From the Ask Tom mailbag – Part 2 of 4

Cumulative State

• S-I (1 day – 3 months) Declarative (Concrete)
• S-II (3 months to 12 months) Cumulative (Concrete)
• S-III (1 year to 2 years) Serial (Concrete)
• S-IV (2 years to 5 years) Parallel (Concrete)

If declarative thinking cannot connect the dots, cumulative thinking can. Cumulative thinking sees patterns and makes connections. A cumulative thinker can learn, not only through trial and error (declarative), but through the documented experience of other people. This documented experience could be an article in a trade journal or magazine, a book, research on the internet or perhaps a conversation with a colleague.

Standard operating procedures (documented SOPs) can be a powerful source for cumulative problem solving. Given a problem to solve, a cumulative thinker can see the pattern in the problem, connect it to a documented best practice, problem solved.

This works really great, as long as we have solved the problem before and documented the solution. This is the land of best practices. Best practices is an S-II cumulative problem solving strategy.

But, there are some problems we have not solved, some problems we have not seen. The cumulative thinker wakes up one morning and sees not just the connection between two elements, but the cause and effect relationship between those elements, the emergence of serial thinking. -Tom