How Do You Know You Are Focused on Right Problem
In Brief
The Issue
Many C-suite executives (85% of those surveyed) say their companies struggle with trouble diagnosis, which comes with significant costs.
Why It Happens
Part of the reason is that we tend to overengineer the diagnostic procedure— but most problems are faced in daily meetings.
The Solution
Here's a new approach, in the class of seven practices for successfully reframing issues and finding creative solutions.
How good is your company at problem solving? Probably quite expert, if your managers are like those at the companies I've studied. What they struggle with, information technology turns out, is not solving problems just figuring out what the problems are. In surveys of 106 C-suite executives who represented 91 private and public-sector companies in 17 countries, I found that a full 85% strongly agreed or agreed that their organizations were bad at problem diagnosis, and 87% strongly agreed or agreed that this flaw carried pregnant costs. Fewer than 1 in 10 said they were unaffected past the event. The pattern is clear: Spurred by a penchant for activity, managers tend to switch quickly into solution mode without checking whether they really understand the problem.
It has been 40 years since Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Jacob Getzels empirically demonstrated the central role of problem framing in creativity. Thinkers from Albert Einstein to Peter Drucker have emphasized the importance of properly diagnosing your problems. So why do organizations however struggle to get it right?
Part of the reason is that nosotros tend to overengineer the diagnostic procedure. Many existing frameworks—TRIZ, Half dozen Sigma, Scrum, and others—are quite comprehensive. When properly practical, they can exist tremendously powerful. But their very thoroughness also makes them too complex and time-consuming to fit into a regular workday. The setting in which people most need to be better at trouble diagnosis is not the almanac strategy seminar but the daily meeting—so nosotros demand tools that don't require the entire organization to undergo weeks-long training programs.
But even when people use simpler problem-diagnosis frameworks, such as root cause analysis and the related v Whys questioning technique, they often find themselves digging deeper into the problem they've already defined rather than arriving at another diagnosis. That can be helpful, certainly. Merely creative solutions near always come from an alternative definition of your problem.
Through my research on corporate innovation, much of information technology conducted with my colleague Paddy Miller, I have spent close to 10 years working with and studying reframing—first in the narrow context of organizational change and then more broadly. In the following pages I offer a new approach to trouble diagnosis that tin can be applied chop-chop and, I've constitute, frequently leads to creative solutions by unearthing radically different framings of familiar and persistent problems. To put reframing in context, I'll explicate more precisely just what this approach is trying to attain.
The Boring Elevator Problem
Imagine this: You lot are the owner of an office building, and your tenants are complaining virtually the elevator. Information technology's old and ho-hum, and they have to look a lot. Several tenants are threatening to pause their leases if y'all don't fix the problem.
When asked, well-nigh people quickly place some solutions: replace the lift, install a stronger motor, or perhaps upgrade the algorithm that runs the lift. These suggestions fall into what I call a solution infinite: a cluster of solutions that share assumptions about what the trouble is—in this case, that the elevator is boring. This framing is illustrated below.
Withal, when the trouble is presented to building managers, they propose a much more elegant solution: Put upwards mirrors next to the lift. This unproblematic mensurate has proved wonderfully effective in reducing complaints, because people tend to lose track of time when given something utterly fascinating to look at—namely, themselves.
The mirror solution is particularly interesting because in fact it is non a solution to the stated trouble: Information technology doesn't make the elevator faster. Instead it proposes a different agreement of the problem.
Note that the initial framing of the problem is not necessarily wrong. Installing a new lift would probably work. The signal of reframing is not to discover the "real" problem simply, rather, to see if at that place is a better one to solve. In fact, the very idea that a single root problem exists may be misleading; issues are typically multicausal and can be addressed in many ways. The lift issue, for case, could exist reframed as a acme need trouble—likewise many people need the elevator at the same time—leading to a solution that focuses on spreading out the demand, such as by staggering people'due south lunch breaks.
Identifying a different attribute of the trouble can sometimes deliver radical improvements—and even spark solutions to bug that have seemed intractable for decades. I recently saw this in action when studying an oftentimes overlooked trouble in the pet industry: the number of dogs in shelters.
America'due south Canis familiaris-Adoption Problem
Dogs are very popular in America: Industry statistics suggest that more than 40% of U.S. households have one. But this fondness for dogs has a downside: Co-ordinate to estimates by the ASPCA, ane of the largest brute-welfare groups in the The states, more three million dogs enter a shelter each year and are put up for adoption.
Shelters and other animal-welfare organizations piece of work difficult to enhance awareness of this issue. A typical ad or poster will evidence a neglected, sad-looking domestic dog, carefully chosen to evoke compassion, along with a line such as "Save a life—adopt a dog" or perhaps a request to donate to the cause. Through this and other initiatives, this notoriously underfunded system manages to get about ane.4 million dogs adopted each yr. But that leaves more than a one thousand thousand unadopted dogs—and doesn't business relationship for the many cats and other pets in the same situation. There is simply a express amount of compassion to go around. So despite the impressive efforts of shelters and rescue groups, the shortage of pet adopters has persisted for decades.
Lori Weise, the founder of Downtown Dog Rescue in Los Angeles, has demonstrated that adoption is non the only mode to frame the problem. Weise is one of the pioneers of an approach that is currently spreading within the industry—the shelter intervention program. Rather than seek to become more than dogs adopted, Weise tries to keep them with their original families so that they never enter shelters in the get-go place. It turns out that about 30% of the dogs that enter a shelter are "owner surrenders," deliberately relinquished by their owners. In a volunteer-driven community united by a deep love of animals, those people have often been heavily criticized for heartlessly discarding their pets every bit if they were simply some other consumer good. To forestall dogs from ending up with such "bad" owners, many shelters, despite their chronic overpopulation, require potential adopters to undergo laborious background checks.
Weise has a different take. "Possessor surrenders are non a people problem," she says. "By and large, they are a poverty problem. These families love their dogs as much equally we exercise, but they are also exceptionally poor. We're talking almost people who in some cases aren't entirely sure how they will feed their kids at the end of the month. And so when a new landlord suddenly demands a deposit to house the dog, they merely have no way to get the money. In other cases, the domestic dog needs a $10 rabies shot, but the family has no access to a vet, or may be afraid to approach any kind of dominance. Handing over their pet to a shelter is ofttimes the last option they believe they have."
Weise started her program in April 2013, collaborating with a shelter in S Los Angeles. The idea is simple: Whenever a family comes in to manus over a pet, a staff member asks without judgment if the family would prefer to keep the pet. If the reply is yep, the staff member tries to assist resolve the problem, drawing on his or her network and noesis of the arrangement.
Within the first year information technology was articulate that the program was a remarkable success. In prior years Weise's organization had spent an average of $85 per pet it helped. The new plan brought that toll down to near $60 while keeping shelter space free for other animals in need. And, Weise told me, that was just the immediate touch on: "The wider effect on the community is the real point. The program helps families learn trouble solving, lets them know their rights and responsibilities, and teaches the customs that help is available. It likewise shifted the industry's perception of the pet owners: We found that when offered assistance, a full 75% of them really wanted to keep their pets."
Yous won't know which problems tin do good from beingness reframed until y'all try.
As of this writing, Weise'south program has helped close to 5,000 pets and families and has gained the formal support of the ASPCA. Weise has released a book, First Home, Forever Home, that explains to other rescue groups how to run an intervention program. Thanks to her reframing of the problem, overcrowded shelters may someday exist a affair of the past.
How might you detect a similarly insightful reframing for your problem?
Seven Practices for Constructive Reframing
In my feel, reframing is best taught as a quick, iterative process. You might think of it equally a cognitive counterpoint to rapid prototyping.
The practices I outline here can exist used in i of ii ways, depending on how much command you accept over the situation. One manner is to methodically apply all seven to the problem. That can be done in about thirty minutes, and information technology has the do good of familiarizing everyone with the method.
The other way is suitable when you don't control the state of affairs and have to scale the method co-ordinate to how much time is available. Peradventure a squad fellow member ambushes y'all in the hallway and you have but five minutes to assist him or her rethink a problem. If so, merely select the one or two practices that seem most advisable.
Five minutes may sound like too petty time to fifty-fifty depict a problem, much less reframe it. But surprisingly, I have found that such brusque interventions are often sufficient to kick-get-go new thinking—and once in a while they can trigger an aha moment and radically shift your view of a problem. Proximity to your ain problems can brand it easy to get lost in the weeds, incessantly ruminating nigh why a colleague, a spouse, or your children won't listen. Sometimes all you lot need is someone to propose, "Well, could the trouble be that you are bad at listening to them?"
Of course, non all bug are that simple. Frequently multiple rounds of reframing—interspersed with observation, conversation, and prototyping—are necessary. And in some cases reframing won't assistance at all. But you won't know which problems tin can do good from being reframed until you try. One time yous've mastered the five-minute version, yous can apply reframing to pretty much whatsoever trouble you face.
Here are the seven practices:
1. Institute legitimacy.
Information technology's difficult to utilise reframing if y'all are the only person in the room who understands the method. Other people, driven by a desire to observe solutions, may feel that your insistence on discussing the problem is counterproductive. If the group has a power imbalance, such as when you're facing clients or more-senior colleagues, they may well shut y'all down earlier you even go started. And fifty-fifty powerful executives may find it hard to use the method when people are accepted to getting answers rather than questions from their leaders.
Your first job, therefore, is to found the method's legitimacy within the grouping, creating the conversational space necessary to employ reframing. I suggest ii ways to do this. The get-go is to share this article with the people you are meeting. Fifty-fifty if they don't read it, just seeing it may persuade them to listen to you lot. The second is to relate the ho-hum elevator problem, which is my go-to example when I take less than 30 seconds to explicate the concept. I have institute it to exist a powerful way to quickly explicate reframing—how it differs from merely diagnosing a problem and how it can potentially create dramatically better results.
2. Bring outsiders into the give-and-take.
This is the unmarried well-nigh helpful reframing practice. I saw it in action 8 years agone when the direction team of a small European visitor was wrestling with a lack of innovation in its workforce. The managers had recently encountered a specific innovation training technique they all liked, so they started discussing how best to implement it within the organization.
Sensing that the group lacked an outside vocalization, the general manager asked his personal assistant, Charlotte, to take part in their discussion. "I've been working hither for 12 years," Charlotte told the group, "and in that time I have seen three different management teams effort to roll out some new innovation framework. None of them worked. I don't think people would react well to the introduction of another set of buzzwords."
Charlotte'south observation prompted the managers to realize that they had fallen in love with a solution—introducing an innovation framework—before they fully understood the trouble. They presently concluded that their initial diagnosis had been incorrect: Many of their employees already knew how to innovate, only they didn't feel very engaged in the company, and then they were unlikely to take initiative across what their task descriptions mandated. What the managers had commencement framed every bit a skill-set trouble was better approached every bit a motivation trouble.
They abandoned all talk of innovation workshops and instead focused on improving employee date by (among other things) giving people more autonomy, introducing flexible working hours, and switching to a more than participatory decision-making style. The remedy worked. Within 18 months workplace satisfaction scores had doubled and employee turnover had fallen dramatically. And as people started bringing their creative abilities to bear at work, financial results improved markedly. Four years after the company won an award for being the land's best identify to work.
As this story shows, getting an outsider's perspective can be instrumental in rethinking a problem quickly and properly. To do and so most finer:
Look for "boundary spanners." Equally research past Michael Tushman and many others has shown, the most useful input tends to come from people who empathise but are non fully part of your globe. Charlotte was close plenty to the front lines of the company to know how the employees actually felt, merely she was too close enough to management to empathise its priorities and speak its linguistic communication, making her ideally suited for the task. In contrast, calling on an innovation expert might well accept led the team's members further downwards the innovation path instead of inspiring them to rethink their trouble.
Cull someone who will speak freely. Past virtue of her long tenure and her closeness to the general managing director, Charlotte felt free to claiming the direction team while remaining committed to its objectives. This sense of psychological condom, every bit Harvard'due south Amy C. Edmondson calls it, has been proved to help groups perform better. Yous might consider turning to someone whose career advancement will not be adamant past the group in question or who has a track record of (constructively) speaking truth to power.
Expect input, not solutions. Crucially, Charlotte did not endeavor to provide the group with a solution; rather, her observation made the managers themselves rethink their trouble. This design is typical. By definition, outsiders are not experts on the situation and thus will rarely exist able to solve the problem. That'south non their function. They are there to stimulate the problem owners to think differently. So when you bring them in, ask them specifically to challenge the group's thinking, and prime the problem owners to listen and look for input rather than answers.
3. Get people'southward definitions in writing.
Information technology's not unusual for people to leave a coming together thinking they all agree on what the problem is after a loose oral clarification, only to detect weeks or months later that they had different views of the outcome. Moreover, a successful reframing may well lurk in 1 of those views.
For case, a management team may agree that the visitor'due south problem is a lack of innovation. But if you ask each fellow member to depict what's wrong in a sentence or two, you will quickly see how framings differ. Some people will claim, "Our employees aren't motivated to innovate" or "They don't sympathise the urgency of the situation." Others will say, "People don't have the right skill prepare," "Our customers aren't willing to pay for innovation," or "Nosotros don't advantage people for innovation." Pay close attention to the wording, considering even seemingly inconsequential word choices can surface a new perspective on the problem.
I saw a memorable sit-in of this when I was working with a group of managers in the construction manufacture, exploring what they could do as individual leaders to deliver better results. As we tried to identify the barriers each 1 faced, I asked them to write their problems on flip charts, after which we jointly analyzed the statements. The very first annotate from the grouping had the greatest bear on: "Almost none of the definitions include the word 'I.'" With 1 exception, the problems were consistently worded in a way that diffused individual responsibility, such as "My team doesn't…," "The market place doesn't…," and, in a few cases, "We don't…" That ane observation shifted the tenor of the meeting, pushing the participants to take more ownership of the challenges they faced.
These individual definitions of the trouble should ideally be gathered in accelerate of a word. If possible, ask people to send you a few lines in a confidential e-mail, and insist that they write in judgement form—bullet points are simply too condensed. Then re-create the definitions yous've collected on a flip nautical chart so that everyone can see them and react to them in the coming together. Don't attribute them, considering you want to ensure that people's judgment of a definition isn't affected by the definer'due south identity or status.
Receiving these multiple definitions will sensitize you to the perspectives of other stakeholders. Nosotros all appreciate in theory that others may experience a problem differently (or not see it at all). Simply as demonstrated in a recent study by Johannes Hattula, of Purple College London, if managers try to imagine a customer'southward perspective themselves, they typically get it wrong. To understand what other stakeholders recall, y'all demand to hear it from them.
iv. Enquire what's missing.
When faced with the description of a trouble, people tend to delve into the details of what has been stated, paying less attention to what the description might be leaving out. To rectify this, make sure to inquire explicitly what has not been captured or mentioned.
Recently I worked with a team of senior executives in Brazil who had been asked to provide their CEO with ideas for improving the market's perception of the company's stock toll. The squad had expertly analyzed the components affecting a stock's value—the P/Eastward ratio forecast, the debt ratio, earnings per share, and and so on. Of course, none of this was news to the CEO, nor were these factors particularly easy to bear on, leading to mild despondency on the team.
But when I prompted the executives to zoom out and consider what was missing from their definition of the problem, something new came up. It turned out that when external financial analysts asked to speak with executives from the company, the task of responding was typically delegated to slightly more junior leaders, none of whom had received training in how to talk to analysts. As shortly as this point was raised, the grouping saw that it had establish a potential recommendation for the CEO. (The observation came not from the squad's finance proficient simply from a boundary-spanning HR executive.)
5. Consider multiple categories.
Every bit Lori Weise's story demonstrates, powerful modify can come from transforming people's perception of a trouble. Ane fashion to trigger this kind of prototype shift is to invite people to place specifically what category of problem they call up the group is facing. Is it an incentive problem? An expectations problem? An attitude problem? And so effort to suggest other categories.
A manager I know named Jeremiah Zinn did this when he led the product development squad of the popular children's entertainment channel Nickelodeon. The squad was launching a promising new app, and lots of kids downloaded it. But actually activating the app was somewhat complicated, because it required logging in to the household's cablevision Television receiver service. At that point in the sign-up process, almost every kid dropped out.
Seeing the problem as one of usability, the team put its expertise to work and ran hundreds of A/B tests on various sign-upwardly flows, seeking to make the process less complex. Zippo helped.
The shift came when Zinn realized that the team members had been thinking of the problem too narrowly. They had focused on the kids' deportment, carefully tracking every click and swipe—but they had not explored how the kids felt during the sign-upwardly procedure. That turned out to be disquisitional. As the team started looking for emotional reactions, it discovered that the request for the cable password made the kids fear getting in problem: To a 10-year-quondam kid, a countersign request signals forbidden territory. Equipped with that insight, Zinn's team only added a short video explaining that it was OK to inquire parents for the password—and saw a rapid 10-fold increment in the sign-up charge per unit for the app.
Past explicitly highlighting how the group thinks about a problem—what is sometimes called metacognition, or thinking about thinking—you can often help people reframe information technology, fifty-fifty if y'all don't have other frames to suggest. And it'due south a useful style of sorting through written definitions if you managed to get together them in accelerate.
Zinn'due south story too exposes a typical pitfall in problem solving, first expressed by Abraham Kaplan in his famous police of the instrument: "Give a small boy a hammer, and he volition find that everything he encounters needs pounding." At Nickelodeon, because the squad members were usability experts, they defaulted to thinking the problem was one of usability.
6. Analyze positive exceptions.
To notice additional trouble framings, look to instances when the problem did not occur, request, "What was different near that situation?" Exploring such positive exceptions, sometimes chosen bright spots, can ofttimes uncover hidden factors whose influence the group may not have considered.
A lawyer I spoke to, for example, told me that the partners at his firm would occasionally run into to discuss initiatives that might abound their business in the longer term. But to his frustration, the instant one of those meetings concluded, he and the other partners went back to focusing on landing the next curt-term projection. When prompted to retrieve of positive exceptions, he remembered i longer-term initiative that had in fact gone forward.
What was different about that one? I asked. It was that the meeting, unusually, had included not only partners but also an associate who was considered a ascension star—and it was she who had pursued the idea. That immediately suggested that talented associates exist included in time to come meetings. The associates felt privileged and energized by being invited to the strategic discussions, and unlike the partners, they had a clear short-term incentive to motility on long-term projects—namely, to impress the partners and gain an edge in the competition confronting their peers.
A checklist for problem diagnosis tends to discourage bodily thinking.
Looking at positive exceptions can also make the discussion less threatening. Especially in a large group or other public setting, dissecting a string of failures tin rapidly get confrontational and brand people overly defensive. If, instead, you lot ask the group'south members to analyze a positive upshot, it becomes easier for them to examine their ain behavior.
7. Question the objective.
In the negotiation classic Getting to Yes, Roger Fisher, William L. Ury, and Bruce Patton share the early management thinker Mary Parker Follett'due south story about two people fighting over whether to keep a window open or closed. The underlying goals of the two turn out to differ: One person wants fresh air, while the other wants to avoid a draft. Only when these hidden objectives are brought to light through the questions of a third person is the problem resolved—past opening a window in the next room.
That story highlights another fashion to reframe a problem—past paying explicit attention to the objectives of the parties involved, first clarifying and then challenging them. Weise's shelter intervention program, for case, hinged on a shift in the objective, from increasing adoption to keeping more than pets with their original owners. The story of Charlotte, too, included a shift in the stated goals of the management team, from teaching innovation skills to boosting employee appointment.
Equally described in Fred Kaplan'southward book The Insurgents, a famous contemporary example is the change in U.S. military doctrine pioneered by General David Petraeus, amongst others. In traditional warfare, the aim of a battle is to defeat the enemy forces. Just Petraeus and his allies argued that when dealing with insurgencies, the ground forces had to pursue a different, broader objective to prevent new enemies from cropping up—namely, get the populace on its side, thereby removing the source of recruits and other forms of local back up the insurgency needed to operate in the area. That approach was eventually adopted by the war machine—because a pocket-sized grouping of rogue thinkers took information technology upon themselves to question the predefined and long-standing objectives of their organization.
Decision
Powerful every bit reframing can exist, it takes time and practice to get good at it. One senior executive from the defence force industry told me, "I was shocked by how difficult it is to reframe problems, but also how constructive information technology is." As you outset to work more with the method, urge your team to trust the process, and be prepared for it to feel messy and disruptive at times.
In leading more and more reframing discussions, you may also exist tempted to create a diagnostic checklist. I strongly caution you against that—or at least against making the checklist evident to the group you're engaging with. A checklist for trouble diagnosis tends to discourage actual thinking, which of form defeats the very purpose of engaging in reframing. Every bit Neil Gaiman reminds the states in The Sandman, tools tin exist the subtlest of traps.
Finally, combine reframing with real-world testing. The method is ultimately limited by the knowledge and perspectives of the people in the room—and as Steve Bare, of Stanford, and others take repeatedly shown, information technology is fatal to think you can figure it all out within the comfy confines of your own office. The side by side time yous face a problem, beginning by reframing it—but don't expect as well long before getting out of the building to observe your customers and prototype your ideas. Information technology is neither thinking nor testing alone, merely a marriage of the two, that holds the key to radically better results.
The first appearance in print of the elevator problem, to the best of the author's knowledge, was in Russell L. Ackoff, "Systems, Organizations, and Interdisciplinary Research,"
A version of this article appeared in the January–February 2017 event (pp.76–83) of Harvard Business organization Review.
Source: https://hbr.org/2017/01/are-you-solving-the-right-problems
0 Response to "How Do You Know You Are Focused on Right Problem"
Post a Comment