Chapter 14: Pheonix

Challenge: Come up with a good strategy for improving my hockey team.

• Why is it necessary to solve the problem? It is necessary to solve because we need to improve our strategy in order to win games.
• What benefits will you gain by solving the problem? Winning more games and possibly a championship.
• What is the unknown? The unknowns are the strategies performed by the opposing teams in the league.
• What is it you don't yet understand? What the best ways are to combat other teams' strategies.
• What isn't the problem? How to lose games.
• Should you draw a diagram of the problem? Drawing a diagram is one of the best ways to convey sports strategies so a diagram would really help conveying the information to the rest of the team.
• Where are the boundaries of the problem? The boundaries are placed in the rulebooks of the hockey league.
• What are the constants of the problem? The teams, the players, the rules, the rink.
• Have you seen this problem before? Yes, I've seen this problem with plenty of other hockey teams that are struggling to win games.
• Have you seen this problem in a slightly different form? Yes, NHL teams have this same problem, but it isn't exactly the same because the NHL is a vastly different hockey league.
• What are the best, worst, and most probably cases you can imagine? The best case is that I would come up with a strategy that allows us to go undefeated and winning the championship, worst case scenario: we lose every game, and the most probably scenario: we win more games, and maybe we win the championship.
• Can you solve the whole problem? Part of the problem? The best way to solve this problem is to break it up into offense and defense but remember that they have to work well together.
• What would you like the resolution to be? My ideal resolution would allow my team to score more goals while letting up fewer goals.
  
• How much of the unknown can you determine? We can determine most of the unknown by researching the other teams and watching them play.
• How many different ways have you tried to solve the problem? About half a dozen, we've tried a number of different hockey strategies to varying levels of success.

I thought this exercise was alright. I liked the specific list of questions to ask that help make me think of the challenge in different ways than I normally would have. I did this one in the car while my girlfriend was picking me up from work today. I had my book on me and I wrote it in my notebook. It was sunny and there were many distractions, I was talking and listening to the radio while doing this exercise.