Apollo 13 Problem Solving--Noise of a Thousand Crises

Ron Howard discussed his process of Problem Solving in the January issue of Success Magazine. He uses the interviews from the Apollo 13 crew as a basis for his philosophy.

• Develop a process for dealing with problems
• Identify the most important tasks
• Can’t let the “noise of a thousand crises overwhelm me.”
• Lessons from Apollo 13:
--Astronauts, Jim Lovell and Fred Haise kept talking about “working the problem”
--They use that as kind of a mantra..It’s basically that as a test pilot, you’re trained that you could crash your plane and die on one of these test flights. That happens. But if you crash, you’d better crash flipping switches and trying to figure it out. Because every once in a while somebody figures it out 10 feet from the ground. So that notion of clear out all the “stuff” and work the problem is a simple mantra that makes a lot of sense.
--Part of what you have to do is to not avoid the problem.