Define Your Problem to Solve Your Problem

The first step of the problem solving process is defining your problem.

The first step of the problem solving process is penning the problem and this is where you’re going to come up with a really robust problem definition statement. You cannot skip this step. I’ve seen more problem solving go off the rails because people think, “Oh we know what the problem is.” They answer a couple quick questions and they immediately rush into the solution. You’re going to get in trouble if you do that.

So in the exercise files that accompany the video, I want you to look at all of the questions and understand you have to answer all of the questions. This isn’t a pick and choose. There are about 18 questions here in four major sections. So those four sections are first answering focusing questions, what are the stakeholders, what are the goals, what are the metrics you’re going to use to determine if you’ve been successful in your problem solving.

Second is evaluating prior efforts, trying to get some insights from the last time we tried to solve this or solve something similar. So have we had similar problem solving efforts in the past? Who was involved in those efforts? Let’s learn from experience.

The third is deriving insights from new lenses, looking at the problem from different angles. So what’s the perspective of the CEO versus the frontline? What’s the 10,000 foot view versus the 50 foot view? We always come at problems from our own perspective. It’s your default, it’s the way you look at things. By looking at it through different lenses you might come up with a different set of solutions.

So let me offer an example in the one of looking through a different lens. As a manager, you may say, “Well this is a training issue, my people aren’t trained.” When you look at it as the CFO she may say, “Well it’s a budgeting issue, we haven’t budgeted the training dollars.” So by looking through those different lenses you may find different possible solutions for your problem.

And then lastly, understanding relevant causality. We don’t want to solve symptoms. You need to dial the problem back to understand what are the root causes and in terms of causality. If you solve the problem, you need to think forward in terms of what are some of the knock-on impacts. If we solve this problem with our products, are there competitive repercussions we need to think about?

As you go through this step of penning the problem, go through that exercise file. Answer every single one of these questions and document your answers because that’s going to give you a really nice well bounded problem statement that’s going to drive the rest of your problem solving.

Want to learn more about solving business problems? How about taking an entire course on it? Go directly to the course and start learning how to solve business problems. The entire course is available at LinkedIn Learning. Enjoy!

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