If it feels like every big problem in your organization sprints towards your desk and lands with a crash – keep reading.

You’re a leader in your organization. You get paid to solve problems. In fact, it might seem that some days it’s all you do. The trouble comes when the time devoted to solving problems crowds out the time you should be spending on the long-term health and growth of the organization or the problems that land on your desk should have been solved long before they got to you. Ideally only the biggest, baddest problems should get to you. You want a team that’s adept at solving problems and solving them early, quickly, correctly, and permanently. So how do you build a team that can do that?

I get paid to solve problems. Some of them are simple. Most of them are complex with lots of moving parts. After doing this for 42 years (the last 18 as a consultant), my methodology is well-honed. Not only do I follow this methodology during an engagement, I teach it to the teams I work with inside the client organization. Your team can follow it too –  

• Is the problem the result of a missing process or policy? Many times a problem surfaces because employees are making stuff up as they go along. Every activity in an organization should be subject to a process or a policy. Processes are for those tasks where there is no wiggle room – the way we mass-produce widgets, the way we pay a vendor invoice, or the way we complete new employee documentation. Policies are for those tasks where there might be some gray areas – when do we give a refund, when do we allow a reservation to be cancelled without a cancellation fee, or how many bereavement days do we allow when an employee’s family member dies. Processes are like railroad tracks: you can’t veer at all from the track without negative consequences. Policies are like guardrails: if you drive anywhere between them, you’re safe. With processes, follow the letter of the law. With policies, follow the spirit of the law.
• Many brains make light work – There’s an interesting paradox in problem-solving – the people involved in a problem are, 9 times out of 10, the best people to solve the problem. So tapping their collective genius is essential. However, getting an outside perspective is often game-changing. Getting a marketing person to weigh in on an operations problem or a finance person to examine a sales problem often unearths a insight that you never would have gotten otherwise. It this peaks your interest, read David Epstein’s book, Range.
• Ego is the enemy – On the heels of the previous point, this one is essential. I’ve co-opted this title of Ryan Holiday’s excellent book hundreds of times. When you work a problem, you might discover some failures that belong to people in the organization. One of those people might be you. The goal of a problem-solving exercise is to find the truth. Ego (yours and everyone else’s) must be laid aside to shine the light on the darkest parts of the problem you’re solving.  
• Break the problem into component parts – Problems often look like an octopus with tentacles going everywhere. Splitting the problem into pieces will help to isolate the places where things are really going south. What is the impact to – customer experience, manufacturing rework, customer charges written off, multiple calls to customer service, etc. Now deconstruct each of those impacts – for example, what happened downstream that caused us to have to write off customer charges – wrong order shipped, shipped late, billed incorrectly, damaged in transit, etc.
• Go from the outside in – Most problem-solving exercises go from the inside out. You’ll go farther faster if you go from the outside in. If there’s a problem on the factory floor, it’s likely happening when they’re trying to manufacture something for a customer. Start from the ideal customer experience and work backward to the change you need on the factory floor.
• Work out from the biggest impact – When you break the problem into component parts, the pieces will vary in size. Start with the biggest one and work out from there. You might find that the upstream or downstream problems go away on their own when you solve the biggest one. Although, you’ll always want to double-check those upstream and downstream problems as well.
• Look for pivot points – As you’re examining the activities that are suspect in the problem, look for one that can make all the other dominoes fall differently. See if there’s a high-impact change that will have a positive trickle-down. For example, if we can drop the defect rate on the factory floor to 1%, that will mean 50 less calls to customer service, a 5% decrease in write-offs, a savings of $25,000 in shipping replacement widgets, etc.
• Synthesis – I probably should have put this at the top because it might be the most important, but I put all the mechanical stuff first (because it’s easiest to teach and easiest to follow). The ability to synthesize the contributing factors and the inputs for new solutions is the shortcut for expert problem-solving. Problems frequently arise because the world shifted beneath your feet. A capable competitor introduces a new product which provides customers more value than your product. A key employee unexpectedly leaves the company. A change in the environment (social, regulatory, technological) suddenly makes your product less desirable. The quicker you can synthesize the new reality into your business worldview, the quicker you can skillfully respond to the problem. And synthesis can’t be only about understanding the problem, it must also apply to crafting the solution. In my work, because I’ve consulted across a couple of dozen industries, I constantly have the opportunity to leverage the solutions applied in one industry to the problems experienced in another. When you’re evaluating solutions look everywhere for someone who’s had a similar problem and brought an effective solution to bear.
• Experiment – Jim Collins encouraged us to “fire bullets, then cannonballs”. That’s an essential problem-solving skill. Your first solution to a problem doesn’t have to be perfect and it doesn’t have to be the only one. Design low-cost, low-risk solution alternatives (even if you have to do them by hand) and experiment. See which solutions yield the best employee experience, customer experience, top-line impact, bottom-line impact, operational improvement, etc. When you have your answer, then invest to make it a more permanent solution.
• Create a policy/Design a process – We ultimately circle back to where we started. With your solution in hand, translate it into a process or policy, and disseminate it to your team. Now everyone can benefit from the expert problem-solving activity. But don’t stop there. Make sure there are no processes and policies that are etched in granite. The values in your organization should remain constant, but the processes and polices should always be subject to review and changeable when new information or a better methodology surfaces.