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A Structured Approach to Problem Solving
In a world of growing complexity, effective problem-solving skills are essential for business strategists, managers, and leaders. According to Nelson Repenning, Faculty Director in the Business Process Design for Strategic Management online short course from the MIT Sloan School of Management, the inability to come up with a clear problem formulation is probably the most common failure mode. The field of Business Process Design addresses the need for a structured approach to problem solving, and has the ability to fulfil an important role in business analytics and management decision-making processes. Watch the video to find out more.
Transcript
So, one of the most critical skills in implementing dynamic work design, perhaps the most foundational skill, is formulating good problem statements. The inability to come up with a clear problem formulation is probably the most common failure mode.
Why is this so important? Our brains are really composed of two basic systems. There’s the automatic system and there’s the conscious system, and we rely primarily on the automatic system most of the day. The automatic system relies primarily on our past experience for supplying answers to the problems and challenges we face during the day. Good problem formulation is really just a trick that we use to make sure that people take a detour into that conscious processing mode and make sure we use that kind of high-powered parts of our brains to tackle the big challenges that we face in our organizations and hopefully increase the chance that we’re going to get an innovative or break-through solution.
Three mistakes to avoid when creating a problem statement
A good problem statement is a key tool to get all those different disciplines unified and focus on what matters.
1. Skipping the problem statement
The first failure mode is, in many cases, people just skip it. And you see this in established organizations where we have intact teams. “Hey, we’ve all been working together for years, we know what the problem is. We don’t need to take the time to write it down. Let’s just get going.”
In our experience, there’s rarely as much commonality and cohesion across team members as to what they’re doing as they might believe. Not surprisingly, marketing people tend to see marketing problems, operations people tend to see operations problems, finance people tend to see finance problems.
2. Identifying the solution instead of the problem
The second failure mode is that, very often, people write down a problem statement but it’s not really a problem statement; it’s actually just a diagnosis or a solution in disguise. So, a typical failure mode here will sound like, “The problem is we’re not doing my preferred solution.”
Probably the biggest challenge you’ll face in formulating good problem statements is: make sure that you carefully peel apart what’s the problem we’re trying to solve versus what is our proposed solution. If we separate those two pieces, we have a much better chance of coming up with something that is innovative.
3. The problem statement is too vague
The third failure mode is that very often people are not sufficiently precise about what is happening in their problem statement. So, the problem statement here might look like, “We have a morale problem in this organization”, or, “We need to upgrade our brand.”
That will catalyze a lot of activity, but that activity will typically be pretty unfocused and often is wasteful. Much better to pick specific problems, go after them quickly, and start to get a sequence of projects that will make your organization more efficient and more effective.