Moving the people away from the problem and looking for the missing system. What is this going to help you do?

It’s going to help you sharpen your detection skills in the business. It’s going to allow you to see every problem as an opportunity and to make every situation better than it was. If having these problems is situation normal for you, then rather than exceptions to a smooth running business, you’re constantly running into these. So, if you find yourself in that permanent state of reaction rather than pro-action, it’s time for a healthy change. And a good place to start is to sharpen your problem detection skills so that you identify problems earlier, when they’re easier to deal with. And you can do this by adopting this no blame, system first approach to problem solving because it results in permanent solutions and fewer recurring problems. And, of course, an even better place to start is to build your business with well-designed systems that rarely break down in the first place, but few of us have that luxury. So this is the next best approach.

The real starting place for this is in your head. If a never ending stream of problems is acceptable, business as usual for you, then the chaos that goes with that is what you’ll get. If, on the other hand, business as usual means a smooth running, profitable business with a minimum of problems occasionally cropping up, you’ll become a systematic thinker and you’ll permanently solve problems the system first way. You’ll begin to live your business life the proactive way.

Problems will always be a part of business management. There’s no way to completely avoid them, but they can be minimized, and they can be detected at an early stage when they’re not so serious. We’ll get to problem detection in a moment, but there are a couple of important points to make before we do that.

Some problems are opportunities in disguise. No matter what the problem, no matter what the solution, problem solving is an attempt to make things work better. Most people look at problems in a negative way. Something is wrong. It’s just more work. Somebody screwed up. Why does this have to happen now? It is human nature to take a negative view of problems, but it’s entirely possible to see problems the same way as you look at opportunities, as a chance to make things better. Rather than merely fixing things and getting back to normal, each problem is a chance to get ahead, to make things better than they were. This is a matter of mindset and a different approach. A mindset that says for the same amount of thought and effort, I can make the situation better than it was before. You can’t fake this. It has to be genuine insight on your part. You have to know, consciously and unconsciously, that it’s realistic to make things better than they were. You have to have a sincere and realistic expectation that the result of your efforts will be improvement, not merely a return to the status quo. And you do know that’s possible, don’t you? If you haven’t done it yourself, you’ve seen others do it. They go beyond normal expectations, not naively, not with phony enthusiasm, but with a confident, matter of fact mindset that says, “Well, of course we’ll make it better. Why shouldn’t we?”

Start thinking every problem is an opportunity. It’s real because the mindset opens you up to additional possibilities rather than narrowing your view to merely fixing it. The mindset biases you in a productive way by making you receptive to a broader range of possibilities. Actually, it makes you more receptive. It makes you actively look for and seek a wider range of possibilities than the narrowly focused, fix-it view. And it’s the same mindset that enables entrepreneurs see possibilities where others see business as usual.

Maybe all problems really are opportunities in disguise. Here, what you’re going to do is shift your focus from the problem to the underlying cause. If we want to take a systematic approach to problem solving then we have to take the emotion and the blaming out of the problems and ground your thinking in reality, focus on the results the business needs and the work that must be done to get the results. It also makes partners of you and your employees, rather than adversaries. Hence the name, no blame problem solving. Like all new activities, it may seem artificial, or even a bit clunky, the first few times you use it, but after you do it a few times it becomes automatic and almost innate. It becomes a productive habit of mind.

So how are you going to do this? First off, start a list of all the things that are your problems. Day to day, week to week, and occasionally. There isn’t a business owner who can’t do a list like this. They can be big and they can be small, but mostly they’re going to be the things that exasperate you. Now is the time to really notice these, rather than ignoring them, putting up with them, or just accepting them as part of the way things happen around here, or hoping they’ll go away. The clues to these things are what you say when they happen, or what you think when they happen. “Oh no, not again” or “I hate it when…something happens” or “If I’ve told them once, I’ve told them a thousand times” or “I wish we had a way to do…something” or “It drives me nuts when…” or “I just don’t understand why…this” or “Every time this happens, something else goes wrong.” You know the kind of thing. You’ll have a huge list.

For the sake of this exercise, you might want to stay away from the really big ones like “I don’t have enough sales” because they’re usually a combination of a lot of things and doing the smaller ones first will allow you to address the bigger ones more effectively later.

Let’s look at the steps one by one and then I’ll talk about them in detail:

1. The first thing to ask yourself…is there a systematic approach? 

2. Is there a problem? If the problem is obvious, then make sure it’s not really a bundle of separate problems. If it’s several interwoven problems, then solve them one at a time. And if it hasn’t emerged yet as an identifiable problem, sharpen your problem radar so you can identify problems in their early stages before they become serious. In that way, you eliminate them for the least cost, the least effort and the least disruption to your business.

3. Is it serious? Determine if the problem is important enough to worry about and establish what its priority is amongst all the other things that need your attention. The key to the importance of a problem is the results it produces. What’s the impact on customers and on the business? If there’s only a minor impact, it’s not a serious problem. And if the opposite is true, you have a serious problem.

4. What’s the cause? Find the underlying cause, or causes, of the problem so you don’t focus on the symptoms. That you cure the disease. And there’s a sequence to your investigation. You need to first look for flawed or missing systems. Following that, you look to see if the resources needed to operate the system are sufficient. And then you look for unsatisfactory working conditions, whether it be safety or social pressures or whatever it might be. You deliberately wait until last to see if people are the cause of the problem. If they are, it’s going to be revealed by your analysis of the system, the resources, and the condition.

5. And then, what’s the solution? The solution will almost always be to improve a system in your business, or create a new one and make it better than it was.

Join me next week for Part II of No Blame Problem Solving.

Until next time….

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