Comment by bmitc
9 months ago
There are many different ways to solve problems. Having tunnel vision will exclude most of them. Critical thought has its place in any field, but many scientists and engineers will hide behind so called analytical thought when in reality, the ideas are more biased than they'd like to admit.
I think problem solving has analytical and creative parts too. Like in Polya's 'How to Solve It' you have clear analytical steps in the beginning (what's known, what's unknown, etc), then 'Boom! Heuristic!', then again analytical steps for reflecting back on the solution (corner cases, did you use all the inputs, etc).