Problems Worth Solving

In my previous post I introduced “Purpose-aligned outcomes” as a technique to guide you to the right problem statement. To summarize, we start from a purpose/mission statement for your organization, and then think about the outcome variables that really align to that statement. It is not totally clear to me if the most important piece of this process is actually having the purpose statement written down, or if it has more to do with just having a filtering mechanism to identify the set of outcomes that really matter to the organization.

In college I learned a technique called structured brainstorming. Instead of normal brainstorming, which is more free form, in structured brainstorming you consider an attribute of the ideas and try to enumerate the possible values of the attribute. If you have ever tried to name as many different animals as possible, you may have used this trick by saying “first, let’s name every animal we can think of which starts with a letter A.”

Applied to purpose aligned outcomes, structured brainstorming lets you identify approximately all the things you care about. We stay 30,000 feet up and try to capture everything that is important. Sure, there are details closer to the ground that matter, but a lot of those details will depend on things we do not currently know. The more detailed we get, the harder it is to keep the whole picture in mind. And so, using this approach we maybe have a list of 5-10 things that really drive success. More than that though, you can start to evaluate the interactions between those things.

Using this approach, we start at the high level, but how much should we come down to earth when we are lining up a problem to be solved? Eventually the answer is “all the way to the ground” since a solution that does not get implemented is not very useful. But as I learned in graduate school, it does not work to jump straight from the high level view to the details. You need a smooth descent (and sometimes ascent) to work out how one layer informs the next set of decisions.

What kinds of decisions are we talking about? We might start at the top by saying our problem is to decide what our business goals are, and the solution would be a set of business goals. More specifically, that solution may look like “We want to improve profit dollars, maintain our current profit percent, continue to ethically serve our customers, and maintain our current product portfolio.” That sentence is a declaration of priorities, aka a decision, about where we want to focus our efforts.

At the next level down, the problem becomes “How can we realize the business goals?” This is where it becomes too easy to dive straight to the ground and say “Well, if we lower costs, we improve profit without changing anything else. We should focus on improving throughput.” If you have taken that step, we are drastically restricting what the project can look like. With the original set of business goals there is an enormous set of possible next steps including adding new products, pricing, sourcing, and others. Improving throughput is just one tiny slice of those options.

The fundamental goal then is to give the next level down enough freedom to pick the right problem to solve, while also making sure that the current level will approve of the final solution. It is a bit like a high-stakes game of telephone – At the top level we care about improving metric N, but does the solution on the ground still resemble that goal or has it meandered into something different? I think this challenge is a piece of why management consultants exist – without a disciplined way to translate the goal from the big picture to the detailed implementation, the best alternative is just to have the same people work through the whole process.

If you are very intentional to only eliminate options because they should be removed, you keep the options open to something that might have been excluded otherwise. We still need to make sure that we define the problem in a way that the future solutions will match the bigger picture needs. But any way we can give people flexibility within that space can help to achieve better outcomes.