Last week, I left off with the steps of no blame problem solving. This week, I focus on spotting, or identifying, the problem or problems.
Spotting problems early puts the advantage in your court. Is there a problem, or what’s bothering you? You can’t do anything about a problem unless you know about it. The big problems are easy to detect and you don’t need any help detecting those. Or do you? Often, in fact, usually a big problem is really a tangle of interrelated, smaller problems. And a small problem can be bunch of even smaller problems. The way to deal with them is to untangle them and solve them one at a time. And the question is, how can you untangle a complicated mess of problems so that you can solve one at a time? The key to the puzzle is results. You identify the results that are unsatisfactory. A great question here is…what’s the result I’m not getting? If there’s a result you want that you’re not getting, then there is a problem.
Here’s how it works. A business is a system of systems. Systems within systems within systems. Each system produces a result. And that result feeds into other systems. The first step is to identify the system where the unsatisfactory result shows up in the business. And then you trace back through the systems feeding into that system until you find the one that’s operating as it should be and is producing the results it’s supposed to be producing. Continue reading
