One of my favourite critical thinking and problem solving tools is a good problem statement. You should never just take a problem and rush off in a general direction, thinking you’re going to come up with a solution that will satisfy the needs of your requester.
Remember, the shortest distance between two points requires you to know where are you starting and where do you want to go? If you don’t know the destination, you’re going to get lost. It’ll take you a long time to get there. The corollary here is with your problem solving and critical thinking, you need to know what that destination is. What is success for your problem solving? Your problem statement defines that endpoint.
Without a problem statement, you’re going to spend a lot of wasted hours, wasted work, and have excessive revisions because your recommendation won’t make sense because nobody knows what you’re trying to solve for. When you put together a good problem statement, it becomes your charter for your critical thinking efforts. It’s going to spell out your goals. It will lay out boundaries on the problem solving space.
It will define success criteria. Your problem statement should spell out the constraints you’re going to face. It should articulate your assumptions, who the stakeholders are, and any timelines that you’re going to face. I have one client organisation where they didn’t spend the time laying out the problem statement. They ended up with major issues for their charter for a huge technology project because the team was trying to solve all different problems. They didn’t have clarity on what the ultimate goal was, what the metrics were, who the stakeholders needed to be, and what, ultimately, the boundaries were for the space they were trying to solve in.
This led the team to write a lot of code, have multiple revisions, multiple attempted rollouts. They couldn’t solve the problem because they hadn’t defined what the problem was in the first place. Take a look at a problem you’re trying to solve. Is it clear what the problem statement is? Do you know what the goals are? What the boundaries, constraints, and assumptions are? Do you know who the stakeholders are? The time you spend with this type of critical thought is going to help you be more effective in solving the problems that you face.
Ask the question behind the question
When people start their critical thinking efforts, I encourage them to ask the question behind the question. So many times when we’re asked to look into an issue, we just rush off and start solving it without really thinking through what’s causing the person to ask me this question in the first place. Probe to understand why you’re being asked to look at something.
Once you have a good understanding of why, you’re more toward a cause. But don’t stop there. Once you have that understanding, ask why again. Really get that deep understanding of what’s causing concern on your stakeholder’s part.
By understanding the real question they have, you can avoid solving symptoms, and instead come up with a recommendation that is going to resonate for them, and be something that they’re excited about. The real question opens up new answers, new ideas, and new opportunities. Let me offer an example.
An executive that I worked with named Sue was asked by her senior stakeholder, Kim, to look at employee turnover data. Now, Sue knew this data inside and out. It was very easy for her to go into the information, pull out the data, and generate a report about turnover. And she could have done that. But she didn’t. She stopped and asked Kim why she wanted to understand this issue. And it was really an issue of evaluating unit performance. Once Sue understood this, other metrics made more sense than just the base turnover data.
She stopped, though, and asked Kim again why was she looking at unit performance in particular?
Turns out, what Kim really wanted to understand was, did they have issues with leadership, or with processes that were causing a lot of churn and turnover of their associates. It was now clear to Sue that she had to look at metrics and processes.
By doing so, she was able to generate ideas on how to fix some of the issues with leadership as well as some of the processes that should change. She generated a better solution because she understood the question behind the question. What I’d encourage you to do is take a look at a problem you’ve been asked to solve. Go back to that stakeholder and understand what’s really driving that request? Why do they care about this? What’s the question behind the question?
When you get a better understanding of that, you’ll find the solutions you come up with are going to be bigger, better, and more exciting.
Ask focusing questions
As you define your problem, you should ask and answer some focusing questions to help you bound the solution space.
You should ask things like, what’s the real question? Specify the objectives and timing that, that stakeholder has asked of you. Ask who are the stakeholders or influencers who are involved in the decision. Who can support it and who can derail it?
You should articulate how you’re going to measure success. Lay out what the quantitative and qualitative measures are going to be. So you know on the back end if you’ve really solved the problem. Ask the specific scope. What is or is not included in the space you are looking at. And lastly, understand the constraints that you face.
By answering all of these questions, and spending this time in critical thought, you’re going to have a much more clearly bounded problem space. Let me offer an example of how I use these focusing questions to help bound a problem space. In my past, I worked for a credit card company. And I was responsible for some of our collections. The way we collected our money back from consumers who owed us was we outsourced these activities to external agencies. The problem we were asked to solve was to improve the performance of those agencies.
So first, we looked at the objectives. We wanted to reduce costs, increase our collections, and make those changes by the end of the year. So we bounded the space in terms of what success looked like. We then had to think through the influencers and stakeholders. We looked at IT and finance because anything we did was going to require technology changes. And any changes in the commissions that we paid was going to impact finance. We then looked at the cost per pound collected, the commission rate, and we also looked at some qualitative metrics of success. In terms of bounding the solution space, we looked at specific lines of business. We had ten business units. For this initial solution, we were only going to focus on two of them. And we had to understand the constraints to that space. There were legal and regulatory issues that we had to consider.
We had time constraints. Remember, end of year.
And we also had some budget constraints. We would be able to spend this much money on IT, and this much on commissions. By asking and answering these focusing questions, we had a better sense of what that box around our problem looked like.
So, when we found a solution, there was a higher likelihood that we would solve within that box which would then meet our stakeholder’s needs. Take a look at a problem you’re trying to solve.
Ask and answer these focusing questions. The time you spend in the critical thinking required to come up with these answers, will help insure that the solution you come up with is going to meet your stakeholder’s needs.