A Definitive Guide to Problem-Solving: Part 1

​There’s no one way to solve a problem — in fact, you should avoid using canned approaches. But there are ideas, steps, plans and questions that problem-solving professionals have found useful for decades.​

This is a five-part series on problem-solving. Click to see steps two, three, four and five.

Finding and Defining Problems

Three days after graduating high school, Fred Nickols joined the U.S. Navy and began solving problems. He learned a technique called fault isolation that let him find and fix problems with radars, computers and weaponry. During one gunfire support mission, he found that a gun was shooting bullets 300 yards beyond where the military thought capable — Nickols wrote up the problem and the weapons system was modified to show its more accurate, longer range. “That was a nice beneficial side effect,” he says with a chuckle.

After leaving the Navy, Nickols worked for 40 years as an executive and business consultant and found that business problems could be grouped into the same three categories as they were in the Navy. There are find-and-fix problems, like the gun that shot too far. These problems are easily definable and have definite solutions. There are problems where businesses simply want to improve. “Nothing’s broke, but you want much better than what you have,” Nickols says. Then there are the problems where businesses have a void to fill and must create something new. “You’re starting from scratch,” he says. “You don’t have anything in place, but you’ve got to put something in place to create the results you want.

“You’ve got to decide up front: Are you trying to find something and fix it, are you trying to improve what you have or are you building something from scratch?” Nickols says.

A caveat to finding and defining problems is the distinct difference between problems that have a single solution and those that don’t, according to M. Neil Browne, a professor at Bowling Green State University’s College of Business and co-author of Asking the Right Questions. Single-solution problems — “efficiency questions,” Browne calls them — will have one answer that is clearly better than the rest. If shipping products has become too expensive, for example, there’s likely one answer that works best to reduce costs. But in more complex problems — “critical thinking problems,” Browne says — the best answer depends on perspective.

“If a firm is having difficulty and the marketing director says, ‘You should spend more money providing incentives to our sales staff,’ but one of the production engineers says, ‘You could save more money by spending more on automated equipment,’ that’s not going to be something that every reasonable person in the room is going to agree with,” Browne says, “because their assumptions are different.”

Consider critical-thinking problems this way: Your back hurts, so you make appointments with an exercise physiologist, an orthopedic surgeon and a holistic health guru. Each will use knowledge of their specialty to give you a different solution for your back pain. They could debate for hours without reaching a single conclusion. As psychologist Abraham Maslow quipped in 1966: “I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.”

This initial stage of problem-solving — defining the problem — is where most businesses stumble, says Andrea Bassi, founder and CEO of KnowlEdge Srl, associate professor of system dynamics modelling at Stellenbosch University and co-author of Tackling Complexity. There are many ways companies can misidentify problems, but Bassi says that their biggest mistake often occurs when they define a problem by its symptoms instead of its causes, main effects and true drivers. Addressing the symptoms can help eliminate short-term issues, Bassi says, but it likely won’t solve the long-standing problems and could create more.

Most problems emerge from within organizations rather than originating from the outside, Bassi says. “We tend to think that things are imposed onto us, and we need to find solutions, but in fact, we’re normally creating problems with our behavior,” he says. “If you use a systemic approach, you can figure out more lasting and more effective solutions.”

But before moving into a systemic approach, it’s important to go beyond the surface of what the problem could be and find out exactly what it is. In this stage, Nickols says that companies must avoid locking in on one solution by asking many questions: What functions do you want to be able to perform, and who must be able to perform them? What kind of data structure do you want in the system?

“Over time, the picture of the system that you’re building will begin to emerge and finally crystallize,” Nickols says.

But the questions should never stop, even if the problem crystalizes. Questions, according to Browne, are likely the most important part of the next step: Creating the team that will solve the problem.

About the Author | Hal Conick

Hal Conick is a staff writer for the AMA’s magazines and e-newsletters. He can be reached at hconick@ama.org or on Twitter at @HalConick.