Episode 22 - How to Become More Effective at Problem Solving in Your Business
Transcript:
Lou Quinto:
Hi, welcome to Q&A on Breakthrough Leadership. I'm Lou Quinto.
Craig P. Anderson:
And I'm Craig Anderson.
Lou Quinto:
In today's episode, what we're going to do is we're going to cover the topic of problem solving. And when it comes to problem solving, let's face it, 80% of all of our list of things to do involves problems. And so what we'll do is, as normal, we'll go ahead and we'll talk about three particular issues when it comes to problem solving.
Lou Quinto:
First is defining the problem. The second one is going to be asking the right questions. And lastly what we're going to do is talk about how to separate the problem into smaller issues. So the first topic that we'll cover is defining the problem, Craig.
Craig P. Anderson:
Yeah. So, defining the problem is pretty crucial. I can remember in a business that I was running, I came in and sales weren't where they were and I didn't think the leads were very qualified. So I came up with this harebrained idea that we were going to start charging people for estimates. Not because we... I decided I knew what the problem was without really investigating and I defined they weren't just qualifying our leads.
Craig P. Anderson:
So, we did that for a little while and all of our competitors slayed us for charging for estimates. The idea was, we wanted to see if they were committed and see if we had the right buyer, but it ultimately kind of blew up in our face. So, it wasn't really defining what the problem was with why we weren't growing the business. It was kind of coming to the solution before we defined the problem.
Lou Quinto:
Right.
Craig P. Anderson:
So, I don't know what experiences you've had, but that was quite a learning experience for me and especially a nice little bit of egg on my face when I was fairly new to the company. So, yeah, good times.
Lou Quinto:
When it comes to defining the problem, there's a quote that I use when I'm doing training for problem solving. And I won't mention who the person is because you'll just give me an okay, boomer type of response, but a problem well defined is a problem half solved. And when you-
Craig P. Anderson:
That's Peter Drucker, isn't it, you boomer?
Lou Quinto:
Yeah. Okay, good. So much for our pre-work here. But yes, Peter Drucker did bring that up. It's an actual... It's reality. So, if you take the definition of a problem, which is our system isn't working, all right, that immediately tells you, you got to take apart the entire system.
Lou Quinto:
But if you can define the problem is that our emails are not being sent in a timely fashion, now all of a sudden I go from the entire system to just sending emails. So, you have eliminated a majority of potential time wasted because you don't have to look in other areas. And so by defining the problem as specifically as you can, what you will do is you will start to eliminate areas that you don't even need to go to.
Lou Quinto:
And I mean, that's good critical thinking skills just to be able to go in and do some root cause analysis. The other thing, too, when it comes to defining a problem is many organizations go from believing, like you did, you knew what the problem was to just jumping on solutions, which-
Craig P. Anderson:
I did.
Lou Quinto:
... in your example of your failure, you did, which is, you talked about that you knew what the problem was and you came up with the solution as opposed to truly stepping back, and before we jump to solutions, let's truly figure out do we have the root cause of the problem?
Craig P. Anderson:
Right.
Lou Quinto:
And that's where defining the problem at the very beginning prevents you from getting into, "Let's come up with solutions."
Craig P. Anderson:
Yep.
Lou Quinto:
Okay, because you want to solve the right thing.
Craig P. Anderson:
Oh, yeah, and that's a great tee up for the next topic, which is ask the right questions.
Lou Quinto:
Yeah, I mean, obviously another great quote is people don't solve problems because of the wrong answers. They solve problems because they ask the wrong questions. And we don't ask the right questions. I always like to tell people that when you're asking questions about a particular problem, try to run around the problem and look at a problem from the people aspect, from the equipment aspect, from the process aspect, from materials and from the environment. And if you run around a problem that way by asking questions in all five of those areas, you'll start asking the right questions to help get you the right information.
Lou Quinto:
The other thing, too, when it comes to asking questions is don't spend all of your time dealing with just asking what the problem is. Also ask the question and find the answers to what the problem is not because a lot of times when you're dealing with the problem, you're dealing with the unknown and when you're dealing with the unknown, you need to immediately start to disqualify areas that you don't need to spend time at.
Lou Quinto:
I always like to use the example of a detective. We've all watched CSI or some detective show and a detective when they're trying to solve a crime where they don't know the answer or the root cause, the person who committed the crime, what ends up happening is they gather their suspects and what they do is they spend as much time trying to eliminate suspects who didn't have motive, who didn't have reason, who didn't have opportunity. And what they do is they ask those questions that are, what I like to call, is not questions. And what ends up happening is you start eliminating those potential causes by asking is not questions and you get down to focusing on what the problem truly is.
Craig P. Anderson:
Yeah, and I think it's actually, as you're talking about asking the right questions, then it gets back to some of the things we've talked about in some of our videos on meetings, right? Getting the right people at the table.
Lou Quinto:
Right.
Craig P. Anderson:
So, when you're going through kind of problem solving exercises, make sure you have all the right people at the table to solve those problems because it does bring different points of view.
Craig P. Anderson:
I came up from sales and I remember an old example when I was early on in sales and customers would have problems. I'd get pretty heated because I was young and I was embarrassed when my clients had problems. And the head of operations, and, oh, it made me angry back in that time. But he said, "Sales brings the emotion of the issue to the front. We have, in operations, we bring the logic to the solution."
Lou Quinto:
Right.
Craig P. Anderson:
And quite honestly, that pissed me off to no end. But as I went through life and grew in my career, actually there was some truth to that.
Craig P. Anderson:
And that's where I think you do want sales to the table because they are the voice of the customer for things. But you need to get the other aspects of the organization at the table when you're trying to solve either a client problem or a systemic problem and that's how you start to get to the point of asking the right questions.
Lou Quinto:
Right. Okay. All right. The next area we're going to talk about is taking a problem and separating it into individual issues.
Craig P. Anderson:
Right.
Lou Quinto:
A lot of times we deal with problems, we just want to jump on the problem and just start solving it.
Craig P. Anderson:
Right.
Lou Quinto:
But good critical thinking skills tells you, is to take a look at your concern, your problem, and see if you can break it down into individual areas, where those individual areas will help you to begin to eat away at the problem. The example that I use is the old question, how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.
Lou Quinto:
A lot of times, though, with a problem, we consider the elephant the problem and we jump on the elephants back-
Craig P. Anderson:
Right.
Lou Quinto:
... and we try to just pound on the elephant hoping the elephant will go down and it doesn't. And so what we want to do is take a look at your problem and break it down into individual areas.
Lou Quinto:
I'll give a perfect example, working with the sales group where they want to improve sales. Problem, okay? But there are a lot of different things you can do to improve sales. So, if you break it down into individual areas such as we want to be able to get more qualified leads. We want to be able to improve our website. We want to be able to look at making more sales calls. We want to look at better sales training.
Craig P. Anderson:
Right.
Lou Quinto:
And if you start taking the big problem, improving sales and breaking it down into individual issues, you can get your arms around training the sales force. You can get your arms around better qualifying leads as opposed to taking and looking at trying to improve sales, yet you can't get your arms around that.
Lou Quinto:
So, I always tell people when it comes to complex problems, ask yourself the question, "Can I break it down into individual issues?"
Craig P. Anderson:
Yeah, I wouldn't be a good former sales guy in your example without saying, "Are there challenges with the product? Are there aspects of the product and the delivery that aren't working?" Which I think is also leads to-
Lou Quinto:
That's part of that.
Craig P. Anderson:
Yeah. And it's separating the problem, right? It's, is it do we have a sales problem? Do we have a product problem? And really kind of breaking down all those individual silos. And instead of just pointing the finger over here, where are we looking throughout our whole infrastructure, say where are the problems that might be affecting this?
Lou Quinto:
Right.
Craig P. Anderson:
So we can really separate out all the aspects of it and then decide the problems that we need to solve and really even prioritize and decide which we need to attack first-
Lou Quinto:
Sure.
Craig P. Anderson:
... and which has the greater impact. So I think there's a whole lot of value in working to separate the problem.
Lou Quinto:
Yeah.
Craig P. Anderson:
So, cool. So, what are your key takeaways today, Lou?
Lou Quinto:
Key takeaways. We deal with problems all the time and we need to become better problem solvers and we need to really work at solving a problem.
Lou Quinto:
One, you need to define your problem and not jump to conclusions or solutions, which is what we tend to do. And that's one of my biggest key takeaways when dealing with companies and helping them solve problems is when people start saying, "Well, we can do this, we can do that." No, no, no, we're not there yet. We haven't truly solved the problem. We'll come up with solutions on how to solve the problem first, but we have to identify what the problem really is and be able to start working from there.
Lou Quinto:
And I think if most companies done that, they will spend less time on rework and implementing things that really don't solve their problem.
Craig P. Anderson:
Very good. Well, I think my key takeaways today are really just this idea of breaking the problem up into solvable pieces and really doing that data and analysis to say, "All right, where are my problem points really?" And not kind of come in with that preconception that it's here. Look across the whole system, get the right people asking the right questions at the table, and then start to kind of prioritize and break down how we need to get this problem solved and where we can do it fastest.
Lou Quinto:
Well, and the other aspect of that, too, is not only you're breaking down the problem, but you're breaking down responsibilities to help solve the overall concern of the problem.
Craig P. Anderson:
Right.
Lou Quinto:
And so this way not one person is trying to solve the problem, but you've got different people who are responsible that can truly contribute to the solving of a particular problem.
Craig P. Anderson:
Perfect. Well, great. Well, thanks for watching this episode today on problem solving. And if you liked what you saw today, please like, please subscribe. And if you have certain friends who are really terrible problem solvers, share this video across your organization and through your social media channels. So, until next time, I'm Craig Anderson.
Lou Quinto:
And I'm Lou Quinto.