A Definitive Guide to Problem-Solving: Part 4

​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 one, two, three, and five.

Finding and Implementing the Solution

When Nickols worked as an executive director at Educational Testing Service in the early 1990s, the rejection rate for one of the company’s health care certification tests was more than 70%. That was too high, he says — test-takers’ careers were on the line.

The clerical staff at ETS were convinced that people filling out the forms were inept, but Nickols saw that the problem was the system itself. Half of the rejects had an invalid or missing institutional code, a number that identified where the registrant was trained or would be employed, he says. The other half were rejected because of sloppiness, such as leaving fields blank that needed to be filled in.

To fix the problem, Nickols told the clerical staff to ensure registrants were instructed that ETS wanted a “clean and complete” registration form with all fields filled in. He also realized that registrants were given a numerically ordered institutional code list that they’d have to scan for their institution. To fix this issue, Nickols told staff to give registrants an alphabetically ordered list of institutions. After ETS made the changes, the rejection rate plummeted from 70% to 9%, Nickols says.

Although this problem seemed easy to solve, Nickols documented everything, just as he would when mapping any other problem. He did this in part to be accountable and responsible, but also because he got the same question from other executives after each problem: “How the hell did you do that?”

“It’s partly a matter of being accountable,” he says. “It’s partly a matter of sharing what was learned with others. It’s partly a matter of having a record that’s more than just a history. Think of it as a problem-solving memory.”

This problem-solving memory will help companies stay vigilant for side effects of the solution with an organization-wide view, Nickols says.

In Smart Questions: Learn to Ask the Right Questions for Powerful Results, authors Gerald Nadler and William J. Chandon suggest that businesses should create a “living solution” to problems. The living solution is similar to the solution companies plan for, but the living solution takes into account a changing environment.

Nadler and Chandon suggest three steps toward a living solution: First, create a detailed description of recommended changes, coming as close as possible to the solution the company had been planning for, which they call the future solution. Then, plan for successive stages of change and improvement that move toward the future solution. Finally, have an installation plan to begin working on the stages of change. Nadler and Chandon write that there are challenges to having a living solution, including lack of resources, unavailable technology, changes in attitude or skepticism from key decision makers. To anticipate these challenges, the authors suggest that problem-solvers ask questions and think holistically about the living solution.

Ask information questions like: What specific information needs to be collected to stay as close as possible to the future solution?

Ask questions of uniqueness like: How can we develop a living solution and an implementation plan that work within our environment and stay close to our future solution?

Ask systematic questions like: What are potential input ideas for overcoming a challenge that prevents us from adopting the future solution now?

Browne says that businesses should implement solutions as quickly as they decide on them. Although they will occasionally make mistakes, they will also become agile when dealing with problems. Businesses don’t often have four or five months to decide on a solution — by the end, they may have already lost millions of dollars — so quick decisions are imperative.

“That’s where the role of leadership experience and knowing who, from the past track record, you can depend on,” Browne says. Though a good record doesn’t guarantee future success, he says looking for high-probability events is the best option.

InnoCentive’s Fredrickson uses a fishing analogy to show why companies must decide quickly on solutions. You can know all the best spots in the lake and catch the fish, but do you know what you’re going to do once you catch it? Will you eat it, take a picture and throw it back or simply let the fish rot in the boat, just as an unused idea lies dormant in a company?

“Unless you are intentional and continue to experiment, you’ve just gone fishing — you caught some fish, but you really didn’t do anything with it, and it rots,” Fredrickson says. “At that point, it’s not innovation because you never really acted on what you found.”

Once the solution is in place, companies must continue to test their theories, always willing to accept that they may have been wrong.

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.