[Music]
hi I'm mine and I'm the head of software
at zip one zip line operates across
Africa using drones to make life-saving
board deliveries we deliver medical
products like blood and vaccines to
places that otherwise can't be reached
we all deal with different types of
problems every day and one way or
another we come up with solutions but
did you know there's actually a series
of steps you can take for solving any
problem it's called the problem-solving
process and it has four basic parts one
define identify the problem to prepare
research previous solutions and brain
some new ones
three try put a plan into action and
test to see what works and four reflect
review what worked and what didn't and
how you might change your approach in
the future let's take a look at how this
process is used in the real world by
looking at where I work
zipline ad zipline we started by
defining the problem first when people
need blood they need blood fast second
what is very hard to store because there
are many different types and it expires
quickly and third most of the world does
not have roads we can rely on for
delivery the next step was to prepare a
solution first we travel to Africa and
met with doctors the people on the
ground who are most familiar with these
problems we were in that storing the
blood in one place would really help if
only there was some way of getting the
blood from that place to remote clinics
on demand next we came up with all kinds
of ideas and really let our imaginations
fly the solution we thought might work
was an airplane shaped drone that could
fly really far really fast over all
kinds of rough terrain when a flew over
its destination it would parachute
a package of blood to the doctors on the
ground then returned home now it was
time to try this all out thence the
previous medical research we new
techniques for building a blood storage
facility so we built one in a central
location so that we could deliver blood
to almost anywhere in the country then
we built drones a lot of drones we
tested how to fly the drones turn them
around and recover them and as we tried
we had successes and we had plenty of
failures we've quickly learned that
dropping the blood from the sky worked
really well but we also learned problems
like weather and hardware failures could
slow us down a lot so as we tried we had
to go back and prepare new solutions as
we defined new problems finally we had
something that worked it was time to
look at what we had done and really
reflect on how it had gone we've
reflected on our original definition of
the problem and asked if our solution
was better or worse than what existed
before we even started to think about
how our solution might be used to
address other problems could it work for
delivering medicine or even organs could
it work in reverse and collect items
from distant locations and could we get
this solution to work in other countries
for each of these questions we went back
and we redefined our process and we made
it better the problem-solving process
works in all kinds of areas creative
personal existential you name it by
using these four steps you can figure
out a process to make anything work