Knowing the right problem to solve

Across February and March 2022 I interviewed a bunch of people from my LinkedIn network to understand their work lives. A refrain I heard more than once:

‘I often need to respond to problems quickly at work. The urgency of the situation forces me to provide the best possible solution within that time frame, which often turns out suboptimal. Because I end up staring at the same problem in a couple of months’ time.’

Time pressure is real. It can make you think that you need to improve your response to problems when what you need is to improve your identification of the problem. Let’s back up a bit.

Here’s a scene from your work day: Someone approaches you with a problem. You hear it, accept it, and start solving it. You come up with a plan quickly enough, depending on the complexity of the problem. Only a few months down the line the problem recurs, bigger and badder.

How you define the problem decides the solutions you see. So, before you try and solve a problem, make sure it’s the root problem. The root problem’s the one to solve. Everything else is a symptom of it.

How do you arrive at the root problem?

✔Step 1: Reject the problem definition presented to you.

What? Why? The problem presented tends to capture only what is visible.

Your customer experience team untiringly fields customer calls day in, day out. But that doesn’t seem to be enough. What do you do? The obvious response would be to hire more in the team. Improve onboarding. Offer more hours of on-the-job training. And so on. But something in you says hang on. Let me first understand why this is happening.

✔Step 2: Separate the act of identifying the problem from the process of solving it

This is an intervention to stop you from jumping into problem-solving. Define the problem in a separate session (if you’re doing this with your team).

Tell your team that until you find out why you’re being flooded with calls, you’re not going to worry about how to solve the problem.

✔Step 3: Ask ‘what has to be true for this problem to not exist in the first place?’

You’re now thinking of how to prevent future problems, not the best way to solve them.

Why are customers calling you so often? You realize the top reason is they cannot find a document–an invoice, a service completion certificate, et cetera. Ooh, why is that happening? Because they have entered their email wrong in the service form. Or your emails are going into their spam. Or the emails landed right but customers couldn’t find them.

Now imagine you had hired more in the team. Would it have helped solve the problem?

Under time and resource pressure, we tend to deal with problems, not fix them. That’s understandable. But that’s also like treating the symptoms of a virus instead of finding a vaccine for it.