When you solve problems, you come out with solutions which tend to be more intuitive. Works for 90% of the time, but in the 10% that it does not, you are left wondering what could be going wrong?
These problems could be varied:
How do we manage growth?
How does my app become viral?
Why is it we are having difficulties acquiring new customers?
How can I ensure that an existing customer does not raise a RFP (request for proposals) next time a project comes up?
In a structured situation, the typical stages of problem solving process are:
Priorities: Of the many problems that you are facing, which are the more important ones?
Thinking: What is the focus area in a complex situation?
Cause: What is the root cause of the problem chosen?
Solution: What is the Best solution?
Risk: What can we do today so that future risk in similar situations can be avoided.
One of the issues that you face is in not recognizing problems – especially when their impact is going to be felt more so in the future. At other times, the number of problems seem to be so many, that you do not know where to start. There is no consensus – different members of your team are pulling in different directions. Your personal biases start affecting problem selection. Trivial problems get picked up. Team members are busy playing blame games. Band-aid Solutions being bandied around are arrived at straightaway by jumping to causes. You end up with very few stake holders supporting your decision.
To illustrate, let us take the problem of a father who is trying to teach his young daughter swimming. The intuitive solutions are: dump her into the water, hand it over to an expert like a coach (most of whom will also dump her in the water). This is what probably happened to you when your dad taught you swimming.
But you remember the younger days of misery where you would dread going to the pool. You are afraid that you may end up scaring your daughter so much that she may refuse to swim for the rest of her life. So what is then the best solution?
Let’s start by opening up our minds. Let’s start by gathering information. What are other fathers doing at the pool? What does Google have to say about this? Who is the best swimmer that you know? The process of asking questions serves to both identify symptoms and validate some guesses that we may have made. A good analogy is a detective. He can only solve a case by asking questions. Questions help the mind explore. The more questions you can ask, the better a problem solver you can become. The narrowing down happens only later – given the alternatives available, which best fits our criteria.
And yes, a few words about the criteria. Two questions which help identify criteria: What is important to you? What impact will this have on you? Now? In future? What are you being measured against? The latter question need not be considered a laxman rekha. Please remember the measurement (read incentive) systems of a company can make or break a company or a country. Most of the time 2 or 3 criteria are enough. Each of the problems can be then given a high medium low rating by a team, taking one criterion at a time. If there is consensus, then take the rating as final. If there is debate, then for the time being avoid including the problem as a high priority one.
And when you are done, what do you do to ensure that this learning in the problem solving process is captured? You ensure that it becomes part of your system, your checklist. The more critical your job, the more critical is your checklist. Wonder why cars meeting with accidents are no news, but planes always are? One of the big reasons we are safer in the air than in the ground is checklist. It does not leave things to intuition. Before you take off, tick off. A system or a checklist is something that needs to be amended time and again – as your experiences change. The danger off course is that you have a 50 page checklist which you will never end up reading. So you need to review your list and also from time to time check what can be deleted!
And you are not alone in this chaos. Even the venerated field of medicine has a word for it – A Differential Diagnosis. This is a systematic diagnostic method used to identify the presence of an entity where multiple alternatives are possible (and the process may be termed differential diagnostic procedure), and may also refer to any of the included candidate alternatives (or candidate conditions).
This method is essentially a process of elimination or at least a process of obtaining information that shrinks the “probabilities” of candidate conditions to negligible levels, by using evidence such as symptoms, patient history, and medical knowledge to adjust epistemic confidences in the mind of the diagnostician (or, for computerized or computer-assisted diagnosis, the software of the system).
Differential diagnostic procedures are used by physicians and other trained medical professionals to diagnose the specific disease in a patient, or, at least, to eliminate any imminently life-threatening conditions. Often each individual option of a possible disease is called a differential diagnosis (for example, bronchitis could be a differential diagnosis in the evaluation of a cough that ends up with a final diagnosis of common cold).
A small table can be of help in our diagnosis:
| IS | BUT NOT | WHY NOT | |
| Object | |||
| Fault | |||
| Location of Object | |||
| Timing | |||
| Life Cycle |
The table helps our exploration by making you answer questions. In the first column you look at what is working, in the second what is not working and in the third you hypothesise about the reasons for things not working. In your answers try to be as specific as possible, in your questions, question to the void (meaning that leave no stone unturned)
A fertilizer company in Gujarat was worried about slipping dispatch schedules. It called in consultants like you to help them understand what could be done. The first thing the consultant did was to involve all stakeholders in information gathering: Sales, Warehousing, Transporters, Operations. There seemed to be little at fault. There were no production shortages, orders were being filled in on time, finished good inventories were in place. So what could be the problem?
That is when the exploration decided to be extended to the security personnel manning the gates.
“Kya Karen sahib, Truck to andar hota hain, lekin driver log kidhar gayab hain samajh main hi nahin aata.”
Like most big industrial plants, there was always a line of trucks standing outside the gate. Road side facilities being what they are, most drivers the moment they managed to get their truck into the plant, went about doing their ‘nitya karma’ – bio breaks. The toilets were at some distance from the Material Gates. Another thing was that the company provided canteen facility to these drivers – and they were busy stocking up on human fuel.
The policy was changed to allow trucks to come in earlier than required, so that drivers were free from biological / physiological needs, and voila, dispatches started happening on time.
Oh, and by the way, before we end coming back to the swimming puzzle. One lateral thinking solution is to not make the kid swim. Get her to the pool for a couple of weeks – at the end of two weeks, she herself will get into the pool and learn on her own!