Sneak Peak - Problem Solving and Decision Making
Introduction
Problems! Problems! Decisions! Decisions! - the art of management is all about how to solve your problems and make good decisions. This workbook is here to guide you through the whole process. We will start with problems or ‘insurmountable challenges' as one executive once told me. Well they are certainly challenges. It's what makes a manager's job interesting and invirgorating - but they are certainly not insurmountable!
In this workbook we will cover:
- 1. How to diagnose your problems
- 2. Does your business support problem solving?
- 3. The Blocks to problem solving
- 4. How you tackle problems
- 5. How to get good collaboration
- 6. The decision making process
- 7. Group decision making
- 8. Reaching a consencus.
How to diagnose your problems
Step One - Always to set an objective
Depending on the type of problem, the objective may be:
- To clarify whey there is thought to be a problem.
- What are the symptoms?
- Why do they matter - what are the consequences?
- What would the desired state look like?
- What constraints must a solution satisfy?
In other words, identify the gaps and decide what exactly it is that you wnat to achieve.
Step Two - Pinpointing the problem
- Identifying trends and patterns in its occurrence
- Defining it precisely.
Sometimes what was thought to be a single problem will be revealed to have many components which may on further analysis be clustered into separate self-contained problems.
Step Three - Identifying the causes of the problem
Usually the cause will be found to be a change of some kind but beware of leaping at the first change identified as the cause - some sort of logical cross-checking is required.
In all these an important process is to identify the assumptions you are making and to challenge whether they are really valid - this may indicate specific information which needs to be collected.
Ask yourself some questions
Questions like those listed below will help to generate the information required to pinpoint the problem and its causes:
- What is the extent/scale of the problem?
- Where does the problem occur (and where does it not occur)?
- What is distinctive about the places and times when the problem occurs?
- How often does it occur?
- What happens at the same time?
- When did it start?
- What else changed at around the same time?
- Who is affected?
- What attempts have been made to solve the problem and how did they fare?
Clearly the appropriateness of the questions depends on the type of problem.
Once a diagnosis has been reached it should be tested if at all possible: by prediction, by comparison, by historical data.
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