Quotes About Identifying Problems

“Human beings have a lot of problems identifying themselves with other human beings who don't resemble them exactly. But there's something about drawing that means that anyone can identify to a drawing. I mean, people can identify themselves with Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse.”

— Marjane Satrapi

“Design is directed toward human beings. To design is to solve human problems by identifying them and executing the best solution.”

— Ivan Chermayeff

“My preference is for the Federal Reserve to be the systemic risk regulator, because the responsibility for identifying and limiting potential problems is a natural complement to its role in monetary policy.”

— Henry Paulson

“The more diverse your team, the better you'll be at identifying what a diversity of users perceive as problems.”

— David Livermore

“It may not be irrelevant to note that even very modest forms of life, like earthworms, dung beetles and fiddler crabs, have no trouble identifying the real problems they must deal with if they are to survive.”

— Edward Goldsmith

“Creativity is the process of sensing problems or gaps in information, then identifying the difficulties and seeking solutions through trial and error or through forming hypotheses.”

— Ellis Paul Torrance

“A person who suffers from a character disorder frequently has significant behavioral or emotional problems that will almost certainly spell disaster for any marital relationships. One of the most difficult aspects of identifying people with character disorders is that they tend to be unusually charming. People with these kinds of disorders tend to lie, cheat, exaggerate, and take advantage of others.”

— Neil Clark Warren

“Creativity is the generation and initial development of new, useful ideas. Innovation is the successful implementation of those ideas in an organization. Thus, no innovation is possible without the creative processes that mark the front end of the process: identifying important problems and opportunities, gathering relevant information, generating new ideas, and exploring the validity of those ideas.”

— Teresa Amabile

“Most people define learning too narrowly as mere 'problem-solving', so they focus on identifying and correcting errors in the external environment. Solving problems is important. But if learning is to persist, managers and employees must also look inward. The need to reflect critically on their own behaviour, identify the ways they often inadvertently contribute to the organisation's problems, and then change how they act.”

— Chris Argyris

“What paralyzes life is lack of faith and lack of audacity. The difficulty lies not in solving problems but identifying them.”

— Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

“People often get racism mixed up with bigotry or prejudice. We need to get our terminology straightened out. We obviously have racial problems that need solving. The first step in solving a problem is to identify it. If we keep mis-identifying bigotry and prejudice as racism we'll never make any headway”

— Neal Boortz

“You've got problems in Central Asia. And you've got problems within our own communities back home. So if we end up saying, look, this has nothing to do with Islam or it's got no connection with that broader question, then we look, frankly, as if we're in denial about the problem. And the interesting thing in the Middle East is that they have absolutely no problem there in identifying that as Islamist extremism and calling it that.”

— Tony Blair

“After 25 years of buying and supervising a great variety of businesses, Charlie [Munger] and I have not learned how to solve difficult business problems. What we have learned is to avoid them. To the extent we have been successful, it is because we have concentrated on identifying one-foot hurdles that we could step over rather than because we acquired any ability to clear seven-footers.”

— Warren Buffett