ABSTRACT
In Chapter 1, we made a case for thinking about the leadership process as problem-solving. A problem, as Baird (1983) and others define it, has three ingredients: givens-the current fact or situation (e.g., this parent standing in my office complaining about his son’s teacher); goals-different, more valued fact or situation (e.g., this same parent satisfied with his son’s teacher and not standing in my office); and obstacles or constraints that must be overcome before the given state can change (e.g., the parent’s perception of the unfairness of the teacher’s grading practices). Research on problem-solving (e.g., Fredericksen, 1984, Shulman and Carey, 1984) has identified two sources of variation in the difficulty experienced by people in solving problems. One of these sources of variation is the clarity or extent of knowledge a person has about those three ingredients of a problem; the other is the specificity of the steps the person is able to identify in order to successfully overcome obstacles or constraints, and thereby transform the complaining parent into the satisfied parent.
