“I can’t tell you how impressed I am with this group,” exclaimed Roger. “Once again, their efforts made all the difference. Without my team working into the wee hours of the morning to fill the customer’s order, we would have missed the shipping deadline.”
“What dedicated and caring employees you have,” said Sam. “Are you planning to recognize them?”
“Well, I’m not sure. This is the fourth time this month they’re pulled out the stops and made it happen. They know I appreciate what they do.”
Heroic efforts? Fourth time this month there was a need to pull out all the stops?
Recognition is absolutely important, but maybe, this boss needs to be looking at the reasons why his employees need to be so dedicated.
Sometimes we get so caught up in the crisis hoopla, that we forget to take a look at why those heroic efforts are needed so often.
Ian I. Mitroff, organizational theorist, consultant and Professor Emeritus at the University of Southern California authored Smart Thinking for Crazy Times. In this book, Dr. Mitroff details five things we do that cause us to solve the wrong problem and offers solutions to avoid misguided outcomes.
5 ways to muck up problem solving
1. Picking the wrong stakeholders.
This happens when we focus on just a few interested parties and forget about, ignore or fail to consider other people who have a stake in the outcome.
Want to avoid wrong solution #1? Take and/or make the time to thoughtfully do a stakeholder analysis. A stakeholder is someone who has a vested interest in the outcome and/or who might be positively or negatively impacted by what happens.
2. Narrowing our options.
This is one-note thinking: honing in on only one possible solution and failing to consider a broader range of options or alternatives.
How to side-step this trap? Don’t settle for just one definition of an important problem. When problems are called “important,” there’s usually more than one way to skin the proverbial cat – consider at least two very different formulations of the problem.
3. Picking the wrong language of variables.
This happens when we use “a narrow set of disciplines, business functions, or variables in which to express the basic nature of a problem.”
Duck this outcome by using your head to manage and your heart to lead. As Dr. Mitroff writes, “Never produce or examine formulations of important problems which are phrased solely in technical or in human terms alone; always strive to produce at least one formulation which is phrased in technical terms and at least one other which is phrased in human terms.”
4. Narrowing incorrectly the boundaries or scope of a problem.
Err on the side of being inclusive and expansive in defining the scope of a problem.
Elude this issue by broadening “the scope of every important problem up to and just beyond one’s comfort zone.”
5. Ignoring connections between parts and systems .
This is what Roger did: he focused on only one part of a problem rather than the whole system, thus “ignoring the connection between parts and wholes.”
Stay out of trouble by not fragmenting problems into isolated tiny parts. Look at the whole system, since sometimes the interactions between important problems are more important than the problems themselves.
What other problems get in your way of solving problems?
Image source before quote: Gratisography
