Where two problems resist separate solution, consider that they may be one problem under two names; establishing the identity solves both at once.
A detective works two apparently unrelated cases, a missing animal and a missing sportsman, and the investigation collapses when the officer leading it and the suspect being sought prove to be one person. The formal content is the identification step: two problem statements are shown to share a solution set, so any solution to one is a solution to the other. Mathematicians call this a reduction and spend careers hunting for one. The detective arrives at it by other means.
In practice
- A team chasing a slow report and an unrelated billing discrepancy finds one clock set wrong, and closes two tickets with one commit.
- A council with a parking problem and a school-run problem has one problem, and had been funding two teams to not solve it.
- Standing
- Entered in jest. The attribution is a 1994 comedy and the name is this ledger's. The move underneath is real and carries serious names elsewhere: reduction in computational complexity, unification in physics, and root-cause analysis in engineering.
- Subject
- Decision-making & Reasoning
- Essay
- Razors, rules and the tools of careful thought