What's the problem?
We’re one week into the school year and we have already faced our first crisis.
Crisis might be too loaded of a word. No one is injured, missing, or hurt, which I should emphasize so I don’t have to write a community letter next week about this newsletter 😬
We do however have about 300 students without buses.
*But again, to be clear, no one was hurt, is hurt, or will be hurt.
But still, 300 kids without transportation to school is no small obstacle, especially when you consider the ripple effect of trying to rearrange routes, find new drivers, and then manage the increase in taxi traffic at the gate.
“Never let a good crisis go to waste.”
Saul Alinsky
While no crisis is a good crisis, you should squeeze every bit of learning and growth out of them you can.
As we prepared a community letter last weekend, my supervisor asked me to articulate the problem to him (which actually ended up being three problems all stacked on each other). And then he said, “people can’t trust your solutions if they don’t believe you accurately understand the problem.”
I’ve been thinking about that all week and thinking about that question in the context of other areas of my life.
“What’s the problem?”
How often do you jump into problem solving before you jump into problem identifying?
We herald problem solving as a crucial skill in team members but this only works if you’re solving the right problem.
What good is it to efficiently solve the wrong problem?
“If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask…. For once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.”
Albert Einstein (he gets this attributed to him regularly, but I couldn’t actually confirm it)
Whether Einstein really said it or not, the idea rings true - if you can accurately and succinctly define your problem, your path to the correct solution for the right problem becomes much more clear..
One of the unintended effects of celebrating the end result (a solution) is that we fall into the trap defined by Stefan Thomke and Donald Reinertsen as the fallacy of “The sooner the project is started, the sooner it will be finished.” This might appear true but isn’t always the case. Unfortunately, it leaves many teams rushing to jump into solving the “eye-level” problem instead of digging for the root problem because they are worried their supervisor will punish them for not “getting started” right away.
Wazoku Crowd is a company that has a network of over 500,000 problem solvers who have solved thousands of problems for non-profits and corporations around the world. Engaging in this work for decades, they have lots of experience in what it takes to solve a problem. In a 2012 Harvard Business Review article, they lay out their process for tackling problems of all sizes from start to finish. I’ve pulled their question list and shared it below in case you just want to see the list itself:
What is the basic need?
What is the desired outcome?
Who stands to benefit and why?
Is the effort aligned with our strategy?
What are the desired benefits for the company and how will we measure them?
How will we ensure the solution is implemented?
What approaches have we tried?
What approaches have others tried?
What are the internal and external constraints on implementing a solution?
Is the problem actually many problems?
What requirements must a solution meet?
Which problem solves should be engaged?
What incentives do solvers need?
How will solutions be evaluated and measured?
My favorite question in this batch at the moment?
Is the problem actually many problems?
In the case of our bus issue, the problem was more than simply a shortage of vehicles and drivers. There were systems issues that were magnified when the external problem struck.
If we had spent all of our energy and resources trying to solve the bus/driver shortage, we would have only been able to resolve part of the problem which still would have left us in hot water because now the other data management issues had been surfaced.
Find the right problem and make sure you’ve found them all.
Keep Asking,
Kyle