Building Your Problem Solving Skills - HIT

Problem solving is a special kind of decision- making that involves more than a choice between courses of action. It involves identifying the cause of a problem and developing ways to correct or remove the cause. We become aware of the problem through a symptom such as customer complaints, below - standard performance, or substandard food product or room cleanliness — some sort of gap between what is and what should be. However, solving a problem is much more complex than we often think – it is a process that requires us to make an informed judgement on what decision we take. This lecture is focused on problem solving skills and why we need to take a critical approach to how we solve problems. Success in most professions these days requires problem solving skills. ​Whether for work or for study, you may be expected to identify issues and concerns and make decisions about how to solve them. In this lecture, we focus on these things with some examples to demonstrate that problem solving is not actually a rocket science.

Lecturer Dr Nick Naumov is a Senior Lecturer in Hospitality & Tourism Management at the Department of Events, Tourism & Hospitality at University of Northampton, UK and  Visiting Professor at Meikai University (Japan), Deggendorf Institute of Technology (Germany) and Amity University (India). Nick’s research interests are quite diverse and broadly include alternative forms of tourism (religious, heritage, cultural, gastronomic), innovation and creativity in tourism and hospitality, service quality in hospitality among others. Nick is mainly interested in qualitative research, more specifically ethnographic and anthropological approaches such as ethnography, participant observation and interviews/informal conversations.