from all rational processes,
in the effort to obtain correct solutions.
Weil took care here to emphasize that his counsel was to separate emotional influences, not ig-
nore them. The practical problem is to give the rational and the emotional elements the relative
weight they deserve. Typically, the rational deserves more and the emotional less.

Rule 4: State your situation with respect to data.


Weil's counsel here is again common sense, which appears to be in as short supply now as it was
in his time. What information is relevant to the problem? What do you know? What do you not
know? What information is needed? Where is or who has the needed information? How might it
be obtained? How reliable is it? It is important to note that Weil did not recommend collecting
and analyzing data as an immediate first step in solving a problem. Indeed, in his analysis of the

© Fred Nickols 2003 2


Six Rules for Better Thinking

problem of exercising financial control over a business, he suggested that, in many organizations,
far too much information was being collected and analyzed. This, too, seems true today.

Rule 5: Observe a fixed sequence of acts in the handling of problems.


Weil laid down eight steps or acts. They are:

1. Execute the appropriate and required processes of solution. (More on this later.)
2. State the tentative solution or solutions.
3. Choose one single tentative solution.
4. Make all available theoretic test checks of the validity of the solution.
5. Relate the solution to your planned priority of problems.
6. Make any necessary alteration in the solution indicated by relating it to your total plan.
7. Set up, where possible, measurements of the exactness of your solution.
8. Set up, where possible, advance measurements such that, when your solution is actually
put to the final pragmatic test of action, you can properly determine how successfully it
worked.

Weil provided little in the way of elaboration on these eight steps. He asserted they should be
clear enough to follow, and that additional clarity would occur as a result of putting them into
practice. I tend to agree.

Rule 6: Estimate, as well as you can, the loss-gain factor in probable solutions, and plan
in advance the course of action if the solution is unsuccessful.
Weil's use of "probable" is worth explaining. Earlier in his book, in reviewing what he defined as
the tools of thinking, he claimed that few knew the true meaning of probability. Most, he said,
confused it with likelihood. Weil's view is that probable means credible or believable. As stated
earlier, his book is most instructive.

Execution is Essential
Although tempted to add another general rule, Weil instead limited himself to pointing out that
proper execution of the right solution is as essential to success as is finding the right solution. His
concern stemmed from his observation that, in many cases, good solutions were often poorly ex-
ecuted, leading those involved to claim that the solutions, not their implementation, was at fault.
This led, he believed, to a search for other solutions which, a priori, would be the wrong ones.

The "Appropriate and Required Processes of Solution"


Weil's six rules for better thinking were preceded by a discussion of six tools for use in thinking.
It was to the proper use of these tools that the first of the eight acts above refers. These tools can
be listed but not elaborated upon in a paper this brief. They are:

 Intuition
 Formal Logic
 Semantics
 Voluntarist Logic
 Symbolic Logic
 The Continuum

Weil defined thinking as "the process of arranging experience into patterns." Thus he argued, we
cannot think about things we have not experienced. (Experience, by the way, need not be firs-
thand.)

© Fred Nickols 2003 3


Six Rules for Better Thinking

Intuition, to Weil, was thinking at a subconscious level. Weil felt strongly that "trained intuition,"
that is, the intuition of a person who has worked hard at mastering the other tools of thinking de-
served its own status as a tool for thinking. But, in deference to his own insistence on careful
classification, he allowed that trained intuition was more properly a subdivision of intuition.

Six rules and six tools; such was the substance of Richard Weil's book. For my money, it belongs
on every manager's desk or bookshelf, but only after it has been carefully read. In this regard,
Weil offered up yet another piece of advice: He encouraged his readers to read Mortimer Adler's
How to Read A Book, which I am doing and which I am able to do because it is still in print. I am
sorry to report that Weil's book is no longer in print. But, as he said of the many books he sum-
marized in the course of writing his book, "I think I have given you the gist of what the author
had to say."

Reference
Weil, R. (1940). The Art of Practical Thinking. Simon and Schuster: New York.

Contact the Author


Fred Nickols can be reached by e-mail at [email protected]. Other articles of his can be found on
his web site at: www.skullworks.com.

© Fred Nickols 2003 4

You might also like