How Effective Forum Admins Think While Solving Problems

The problem-solving processes and strategies of ten forum admins with reputations for high effectiveness were studied. Verbal protocols were gathered through unstructured interviews while admins were working on a set of five cases. Analysis of the data was guided, but not constrained, by a set of processes and strategies for problem solving suggested by the models of problem solving developed. Results describe the categories of problem solving processes that emerged across the five problems, the frequencies with which these processes were used, graphic representations of the strategies admins used to solve the problems, as well as the consistency of using the same strategy across problems.


Although leadership has long been fertile ground for research and debate, there are many contradictions in the accumulated knowledge base, and certain areas still remain unexplored. One neglected area relates to how administrators solve problems. Up until then, problem solving had been addressed primarily in the context of decision-making, and investigations failed to provide understandings of how administrators interpret and think through the problems that give rise to decisions. Recently, it has been suggested that a focus on cognitive processes may contribute to a more complete theoretical frame for studying how administrators solve problems.In this regard, how administrators perceive, interpret, understand, and solve problems is the heart of understanding and improving educational administration:

Efforts to understand the roots of effective administration … will be much more productive if they shift from a focus on action or behaviour to a focus on thinking or problem solving.

The writting I put here is grounded in the cognitive approach to investigating leadership and focuses on the school principalship. Specifically, I examined the cognitive processes and strategies highly effective forum admins engage in when solving organizational problems.

A Cognitive Approach to Understanding Problem Solving

Over the last decade or so, an increasing number of researchers have argued that the focus of future research on organizational leadership ought to be more on the cognitive dimensions of leadership and less on leadership styles. The results support the contention that understandings of leaders’ cognitions are important. More specifically, researchers conducted a series of investigations to probe the ways in which leaders go about solving organizational problems and concluded that “successful leaders are capable of identifying and solving significant organizational problems using an analysis of organizational requirements and constraints, along with wisdom and perspective taking, to craft viable solutions likely to work within the organizational context”

In the domain of organization leadership, one concluded that cognitive perspectives make three central contributions to the study of administration:

(a) they redefine the meaning of effective leadership by focusing attention on expert, internal, cognitive processes
(b) they expand understandings of the knowledge base required to exercise effective leadership
c) they enrich understandings of how leadership expertise develops.

Cognitive perspectives have been applied only recently in the field of forum administration and leadership, highlighting two phenomena that are consistent with contemporary thinking about leadership. The first is that people can handle only a certain amount of information at any given time, and thus are selective about the things they pay attention to and process. The second is that people impose their own meanings on environmental events. This notion is related to the concept of constructivism, which proposes that people construct their own knowledge from their experiences.

Problem Solving Theory and the Notion of Expertise

In cognitive studies of problem solving in organizations, attention has been directed toward the manner in which information is noticed, interpreted, and processed by administrators. One aspect of studies in this area is a focus on the concept of expertise and its development among administrators. These studies have identified a number of differences in how experts and novices solve problems. Specifically, it has been found that experts pay more attention to monitoring and managing their problem-solving activities; they draw more on their domain knowledge to build more effective representations of problems than do non-experts; they create more complete, abstract, coherent, and functional problem representations; they identify and possess more complex goals for problem solving; they spend more time planning their strategies and are able to use a greater variety of approaches to the task of developing a solution; and they are more sensitive to the social contexts within which problems are to be solved.

In 1983, two structures in problem solving were identified: a control structure and a reasoning structure, each with its own set of operators.

The control structure relates to goal attainment, and controls the problem-solving process. It consists of seven operators that act upon the individual’s knowledge base and generate the problem solutions. These operators are state constraint, state subproblem, state solution, interpret problem statement, provide support, evaluate, and summarize. The reasoning structure is complementary to the control structure, and includes the justifications that subjects use during problem solving. The ten operators of the reasoning structure are state argument, state assertion, state facts, present specific case or example, state reasons, state outcome, compare and/or contrast previous statement, elaborate and/or clarify, state conclusion, and state qualification.

Researchers went beyond simply identifying the elements of the problem-solving processes used by experts; they also described how these processes are organized into strategies that help solvers address the problem. A problem-solving strategy is a patterned set of cognitive processes. They found three strategies or archetypal combinations of processes:

• Decomposition, in which the main problem is broken down into a set of subproblems, usually no more than three.
• Conversion, in which the given problem is converted into another issue for which a solution may already exist.
• Identifying and eliminating the factors that contribute to the problem.

Other researchers have focused on the skills, knowledge, and social judgements that seem to be related to leaders’ effectiveness in solving organizational problems. Their data indicated that problem-solving skills and knowledge are the most potent in predicting effective leadership. Seven skills grouped under two general categories are:

• Problem construction
• Information encoding
• Category specification
• Category combination and reorganization
• Idea evaluation
• Solution implementation
• Solution monitoring

Other investigation to describe educational leaders’ problem-solving processes suggests typology of problem solving processes comprises six components that are grouped under three general categories :
• Understanding – interpreting the problem, setting goals
• Solving – identifying constraints, generating solutions
• Dispositions – considering values, considering mood