You may have noticed a couple of pervasive buzz words going around in the business world today: Synergy and/or collaboration. It means teams getting out of their silos, putting all their heads together, and solving problems. The first and most important step is defining the problem. By defining a problem, it means that you have simply stated the situation in a factual, non-blameful way.
As simple as this sounds, I find that people struggle with this step. Too often in problem-solving team members start out with blame or just a symptom of the problem.
Several years ago, I was teaching a management class, Ralph was one of the class participants, and he decided to apply this fundamental with his team. He asked for a statement of the problem, and he heard comments like, “Sam didn’t do the quality check in time”, or “the belts were not changed in time and the machine broke down”. Ralph stopped them right there by saying, “That’s not the problem”. He stuck with it, and they finally came up with a simple statement they could all agree on: “The problem is we had a late delivery to a key customer”. Now we are cooking! Instead of getting into blame and finger-pointing, we can work through the next three steps of the problem solving process.
2. What are the causes of the problem?
3. What are the possible solutions?
4. What is the best possible solution?
The team agreed on the best solution, laid out their action steps, and were well on their way to making the changes to improve delivery time. Ralph said that had he not insisted they define the problem, they would have gone round and round. Remember, if you have a problem to solve, begin by defining it. Consider the old maxim, “A problem defined is a problem half solved”
