PROBLEM-ORIENTING THINKING

Week Four: Problem-Orienting Thinking



Problem-solving

Persuasive thinking to solve a problem

Throughout the life, people encounter problems that are not easy to solve. The most important thing to note here is the nature of the problem that a person faces. Many problems are of ethical nature as the person, who faces them, tends to apply ethical and moral parameters of the society in order to get a solution. There are problems that are to be solved after keeping mind your familial values. One of the problems that I faced in my life was of ethical nature. It was the time, when I was working for a superstore chain. The on-floor manager was involved in unethical activities. I and two of my colleagues decided to stand against him. We reported to the regional manager but, to our disappointment, he diverted the issue for solution to our own manager.

We were asked to report to the manager and tell him about the problems we were facing. In our meeting with him, he threatened us to spoil our performance appraisal if we even dared to report again to the regional manager. The discovery was shocking for us. The manager also asked us to leave the job if we did not want to work with him. We were caught up with a very strange situation. Leaving the job was not a choice for us and staying there meant encouraging the manager to do whatever he wanted to.

In order to solve this problem, the persuasive thinking can be applied. For us, the job was important. We could not afford to talk to him directly about the things that he was doing. The Door-in-the-face techniques would have worked. We should have initially asked him to give up his job because we were going to report to the ...