Solution Oriented Thinking Refines Decision Making Capabilities
One day at my former ecommerce company, a team member told me that the government would only allow licensed distributors to sell fertilizers. For us, this was bad news because my team’s role is to grow revenue and there were several fertilizer sellers on the platform moving appreciable volumes. At this point, I asked the individual for their thoughts on what we should do next? The team member suggested that we should demonstrate that we are making an effort to uphold government policy; their suggestion is certainly valid, but unfortunately, lacks actionable next steps. After we jointly discussed, we decided to contact fertilizer sellers, aggregate their distribution licenses, and ban fertilizer listings from sellers without a license. When I probed, I was not looking for the right answer, but rather I was trying to stimulate thought. Over time, this stimulation will build future leaders.
In my experience, some business partners, external and internal, focus on the existence of an issue, rather than thinking through solutions. If practicing solution oriented thinking, after the individual identifies the issue and underlying cause, they should also invest energy into thinking about suggested actionable solution(s).
Definition
Solution oriented thinking is an approach to decision making, where we seek to understand the underlying causes and create actionable steps to resolve the issue now and prevent the issue moving forward.
Purpose
As mentioned in my previous article, A Detailed Guide to Cleanly Navigating Corporate Politics, for those who want to elevate to become a decision maker, a boss, a leader there are two primary requirements: Receiving Opportunities and Demonstrating Competence. Receiving opportunities was described in the aforementioned article. Whereas, competence boils down to good decision making, which, as we will discuss today, is a skill that needs to be refined.
In most situations, leaders and managers are the decision makers because they have good judgement. Good judgement comes from repetitions of thoughtful problem solving. Solving problems mindlessly will not refine one’s judgement. When solving problems, practicing solution oriented thinking can guide individuals looking to refine their decision making capabilities or provide managers a framework to guide their team.
Solution Oriented Thinking in Practice
Solution oriented thinking is a skill that takes devoted practice. Here is my personal practice regiment. When a problem comes up, before I tell my managers that problem exist, I will spend five to thirty minutes thinking about the underlying cause(s) and the next steps. Within this initial thinking period, the 100% correct and complete solution is not needed since we likely have not considered all available options yet, but we should have thought about the pros and cons of possible solutions. Now we can explain the problem and planned next steps to our boss, who should then provide feedback on the validity of our logic. This process of thinking about potential solutions and developing ideas for next steps is a cornerstone of our devoted practice to decision making.
Underlying Causes
When thinking about underlying causes, we need to understand the source and the reason. To help illustrate, let us discuss a case scenario of a consumer facing technology company (e.g., Facebook, Netflix, Uber) facing a decrease in their platform traffic. These companies live and die by their number of users; so if the total number of users is going down, we certainly need to understand the underlying cause. Both the segment and process should be measured against the agreed upon traffic metric (e.g., impressions, clicks, length of interaction, conversion rates, daily users) to determine the source and the reason of the underlying cause.
The source is usually found through segmentation or filtering through possibilities. A segment is a subsection of the overall base. In our case, platform user traffic could be segmented by new users vs. returning users, users split by age group, users with competitor account vs. loyal users, users split by gender, psycho-graphic cohorts, etc. The segments you choose to analyze should be based on relevance to your issue and correspond to controllable aspects of initiatives. For the consumer facing technology company, if a platform can target messages by age and gender, than it is valid to check the contribution of user decline within these segments. Deeper commentary on finding the most relevant data to segment can be found in my former article, Utilizing the Most Relevant Data to Drive Influence.
The reason is found through understanding the process or the user flow in this case. In the consumer tech case, process would include any activity that affects users, starting from installs and ending with uninstalls, but also including any user related logins, initiatives, notifications, press. From our efforts, we should first develop an understanding of reasons that ties with actions we can control. For example, did the issue arise from an error within our product development, an under performance from online advertisements/new user initiative? If no internal factors can be attributed to the cause, we can begin to consider external factors (e.g., seasonality, competitor promotions) affecting user flow.
Next Steps
The next steps you initially provide can be immediate term (next steps to solve the current issue aka band-aid solution) and/or long term (the next steps to prevent the issue from arising again aka process improvements) action items. For the purposes of continuity, let us continue with our consumer facing technology company with a declining number of users. Our next steps should tie closely with our findings from underlying reasons. For example, if we found that the primary source of decline was due to daily new users, specifically from fewer number of installs due to under performance of our online advertisements, we can now develop targeted next steps to address this issue.
Whether the resolutions are immediate or long term will depend on the severity of the decline and its importance to our overall results. For example if we can still make this month’s targets with improved performance in the back half of the month, we may only need long term next steps. Immediate next steps would increase our total number of users now, which might be providing promotions, sending push notifications/emails/texts, or increasing online advertisement spend. Long term next steps should dig into resolving the reason behind the decline, in our case, decreased installs due to ad under performance. So we need to figure out how can we run more optimal advertisements through analyzing relevant data points. Perhaps our data will tell us static images have a higher number of installs per dollar spent for a certain demographic (x), whereas videos outperform on all other demographics (1-x). Our next steps should incorporate what metrics will be monitored, how/when we should check, and the resulting action based on the metric performance.
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From the perspective of a manager, we should look to install solution oriented thinking in our team members. If you have a team of experienced problem solvers, it is possible to ask them to come to you with suggested solutions along with the issue. If your team does not consist of experienced problem solvers or does not respond well to pressure, we will need to take a different approach. Previously, I tried asking my team, which consisted of many junior individuals, to come with solutions along with the issues, but that meant they only brought up issues if they had a solution. Once I realized some issues were not being discussed, I reverted to encouraging my team members to come talk to me about any issues, whether or not they have the solution. Once issues are raised to me, I will challenge my team members to think about potential solutions. In all cases, managers need to install the habit of thinking through solutions to their team, while also ensuring they themselves are aware of all relevant issues.
Closing Remarks
Our brain muscles need to be trained in solution oriented thinking, so I cannot emphasize enough that this needs to be exercised over and over. For every problem encountered, we need to always think about potential solutions. Whether the government is preventing the sale of fertilizers, you have a large decline in numbers users, or any other issue arises AND even if it is not your job to make the decision, you, a future leader, need to practice thinking through solutions. In other words, if you want to be the boss, you have to practice thinking as if you were the boss. Practicing going through underlying causes, source and reason, and next steps, immediate and long, will refine our problem solving skill set over time. Demonstrating that you can make solution oriented decisions over and over again for tougher and tougher problems will point you towards becoming the decision maker, the boss, the leader.
Navigating office politics will help us get the projects. Solution oriented thinking will refine our problem solving mindset. To close the loop, we need to execute our plans, test their results, and iterate to optimize for the future. I did not dig into all of the latter topics this time, but they will be discussed in future articles.
Are there nuances that I missed? If you have any comments or questions, feel free to respond below or connect with me on LinkedIn. Please follow me on medium.com/@dhuynh2979 for more articles about leadership and management.
