Where do you start?

We have a tendency to blurt out the first thing that comes into our head when we are stuck. When we do this we behave as though we’re from the ‘fire, aim, ready’ camp … and it’s hopeless.

The ‘ready, aim, fire’ school of thought is a much better way. Yet we’ve got less good at applying the process of thinking and aiming before acting that than we should have been. This is mostly put down to our living in a helter-skelter, fast moving world where everything is rushed.

What do people who are really thinking do?

They think quietly.

They assess.

They look for connections and consequences.

They ask themselves to what this problem actually relates? What its various elements are? They break the problem down into smaller pieces so they make the problem easier to understand and solve. And they ask some basic questions like what are the results of not solving it or of only partially solving it or of completely solving it? Who benefits? Who else is involved?

What’s the size of the prize if successful and the cost of failure if the problem is not solved.

Can I tell you a secret? Most of those books about business in the shops and online are redundant.

Because most real business problems are more similar to our own simple day-to-day stories in our real, social lives than anyone in business would generally admit.

Most business problems require more common sense than business skills to solve.

Example: The trouble with your plumbing is the same as an IT problem at work.

Example: A nasty letter from your bank as you slip into overdraft is the same as a temporary slowdown in cash flow brought about by changes in seasonal demand.

And there we see the main difference. Business has a lexicon of jargon to protect itself or to confuse people and to create time.

So overall the good news is this.

Most critical business issues are often potentially simpler than they seem at first sight.

Most problems that need solving in business or in your personal lives seem complex only because we lack the tools to solve them.

Example: Someone who was not in business and who was thinking of moving house was trying to decide on which of several houses she preferred. She said in frustration ‘I can’t decide and I don’t know how to decide. And we’ve got to hurry or we’ll be beaten to the punch by other buyers’.

She had a problem.

I explained that what I would do first of all was decide what the most important criteria were (which might have been maximum price, location, size of garden and kitchen layout potential.)

Evaluate these and other criteria that seem important then take a deep breath and ask yourself in which house would you most easily dream of yourself and your family having a lovely time.

The real art of decision making.

You fill your rational brain with data then ask your intuitive brain to help you decide. You seek to solve the problem rationally then let that computer in your head make a decision as to the best way to go. (I’ve heard people describe this as ‘letting things stew’.) You can go to sleep while this is happening if you want; just relax and let information simmer. In this particular house-choosing scenario a series of things were getting in the way:

• the sheer size and consequence of the issue;
• too much information;
• the need for speed;
• estate agent’s patter;
• pretty brochures;
• contradictory opinions of friends;
• biased family views and feelings to consider.

The big three here are the scale, conflicting data and urgency attached to the decision. In business, decisions don’t get harder than this.

Too much information without enough time to assimilate it is why people in business keep saying things like the ‘devil’s in the detail.’ No it isn’t.

What always matters most is the big picture.

Without knowing where you are going, what you want to achieve in the long run and what the broad context of the problem really is you can’t solve a problem sensibly or make a sensible decision.

But most all you must let your feelings have a vote.

We underestimate just how much sway they have. As Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Prize winner and writer of the best-selling and seminal book Thinking Fast and Slow shows, our intuitive thinking brain is the one that calls the shots:

‘We think, each of us, that we're much more rational than we are. And we think that we make our decisions because we have good reasons to make them… even when it's the other way around. We believe in the reasons, because we've already made the decision.’

To make the most of our personal computing power you should be rigorous and rational in assembling and analysing data, but then let what no computer has, namely your huge creative, intuitive resource get to work.

What is business?

Business can be simply described as the creation of products, services and material for customers and consumers that they want and need at a sustainable profit.

But business advice doesn’t work on a one-size-fits-all basis.

Think of four very different businesses

Retail: Morrisons – number 4 in the UK. Together with the much larger Tesco, Sainsbury’s and Asda they have nearly two-thirds of grocery sales between them, are locked in price fights, fighting off the German invaders Aldi and Lidl and facing a ‘clicks versus bricks’ dilemma (what do they do with all that retail space in a world shifting increasingly to e-commerce?) Morrisons is an outlier from Yorkshire with a great reputation for fresh food and particularly meat, which is now in alliance with Amazon. So this Cinderella brand in retail is now possessed of a very potent glass slipper. Its world is full of competitive problems to solve; big decisions to make to avoid being trampled in price wars and drowned out by louder voices. However it’s a brand with increasing momentum – watch this space.

FMCG: Heinz – I love grocery brands and fast moving consumer goods where a marketing action can have an instant effect. Am I mad (probably says my wife) in loving the way that the great brands such as Heineken, Persil, Alpro, Mars and Kellogg’s dance around trying to gain momentum and advantage in the game of jujitsu called marketing? Heinz is a favourite. When Henry Heinz founded the business in 1869 he put all his products in glass jars so consumers could see exactly what they were buying. He thereby solved the biggest problem. Many people distrusted prepacked, factory food because the contents were so variable. His decision to be ‘transparent’ was an early key to building reputation. The problem they face is maintaining momentum and growth. Recent, rapid product diversification and stretching the Heinz brand has been important in creating the sense of a brand creating news and the company being much more interesting. The decision they will be wrestling with is how fastidious they ought to be in introducing new products and how far they can stretch the brand.

B2B: Tetra Pak – the big difference between B2B and B2C is that in the former the customer base controls the consumer base. (Salesmen in B2C will always argue they live in a B2B world where the customer is king not the consumer. But in reality in a self-service world the consumer is still in charge.) In B2B you have fewer sales points, each of them worth a lot of money. Tetra Pak used to have a virtually monopolistic position as the creator and driver of its packaging format. No more. Chinese competitors have invaded with good and improving product and ultra-keen pricing. Tetra Pak has an unbeatably wide portfolio and a long history of success. But competition hurts because it came so hard and suddenly and Tetra Pak are so big they were (at first) ill-equipped and lacking in flexibility to handle it. The problem they have is to project themselves as the packaging thought-leader and the market-transforming innovator they are and should be seen as.

Hi-tech Apple – oh come on … everyone chooses Apple as a role model. Yes, but this proves a point. Apple changed from being another hi-tech business that only computer nerds understood into a mass-market premium consumer goods brand. Sony used to do be like that – remember the Sony Trinitron TV and the Sony Walkman. The problem is to sustain the magic of momentum and how to ward off the looming competitors Google, Amazon and Facebook all capable of transforming what they are. The hi-tech companies are generally unafraid, it seems, of failing on individual projects and instead, with their mighty war chests, seem happy to do surprising things to extend their footprint. The problem is the future, and in each of these companies deciding what will it be like and deciding how they want to shape it,

The decisions they make need to be made fast, fearlessly and self-confidently. Wayne Grodek the great Canadian hockey player got it right.

‘A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be.’

What are huge companies like this to do with me?

Yes, that’s true. These are all huge companies employing lots of people. What can you learn from them? The answer is quite a lot. Big companies take more time to do anything, simply because coordinating an action plan takes great energy and a lot of time.

Watching this happen is like watching a play in slow motion.

Small companies are by definition nimbler and more flexible. Smaller companies learn how and how not to deal with big problems by watching how companies like BP dealt with the Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster, or Talk-Talk dealt with their hacking problem, or Toyota dealt with their problems on defects and product recalls and the VW handled their emissions scandal.

Watch and learn from our masters.

The tricky bit for all of us to get our heads around is the sheer scale of the big companies.

Walk through London or any capital city, stare up at those enormous skyscrapers full of people and wonder ‘What on earth do they do all day?’

Very small businesses also create products, services and material to customers and consumers that they want at a profit (if they are to succeed) but in a simple, focused and people-light organisation. The money goes on product and on marketing rather than on systems and HR.

Large complex, corporate organisations – how they work.

These require structures, departmentalised functions, people recruitment and management and, most of all, resource allocation. All of these create misalignment problems and the need for continual adjustment and refocusing. Create such a structure and there’s the need for constant decision making – often small decisions but important in their effect on people.

The more smoothly the problem solving and decision making culture is in a business, the better the focus on the future and the sort of products that the customer needs. This is what drives everything and what matters most in the end.

People are the common (and often awkward) factor.

A problem isn’t solved until everyone involved in and affected by the problem agree the solution is the right one and workable. The people must agree.

Getting people to agree is critical, not because businesses are democracies … most successful ones are, in fact, benign(ish) dictatorships or oligarchies. But if the ‘people’ don’t agree and the decision to implement a solution is taken despite their opposition to it, they have a funny knack, over time, of making it fail.

Small businesses are nearly always simple dictatorships where just one brain – the boss and founder – strategises, solves and decides.

Solving problems at work

Problem solving is actually fun. No really. As the problem unravels and as you begin to think and say ‘We could do that, or have we thought of that, or what’s this remind me of?’ and as the terror subsides and as the problem surrenders to your probing the sense of winning really is fun.

The right solution has to be one that fits into the strategic thinking of the business.

And it has to legal, decent and honest.

Thinking tools

• Think of the context… Because we have to recognise that all problems relate to other things, they don’t stand alone. Any problem is usually linked to a lot of other issues and there are countless examples of people solving a problem but creating a series of other problems just because we didn’t pause to reflect on the possible implications of their first solution.

• What do you do when you feel stuck? Sometimes you’ll be asked a question completely outside your comfort zone. Sometimes the problem you’re asked to solve sounds like quantum physics. There are three quick-fix hints:
  1. Talk to a colleague who probably knows more than you do about the specific problem in question.
  2. Find out if and when there was a similar problem and see what happened … is this perhaps a recurrence of the original problem?
  3. Find a reference point and compare this problem with it. The ability to compare and contrast is always a helpful one in highlighting a situation. All wars are not the same, but, if you are a historian, the more you compare and contrast wars and why they start and what happens when they do start and hostilities begin, the better you’ll understand the common threads (and importantly the elements which are different).
• Data/observation/knowledge – your most powerful tools. Assembling all that you need to help solve a problem is a critical part of the problem solving process. The research phase is a particularly inspiring one because you are learning new stuff. Even if dealing with numbers is not your favourite pastime, study data to see if there are patterns , anomalies or things you judge as unusual.
  Some of the most useful material will unfold as you walk around ‘looking’, whether in shops, warehouses, factories or meetings.
  And if there’s consumer research, read it all carefully and if necessary arrange some more research so you learn the language that consumers use.
  If you have facts, trends, data and analysis, celebrate and make sure you immerse yourself in it.
• Listen to those in the ‘frontline.’ If you want to understand a customer problem, listen to salesmen. If you want to understand a supply-chain problem, you should talk to factory and logistics management. If you want to understand a labour dispute, listen to HR. But having listened, get down as close to where the action is – in the retail outlet, on the factory floor, in the warehouse, around the vending machine and in the canteen and that’s where you might hear the hidden gems …‘If only they hadn’t changed the supplier…’, ‘The new manager won’t listen…’, ‘Our prices are way out of line…’.

Making Decisions

The late Jim Greenwood, the one-time Scottish rugby football captain, said: ‘the real art of management is well judged risk-taking’. The most impressive decision-makers in my experience are realists about the odds of success.

Making six out of ten decisions that are winners is good, while winning nine out of ten is freaky. Just make sure you are not making an impulsive ill-thought-out decision – a total guess, with fingers-crossed-behind-your-back sort of decision.

‘Whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision.’ Peter Ducker

Decision making tools

• Value experience. When it comes to making decisions the inexperienced will tend to takes more risks while the more experienced, having burnt their fingers in the past, will be more risk averse. Take the advice of an experienced person whenever you can. As Matthew Syed, one-time international table tennis player and now a leading journalist, put it: ‘Successful decision making is propelled by the kind of knowledge only built up though deep experience.’ Experience really matters – if you don’t have it, listen to someone who has. You’ll learn a lot.
• ‘Speed, simplicity and self-confidence’. These are the three characteristics that Jack Welch most rated in his executives. They are great tools to be sure, but beware being too impulsive, too simplistic and too much of a self-confident bully – overriding the views of others. But if you are in a team of people who share the language and attitude of these tools you’ll be lucky.
• Give yourself room and time to think. Don’t be impulsive. Don’t be crowded into making a decision. Get your act together by calmly assembling all the evidence you have which will support your decision (whatever it is). Use whatever time is available and if you think that you’ll need more time ask for it.

TIP

‘He was very decisive’ they said of the lemming who failed to reconnoitre properly. Being impulsive is repulsive.

• Messy is normal. We need to embrace the confusion of today’s world and then unravel it. Here’s what Michael Mills the television producer said:

‘Humans are vulnerable, messy little animals and that's normal. And all I want to do is make a space for that in my films.’

The tendency to oversimplify and create a false sense of order, when our lives are much more nuanced than that, is not a good idea. Managing mess, reducing the chaos and thriving on it is much more likely to lead to success.

• See things from the customers’ point of view. As a general rule this is a great piece of advice. If you are genuinely stuck and don’t know what to do ask yourself ‘What would my customers want us to do?’ And anyway, don’t you think that the person who pays you money for your product seems entitled to a stake in your decision making?
• Creating a decision tree. Creating a decision tree - This is a way of doodling your thoughts so each theme spreads out from the main trunk of the issue like branches on a tree. It’s a neat way of getting all your themes and thoughts in an orderly form. For those who like such ways of breaking down data they can be useful. I am a cynic about such things but as a way of graphically separating elements in the evidence this has more merit than most.

How do you feel?

How experienced were you as a problem-solver and a decision-maker before you read this? How do you feel you rated at either in terms of confidence and competence?

• Are these tips working for you? Or are you finding (or not finding) that you feel increasingly accomplished? One of the more interesting phenomena in business skills is the very act of thinking about them and being self-critical tends to improve one’s performance.
• Do you relish new challenges? The obstacle to self-improvement is the fear of failure. The launch pad to success is trying new stuff. What I hope you’ll be focused on now is how to judge and then minimise risk, how to assess opportunities and how to create an effective decision making team.

What have you done?

• Are you building a group of people like you? Building a team of people who, like you, want to hone their business skills in problem solving and decision making is available to any of you if you work for a reasonably enlightened company. Create your own network of wannabes. They can come from anywhere in the business, the more diverse the better.
• Have you worked on successful projects? Think about those projects you’ve worked on where your decision making and problem solving skills have made a difference. Knowing what you know now would you have done anything differently? What were the things you did right? What did you learn?
• Why have you improved? Assuming that you are constantly improving can you pinpoint the specific steps you’ve taken to improve those skills? What is the most important way in which you have seen improvement manifest itself?

What other people say

The world in which we live is one that is 360^◦. We all need to assess ourselves in relationship to others the whole time.

• What does your boss say? Ask them. Ask them to help. Ask them to take you through one of their recent examples of problem solving or decision making.
• What do your peers say? Tell them about your mission of improvement. Ask them how they see your changes in effectiveness. Ask how they rate their own strengths and weaknesses.
• What does your mentor say? If you don’t have a mentor you should ask HR to get you one inside or outside the business. If you have one, this will be a critical part of your development programme with them. By the way, the reason you should have a mentor is that anyone who reads a book like this is destined to grow and is showing the urge to succeed. Your company should encourage this appetite.
• What do your friends say? If you have friends working in other businesses, briefly tell them about your thoughts and see how you measure up with their development programmes. It’s always interesting to discuss and compare processes between different companies.

The future

• Have you solved your own plan of success? The more skilled you are the better you’ll do, especially if you have developed a way of solving problems and ensuring the solution is executed properly and if you have become a thoughtful and rigorously systematic decision-maker. Now apply the skills you’ve learnt to your own career. What next? Where? When? How do you get there? What do you need to change?
• What is changing in the world of decision making and problem solving? The world is changing fast. A computer called Deepmind beat the world’s best ‘go’ player in the world, Lee Sedol, in March 2016. This was ten years before anyone anticipated artificial intelligence beating human intelligence at this most complex of games. Decision making and problem solving will change and A.I. will become a major force in helping. So will we cease to have a role? Of course not, because our ultimate customers are likely to be human for a long time to come. Mr Spock remarked early on in the Star Trek series:

‘May I say that I have not thoroughly enjoyed serving with humans? I find their illogic and foolish emotions a constant irritant.’ 

Yes but irritating though they may be, the key to the future will lie in better understanding our own feelings and how to empathise with and manage those of others. ‘Illogic and foolish emotions’ are our strongest and most distinctive assets.