A Definitive Guide to Problem-Solving: Part 5
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 four.
Review Results, Analyze the Future and Always Try Again
For 20 years, Browne and his wife were blackjack counters. “One of the things that always amused us was when we’d be flying to Vegas or Macau and there’d be people on the plane getting ready to play blackjack,” he says. “They’d all have a system and say, ‘I cleaned them out last time.’ They don’t understand: The dumbest monkey in the world could play blackjack and win — it’s just that over time, you lose. That’s the math of the system.”
Much like blackjack, solving problems isn’t an exact science, but it does require some scientific thinking and experimenting. Companies need to grow comfortable with making hypotheses and mistakes and learning from both. Much like card counters must recount when the deck is shuffled, businesses must anticipate a changing environment — measurements, criteria for success, people in the organization, outside factors. What can’t change is a company’s dedication to learning from mistakes and adjusting quickly.
“When you make a mistake, ask, ‘What did I miss? Why did I miss it? What did I fail to do?’,” Browne says. “That’s an analytical process of reviewing the bad decisions you made rather than just wallowing in the successes of the good decisions. Bill Gates has said that success is a lousy teacher; it makes people think they know what they really don’t know. I think that’s true.”
Once a company implements a solution, Bossi says that it must monitor and evaluate the solution’s performance on an ongoing basis. Start-and-stop exercises — for example, checking the solution’s progress once a year — usually won’t work because companies tend to treat them more like a checkbox than an embedded part of the decision-making process, he says. Continuous evaluation allows companies to catch problems as they emerge, rather than once they are fully realized.
The map will be useful for ongoing monitoring, Bossi says. The company will see performance on departmental and organization-wide levels. If the solution has unforeseen consequences, the map will allow the company to see exactly where it went wrong and quickly fix the problem — or perhaps decide that what went wrong is preferable.
Nickols says that the path companies take will vary for each solution. Sometimes, companies will think that they have the solution but find that their path leads to a brick wall. “That’s not because you chose the wrong path, it’s because nobody knew what the right path was,” he says. “There’s a lot of feeling your way along.”
Instead of worrying about what’s at the end of each path, Nickols says that the best thing companies can do to is take a step and figure out where to step next.
And if the business does reach a point where the problem is solved, there’s only one logical thing left to do: “Celebrate,” Nickols says with a laugh. “The more you succeed in solving issues and wrestling with issues, the more credible you’ll become.”
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.
