What is a problem?
A ‘problem’ is any actual or desired deviation from a normal state of operation.
If your journey to work normally takes 30 minutes, but this morning there has been a major accident then that is a deviation from what usually happens.
If you’re early anyway, and your diary is empty for the morning then you can turn on the radio, sit back or maybe make a few phone calls until the traffic begins to move again. It’s an inconvenience, but not a major problem.
What happens if you have an important meeting that you’re now going to be late for? Perhaps clients and senior managers are involved, and they need your input?
Most people would say that this was now a problem.
To solve this problem, we need a reliable, methodical process. Imagine that you’re already late this morning because you couldn’t find your car keys. You went round and round in circles, repeatedly looking in the same places, looking where your keys ’should’ have been and getting more and more frustrated. This is not a process. Finally, you stop, take a deep breath, retrace your exact steps and find your keys in the bathroom. By following a process, you were able to break down the problem systematically. On any other morning, you wouldn’t have been in such a rush, but today, other people are depending on you being in the office on time.
This leads us to the second aspect of solving problems in the corporate environment – stakeholders. When a problem impacts on other people and their ability to do what they need to do, the scope and impact of the problem have increased dramatically. You can call ahead and tell your manager that you’re going to be late, and you can both express your frustration as much as you like, but it’s not going to get you out of the traffic.
A stakeholder isn’t just someone who has a passing interest in the problem, a stakeholder is someone who has a personal, vested interest.
For example, the public sector puts a lot of effort into ’stakeholder engagement’, inviting managers from the fire service, police, local government and community organisations along to their strategy meetings. Yes, health policy does have an impact on these groups, and it’s important that they have a chance to input their experiences and ideas, but they are not stakeholders in the sense that they don’t have a strong, personal interest – until one of their children is in hospital, for example. This is why patient or customer pressure groups are often effective – because they are personally motivated.
However, to come up with a practical and sustainable solution, we need one more thing – creativity. The following diagram highlights the essential components for effective problem solving.
Einstein famously said that we can’t solve a problem with the same type of thinking that created it. Thinking about getting to work as quickly as possible isn’t going to solve the problem. You need to shift your level of thinking. Would it be acceptable to provide your input to the meeting without being physically present? It’s not ideal, but it’s better than nothing. So you call your manager and ask him to make sure the meeting is held in a room with an audio conference facility.
You can’t do anything about the traffic jam, but you can use your structured thinking, stakeholder relationships and creativity to find an alternative way to achieve your goal.
The problem with solving problems
Deviations from the normal operation of a business become subjectively important problems when one of the three factors that we’re discussing is missing:
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Without a reliable process, you waste resources by revisiting dead ends and reinventing the wheel. |
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Without creativity, you keep on doing what you have always done, resulting in sub-optimal solutions. |
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Without stakeholder commitment, you may not have the necessary support, resources or information to solve the problem. |
An absence in one of these areas simply means that the problem persists until it gets big enough to warrant serious attention. Stakeholders are finally ordered to co-operate and external consultants are often hired to guide a change management process or provide ‘creativity training’ for staff.
None of this is necessary when you approach corporate problems in the way that we’re going to work through in this book.
Problems as Projects
In my experience, corporations tend to solve problems by taking a project approach. Typically, once a problem has been identified, an individual is allocated the responsibility for resolving it, and this problem is now called a Project. Perhaps managers feel less personal risk in talking about projects rather than problems, because working on a problem implies that you don’t know what to do about it, whereas working on a project implies that you’re doing something very important. The responsible individual goes by many names, some of them less than complimentary, and so I will use the term ‘Project Manager’ to define the person who has been tasked with solving the problem.
Two parts to corporate projects
The key difficulty with running projects & solving problems in a corporate environment is that the Project Manager’s managers and a variety of other stakeholders can be involved in the process, especially if the problem is non-trivial. These stakeholders can come from different areas, divisions and locations, each with their own personal goals, aspirations and motivations that may be neither apparent nor aligned to those of the corporation.
Companies can be highly political and herein lies the core issue: to effectively resolve the project you actually need to successfully overcome two separate problems:
- The business or technical problem itself
- The willingness of stakeholders to engage in solving the problem
Vitalsmarts’ ‘Silence Fails’ research in 2007 showed that:
- 82% of employees believe that corporate projects will fail.
- 78% are currently working on a “doomed” project.
- 90% knew early on the project would likely fail.
- 77% describe these projects as “slow motion train wrecks”.
- 81% believe it is impossible to approach the failing project’s key decision maker.
In my experience, solving the business or technical problem is often far easier than managing a disharmonious group of stakeholders, the commonly used phrase being ‘herding cats’ . The Project Manager is trying to exert influence over a group of Stakeholders (who could perceive themselves as being higher than him on the corporate ladder and therefore more important) but has no direct power to make changes or implement the changes without their support. Thus in order to succeed, a Project Manager needs to become both a skilled problem solver and an experienced handler of people.
This method is comprehensive AND delivers results
The difference between this method for running projects and solving problems, and that of other manuals, is that they tend to focus on providing a pure technical approach to solving the business or technical problem, with provide little insight into the second aspect of stakeholder management. In my experience, a purely technical approach is likely to fail.
We’re going to work through the three vital areas of corporate problem solving – Process, Stakeholders and Creativity – in turn and look at both the common theories and practices within them.
The first part of the overall approach that we’re going to explore is the process itself. Within the process there are stages that require stakeholder engagement and creativity, and I’ll expand on those aspects of problem solving in further articles.