You’re haemorrhaging time and money, got the best people for the job onboard but the problem just isn’t getting solved. Sound familiar? There’s a good chance you’re trying to solve the wrong problem.
The fastest way to save time and heighten both efficiency and effectiveness is to ensure you are solving the actual problem, and not a symptom of the underlying problem. Make sure your great ideas for fixes are related to the actual problem.
So next time you need to run a brainstorm or launch a campaign make sure you do this first:
Clarify.
The business world is fast-moving and complex, with many issues having interlocking implications and effects. This means its hard sometimes to discover what is causing problems. When its an emergency and delivery is affected, its tempting to just leap into action and start fixing things… fast!
But doesn’t save time, it wastes it. Investing more time upfront, finding the underlying cause of the real problem is always recouped later when you only need to develop your solution and implement it once.
Clarification is the first stage in the Foursight Creative Problem-solving framework and helps ensure that your team is not waste time and energy creating solutions that don’t help or that no-one wants anyway.
There are standard approaches that can prevent you from being misled into solving the wrong problem:
1: Start with an overall challenge.
Don’t be too specific. It is hard to let go of concrete ideas once formed so focus on keeping an open mind when formulating the problem you think you are facing.
2: Go wide
Approach the issue from all angles. Aks yourself, what is the problem my clients have? What problem does IT have? What problems do the delivery team experience? Gather as much background information from as many sources as you can.
3. Ask questions
But not any questions, open questions that invite people to tell you stories and add to your knowledge. Here people may very well already have suggestions for solutions to the problems they are experiencing.
4. Use Data
Collect as much data as you can to pull the problem into focus. This will help you to avoid making assumptions about what is going on and who is involved.
5. Look ahead
Ask yourself what challenges might lie ahead, and how the current situation might have a future negative impact.
It’s too easy to be blinded by our expertise or our experience and mistake one problem for another because they have some elements in common.
Slow down, take the time to get to the real issue so that whatever fix you can create, ALSO has the knock-on effect of fixing multiple interdependent problems.
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