Be A Better Problem Solver in 2017 By Changing This One Thing

If there is one constant in the business world, it is that there will always be complex problems to solve. There are a host of different strategies, tools, and approaches for solving them. I have used everything from strategic decision trees to Pareto charts to root cause analysis. All are effective.

Even with that, every year I wonder if I could be better at solving problems. If you are looking to become a better problem solver this year, it might be time for a change in mindset.

What if we’ve been spending too much energy on becoming good problem solvers? It sounds almost sacrilegious to put in writing, but one of the constants of problem solving is that you are applying your best brain power towards figuring out why something isn’t working.

The problem has already surfaced.

What if you shifted your thinking 180 degrees and focused your best thinking towards figuring out how to prevent the problem from showing up in the first place?

The notion might sound a bit out in left field, but one industry is already doing this on a large scale.

Health care leading the way in problem prevention thinking?

As much as the health care industry has been perceived as trailing high tech, financial services, and other industries on innovative and progressive business practices, they might be leading this one.

Many health care organizations are focused on something called population health management. In normal English, this simply means that they are working with communities to build better infrastructure, health habits, and wellness so that they can prevent the acute health care diseases and issues that put people in the hospital to begin with.

In other words, they are putting their best thinking towards disease prevention.

Of course, they are continuing to treat diseases like Diabetes and all of the health issues that come with it. But now they are trying to prevent people from getting Diabetes in the first place, which prevents a significant number of cascading health issues (and costs) that develop because of Diabetes.

Using familiar problem solving tools for problem prevention

Problem prevention thinking can actually change how you use your old problem solving tools. Root cause analysis has always been a great approach when trying to figure out what is really going on. It allows you to dig past surface symptoms to find real drivers of the issue at hand.

What if you used root cause analysis to look at the root causes of things that were working well instead of things that were broken?

It might sound a bit foreign to think about using root cause analysis to identify drivers of success instead of failure, but it creates great problem prevention opportunities.

Here’s how:

If you allocated time to diagnose things that are working smoothly in your business, you might learn a thing of two that they all have in common. You could apply this knowledge directly when you set up new parts of the business. You are then inherently introducing established proven drivers of success into the system.

The trick is to diagnose what is working well during good times so that when things change you have the insight about how to deal with them quickly. Even more importantly, you might be able to mitigate just how bad things turn by incorporating your root cause knowledge into the system well in advance.

The challenge of culture

One of the challenges with this approach is culture. We are very good at rewarding fire-fighting and problem solving. It is visible. One minute you saw something not working, and then you saw that same thing working. It is very tangible.

Not all fires need to happen, though. In fact, many don’t.

To move towards problem prevention, you have to shift mindsets around what is rewarded. In other words, incentives could be re-aligned to reward people for not having fires.

It is certainly harder to visualize and quantify than problem solving and fire-fighting but might be worth the effort when you consider the potential outcomes.

Reductions in problem solving and fire-fighting would free up a significant amount of time you could spend in other ways, including strategy and people. For small companies, there are fewer resources available so the more time spent on problem solving, the less time is spent on forward looking strategy.

So how can you become a better problem solver in 2017?

It might be by simply applying some strategic thinking and problem solving tools in a different way so that you end up with fewer problems to actually solve.