On 7/15/10 3:30 AM, Trey Darley wrote: > Suppose you have a junior colleague with bang-up technical skills but who > gets thrown off-track whenever things don't work as expected. Suppose this > person gets routinely blocked from working until a more senior person has > the availability to unblock them. Suppose this person routinely gets > blocked and it turns out that there is a common-sense workaround. What > would you do to help them to see the light?
After thinking about this for a while, I would take a slightly different approach. Have them chew on (fun) problems not directly related to their current tasks (or even job) but that have enough underlying similarities that parallels can be drawn. Learning other disciplines could work to. Often I resolve problems by thinking "if I coded this, how would I do it?". In short, build up their wealth of information in other topics so that they can start building their own analogies, and see other solutions to the same problem domain. From the wikipedia article on analogy: "Analogy plays a significant role in problem solving, decision making, perception, memory, creativity, emotion, explanation and communication" Damion _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
