© 2015 Next Level Up. All rights reserved.

No Blame Problem Solving – Part II

Focus on spotting, or identifying, the problem or problems.

Spotting problems early puts the advantage in your court. Is there a problem, or what’s bothering you? You can’t do anything about a problem unless you know about it. The big problems are easy to detect and you don’t need any help detecting those. Or do you? Often, in fact, usually a big problem is really a tangle of interrelated, smaller problems. And a small problem can be bunch of even smaller problems. The way to deal with them is to untangle them and solve them one at a time. And the question is, how can you untangle a complicated mess of problems so that you can solve one at a time? The key to the puzzle is results. You identify the results that are unsatisfactory. A great question here is…what’s the result I’m not getting? If there’s a result you want that you’re not getting, then there is a problem. Here’s how it works. A business is a system of systems. Systems within systems within systems. Each system produces a result. And that result feeds into other systems. The first step is to identify the system where the unsatisfactory result shows up in the business. And then you trace back through the systems feeding into that system until you find the one that’s operating as it should be and is producing the results it’s supposed to be producing.

© 2015 Next Level Up. All rights reserved.

It sounds complicated, but it’s not really. When something goes wrong you need to ask questions like: How often does that happen? When does it happen? Why does it happen? What’s the trigger to make it happen? What happens, or doesn’t happen, just before this happens? (You’re tracking backwards) And what happens before that and before that? What should be happening and why isn’t it? This sort of digging can often take you off in a completely different direction to what you thought it was originally. I’ll give you an example: Ben runs an event company. He headhunted a crack sales person (Jack) from his competition and put him to work. Jack’s role was to actively seek out new business. Particularly, new business appointments that could lead to new business. After about six weeks, Ben was complaining that Jack wasn’t getting results and was spending much of his time on the phone making personal calls. Ben’s solution was to ban all personal calls in the office.

© 2015 Next Level Up. All rights reserved.

I asked Ben what was the result he was expecting. He said, “Sales appointments.” I asked him how many. He said, “Lots.” I then asked him how he was measuring Jack’s performance. And he wasn’t, except to look for the appointments made. Did Jack have specific targets to be met, like the number of approaches he made in any week, and the percentage of those that converted to appointments, or the percentage of those that converted to sales? Did Jack have a responsibility to report on his activities each week?

Was Ben meeting with him regularly to see how he was going, to make suggestions, or to guide him in any way? And the answer to all of these was, you guessed it…no, no, no, no and no. Would setting targets with Jack make a difference? Yes, of course it would. Now you might ask if Jack was so good at his previous company that he got noticed and headhunted, what was different and why wasn’t he performing here? And you know the

answer. At the other company, he had targets he had to meet. He had to submit a weekly activity and sales report. In fact, it turned out he had, off his own back, submitted several reports in his first couple of weeks, but they were still in Ben’s in-tray. Seeing no one seemed interested in what he was doing, Jack didn’t see the point in carrying on. So you can see the journey from the initial frustration…Jack wasn’t getting results and spending much of his time on the phone making personal calls and the initial knee jerk solution…ban all personal calls. This solution wouldn’t have done anything, except probably have Jack, who was a gregarious person naturally, turn his attention on his co-workers and have chats with them. From there we move to the systems solution. By identifying the missing systems and understanding the result he wasn’t getting, he found that the missing systems were the sales target system, the weekly reporting system, the weekly analysis and the management system. That was just for starters. The message here is to be prepared for the solution to not be as obvious as you first thought. Sometimes your digging takes a sudden turn off into another area and until that’s fixed, the original frustration will not be fixed. Ignoring this method and going for the first, and seemingly obvious, solution is like putting a Band-Aid on a cut before you’ve cleaned it out and dealt with the cause. All you’ll end up doing is fixing stuff rather than getting to the root cause, or being too busy mopping up the water to turn off the tap.

© 2015 Next Level Up. All rights reserved.

Let’s look at some specific examples: --Customers are complaining that the finished work is shoddy and incomplete. --My people spend too much time on breaks. --John doesn’t get his sales reports in on time and they’re full of mistakes. --Telephone costs are going through the roof. --Why are my people blaming each other and not taking responsibility for their own work? --Nothing gets done around here unless I’m there to make sure it gets done right. --I can never get my quotes done on time. --I just came from the supply/storage room and it’s a mess. --Every morning when I come in, I find that the lights were left on overnight or the security system wasn’t turned on. It’s really annoying me. In each of these cases, identifying the frustration does not identify the problem. Shoddy work is an unsatisfactory result, but the problem lies somewhere in the process of doing the work. People taking too long on breaks is an unacceptable condition in the business, but the problem lies in the business practices that encourage or allow that behavior. Rapidly rising telephone costs is another unsatisfactory result, but the problem lies in whatever caused the costs to skyrocket. The messy supply room isn’t the problem. The lack of a system for keeping it clean is the problem. When I come in the morning and find the lights were left on, or the security system was not turned on, that’s missing an opening and closing system, a closing the office system.

© 2015 Next Level Up. All rights reserved.

The good thing about any frustration is that it alerts you to the fact that you might have a problem and that makes the frustration a really valuable warning sign. The frustration isn’t the problem. That’s the human reaction to an underlying problem. The key is to shift your focus from the symptoms of the problem to the underlying problem itself. The frustration doesn’t tell you what the underlying problem is, but it tells you that there is a problem and gives you a place to start looking for it. And yes, frustrations experienced by others in your business, or by customers or suppliers, are also indications of problems. You should take them seriously too. The exception to this rule is exceptions. An exception is something different from what is expected or normal. If your staff are normally cheerful and energetic, but one day you come to work and they’re gloomy, that’s an exception. If your sales are growing steadily at a couple of percent a month, but they grow at less for three months, is that an exception. Maybe. Maybe not. Exceptions occur for all kinds of reasons, some good for your

business and some bad. Exceptions are usually signals, not problems. They catch your attention and you have to figure out if they indicate problems, opportunities, or nothing at all. The point is that exceptions are still signals. You have to do the investigation and make the decision as to the underlying cause of the exception because sometimes they’re just one time events of little importance. Sometimes they’re random and don’t indicate much of anything other than the normal

rhythm of your business. And sometimes exceptions are symptoms of major and minor problems. You have to investigate and decide for yourself. Being alert for them is one of the best ways to detect problems early so you can jump on them and prevent them from becoming serious. Some problems aren’t worth fixing, and some are business busters if you don’t fix them. So, is it serious? What are the results? Is the problem worth the effort it takes to track it down and fix it? It might not be. It might be annoying to you that some of your people take too long on their breaks and lunch hours. But what if it also turns out that they’re extremely productive employees who take a little extra relaxation time to decompress from their intense work, but put in extra hours at night and come early to the office. It might be a problem not worth fixing, or not a problem at all. To judge the importance of a problem even before you’ve fully defined it, you simply need to look at the results. If the results are

© 2015 Next Level Up. All rights reserved.

dissatisfied customers, rising costs, lower sales, high employee turnover and the like, you definitely have an important problem. If the results are occasional inconveniences, minor product blemishes or some messiness in the office, you might have some problems, but in the overall performance of your business, you might wait to address these minor concerns until some more important matters have been resolved. The basic question again is: What result am I not getting that I want? What result am I getting that I don’t want? The more you can measure and quantify these results the better. If sales dipped by half a percent in the last month, that’s a different matter than if they plummeted by 25%. Both results are a matter of concern, but on your priority list of things that deserve your attention, the 25% drop clearly has a much higher priority than a half percent drop. So before you expend the time and the effort on a problem, you should consciously decide if the problem is worth fixing and what its priority should be considering all the other things you and your people have to do.