Albert Einstein is reputed to have said, "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."
Einstein's observation points to a crucial step in problem-solving called "problem framing." This technique can reveal new and innovative possibilities and uncover stakeholders and partners that may be able to help. It is an often-neglected step to finding better solutions to complex problems while avoiding wasted time and effort going down blind alleys and wasting money on ideas and activities that don't yield the desired results.
The MIT Sloan Management Review finds,
"Sixty percent of over 700 international executives studied revealed that formulating and articulating the problem statement is one of the two significant barriers to practical problem-solving in their organizations (the other barrier is poor stakeholder engagement)."
We will get to stakeholder engagement in a future post.
The analysis demonstrated that executives often paid significantly more attention to symptoms than causes, framed their analysis on incorrect assumptions and artificial constraints, and overlooked stakeholders who were critical to avoiding or resolving the problems.
In my own experience, I have also found postmortems to frequently concentrate on the last few events that contributed to a failure or loss of business rather than embark on a deep root-cause analysis that could have identified triggers that insidiously caused a chain reaction months or years earlier.
It is, therefore, crucial to avoid these pitfalls by asking better questions and redefining how to approach problems. To start with, be clear about the goals, identify the root causes of any issues, and the obstacles to remove. By correctly and succinctly articulating the problem and ensuring the right people are involved, the path to a solution becomes more accessible.
The enormity and complexity of reengineering a business require plenty of deep thinking, which necessitates asking much better questions.
To summarize, major business transformations need to resolve complex business and technical issues, and problem-framing is a critical but frequently missed step in solving these problems.
Of course, this is in addition to being clear on the goal, removing the obstacles, making informed decisions, developing a game plan, and identifying who will take action.
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