Solving problems is tricky enough when we’re working on our own. It can become even more difficult if we’re trying to solve a problem with other people.
This chapter won’t be a lengthy discussion about all the interpersonal skills involved in working in groups. (If you’d like to discover more about these skills, my book How to Manage Meetings includes a chapter on how groups work.) Instead, we’ll explore here how to use the problem-solving tools and techniques we’ve already discovered to collaborate with others.
Collaborative problem-solving must begin and end with decisions about who owns the problem. The key questions, in order, are:
To answer the first question, look back at our exploration of ownership in Chapter 4.
In this chapter, we shall assume that the problem-owner is you.
Solutions in organizations often fail because nobody owns them. A solution becomes a victim to ‘disconnects’, which can occur when the two stages of problem-solving – defining the problem and constructing a solution – become separated. (The concept of disconnects is another of Fred Nickols’ brainchildren.)
Some disconnects are vertical. Senior management decides to simplify a process; middle management analyses the existing process and the criteria for improving it, then designs a new process; finally, line management tries to implement the new process, tweaking it to make it fit all the contingencies of everyday working – and all too often the new process becomes more complicated than the old one.
But disconnects can also occur laterally. Relationships between customers and suppliers, or between clients and consultants, can become disconnected.
Whenever you hear the words, ‘but that’s not what I wanted’, you’re probably hearing evidence of a lateral disconnect. Disconnects often occur, for example, between IT departments and users. Users complain that IT has produced a solution that doesn’t do what users want; the boffins retort that the brief was unclear; and so on, round and round. (Agile Software Development, which we met in Chapter 8, is a response to this very problem.)
According to Fred Nickols:
“The obvious response to disconnects is to provide continuity. Sooner or later, the whole thing must pass through and fit in one brain; if not, it ain’t gonna work, ‘cause no one understands it from end to end.”
In other words: one person must take ownership of the solution.
Stakeholders are the people who have both an interest in the solution and the power to influence our problem-solving work. You might not welcome the fact that other people have a stake in your problem: we saw in Chapter 7 that problems can become wicked as more and more people become involved. But it’s important to view the stakeholders, not as potential troublemakers but as a valuable resource.
The first step in your stakeholder analysis is to brainstorm who your stakeholders are. Who is affected by the problem? Who has contributed to it? Who has power to influence the situation or to help you make a solution happen?
One way to cover all the stakeholders is the ‘nine Cs’ checklist, originally drawn up by the National Health Service:
You may identify both organizations and individuals as stakeholders, but you can only deal with people. Make sure that you identify the appropriate individual stakeholders within a stakeholder organization.
Once you have decided who owns the problem, map out the problem’s stakeholders: everyone who has a stake in the problem, the solution and any possible consequences.
You could map stakeholders on a large piece of flipchart paper, with those most affected or involved near the centre and others at varying distances from the centre.
You can also link stakeholders whose interests are related.
You now have a list of stakeholders who are affected by the problem. Some will have power to help or hinder you; some will have an interest in generating a solution, while others will not. Your manager, for example, probably has power to influence what you do, and may have high interest in generating a solution. A customer may have very high interest in generating a solution, but little obvious power in your organization.
Map out your stakeholders on a power/interest grid, to work out how you will involve them in your problem-solving efforts.
Your working methods will differ with each of these four groups. With the collaborators, you are likely to set up problem-solving meetings, and these need to be well managed.
We think differently when we think in a group. All too often, in fact, we think less effectively when others are involved. But group problem-solving can work extremely well – if it follows some basic disciplines.
An effective problem-solving group:
The key roles in a problem-solving group are:
And it’s a good idea to allocate these three roles to different people. In particular, the problem-owner and the process leader should be two different people. Why?
The process leader will help the group discipline its thinking, apply thinking tools more effectively and keep the conversation on track. That’s a full-time task. It makes sense, therefore, that the process leader and the problem-solver should be different people.
Among the thinking consultants, have as rich a mix as possible of the four problem-solving styles: Analyst, Explorer, Engineer and Designer. Use the skills of each style as appropriate at different times in the problem-solving process, and for different types of problem.
Group problem-solving should do two things:
Group problem-solving is always vulnerable to conflict. When we think in a group, we easily confuse an idea with the person holding it. Attacking an idea means attacking the person. Conflict nearly always includes emotional arousal, which, as we’ve seen in Chapter 2, limits our ability to think rationally – or, indeed, intuitively.
We can encounter four main types of conflict in group problem-solving.
The process leader can manage these different forms of conflict by asking the group questions:
Another way to discipline the group’s thinking is to focus on the problem-solving process itself.
One basic question to ask is: are we doing Stage 1 or Stage 2 thinking? In other words, are we seeking to understand the problem or generate a solution?
Simply keeping a group focused on one stage of the problem-solving process can be a challenge. You could begin by using the problem matrix (in Chapter 5) to help the group categorize and define the problem.
Stage 1 thinking is always about being able to see a problem more clearly, more deeply or more imaginatively. A group working on a problem will always benefit from a shared visual representation of the problem – especially if they can create it themselves.
Many techniques and technologies have appeared over the years to help groups visualize their thinking. Yet it’s surprising how many groups try to work together with no visual element whatsoever. Some meeting rooms are equipped with white boards – many of which are now interactive – or flipcharts. Lo-tech tools such as sticky notes can be hugely effective. The key is to be able to use a range of techniques with these tools, to help us visualize our ideas.
Two technologies in particular have proved enormously successful in making use of our capacity to think visually. Both claim not merely to represent our thinking more effectively, but actually to help us think more creatively. And neither of them uses electricity!
Mind maps are diagrams representing words, ideas, tasks, or other items linked to and arranged around a central key word or idea. We can use mind maps to generate, structure and classify ideas, as well as the connections between them.
Mind maps are closely associated with Tony Buzan. In The Mind Map Book, Buzan offers four principles for creating them:
Rich pictures are variants on mind maps that are particularly valuable in picturing a large-scale system such as an organization or network. Rich pictures grew out of Soft Systems Methodology (SSM), developed during the 1960s and 1970s by Peter Checkland and his students at Lancaster University.
Rich pictures are particularly powerful in mapping wicked problems. They help us map not only the obvious facts of a situation, but also abstract or emotional factors such as the social atmosphere among the actors. A rich picture represents what we know about a messy situation: the issues, the actors, the problems, processes, relationships, conflicts and motivations. Drawing a rich picture helps us to see not only the obvious facts about a situation, but the emotional and social factors underlying it. You can find plenty of examples on the internet.
Begin with a large sheet of paper and a lot of differently coloured pens. Draw what you see happening in the situation. Include everything that you perceive to be problematic or significant: emotions and relationships as well as organizational groupings. Use symbols and metaphors.
All rich pictures include three important components:
Focusing on structure, process and concerns helps prevent the rich picture becoming overloaded with detail.
In the past 50 years a whole industry has grown up devoted to developing and promoting group problem-solving techniques. Among the earliest is brainstorming, invented by Alex Osborn in the 1930s. Osborn offers four basic rules for brainstorming.
Beyond these simple rules, Osborn emphasizes the importance of:
In the decades since Osborn published his ideas in his book, Applied Imagination, a good deal of research has investigated whether brainstorming does indeed help groups to generate creative ideas. The results have been ambiguous: groups don’t seem to be as effective as individuals at generating ideas, though they do seem to be able to evaluate and develop ideas more powerfully.
These findings are hardly surprising. An idea can only ever form in a single mind. Groups in themselves cannot generate ideas. A brainstorming session works best when it provides the environment for individuals to have ideas and voice them.
Brainstorming may benefit from a few simple additional guidelines to Osborn’s original four principles.
Separate individual from group brainstorming. Ask people to generate ideas individually to begin the process. Gather them anonymously to encourage the wilder ideas to surface and counter any politics or inhibitions in the team. Then use group brainstorming to group the ideas, build on them, combine them, vary them, develop them and transform them.
Set targets. The discipline of ‘scoring’ can produce more ideas and help crazier ideas to surface. A target of between 50 and 100 ideas in 10 minutes is not unreasonable for a competent team of about seven people.
Vary the session’s structure. Change the way the session runs by:
A ‘how to’ session is a powerful variant on brainstorming.
Begin by identifying the problem-owner and asking them to define the problem as a ‘how to’ statement. They should present the problem to the group in no more than a few minutes.
If you are the problem-owner, use this checklist to help you talk briefly about the problem.
How to:
...............................................................................
The group leader may need to remove the problem-owner from the group after presenting the problem. If they stay in the group, appoint someone to manage the problem-owner’s behaviour so that they don’t stifle the group’s thinking with operational objections and idea killers.
Now ask the group to generate as many new ‘how to’ statements as possible. (Look back at Chapter 8 for details.) Record the new ‘how to’ statements on sticky notes, so that the group can cluster them into themes. Ask the group to create clusters of ‘how to’ statements that it can use to present its thinking to the problem-owner.
Invite the problem-owner to inspect the collection of ‘how to’ statements. Some of the ‘how to’ statements may strike them at once as feasible solutions and others as ideas for practical solutions. A third group might intrigue and excite them: they may feel that they would really like to do what the ‘how to’ suggests, and they don’t know how. These are potentially the most interesting ideas, so ask the group to develop them further into ideas for solutions.
Groups are usually much better at evaluating and developing ideas than having them. A group problem-solving session can add real value by concentrating on working an idea into a feasible, practical course of action.
Use the business case checklist and solution effect analysis (SEA) that we looked at in Chapter 10.
Once a group has been through a problem-solving process, it’s critically important to establish who is going to make the solution happen.
Think back to Chapter 4: is the solution-owner taking responsibility for the solution, or are they energetically committed to implementing it? What can the group do to help transform the solution-owner’s responsibility into real commitment? And how is the solution-owner proposing to make the solution work?
Taking responsibility for a solution, as we saw in Chapter 4, should be a free act. Simply telling someone to implement a solution is unlikely to guarantee a positive outcome. The best way to establish someone’s ownership of a solution is to negotiate:
Solutions, as we know, are courses of action. They make change happen. And, as we also know, change introduces uncertainty, and uncertainty can provoke resistance – especially in the stakeholders who are affected by it. Think especially about the stakeholders who aren’t in the ‘collaborate’ category: they probably haven’t been closely involved in creating the solution, but they will feel its effects and may have to work with it.
As we saw in Chapter 4, resistance can be the result of procedures being disrupted and needs not being recognized. Success will come from reducing the resistance: recognizing that disruptions to procedures need to be navigated, and meeting needs wherever possible.
Force-field analysis develops the idea of resistance from the level of the individual to the level of the system. By representing a situation as a dynamic, open system, force-field analysis shows how a new solution can disrupt the balance of the system by exerting force in a certain direction. The inevitable result within the system will be resistance.
The system will only change if the resisting forces are weakened. Exerting more force for change will simply increase resistance.
Force-field analysis creates a simple, clear model of the forces supporting and opposing change (see Figure 11.1).
Figure 11.1 The forces supporting and opposing change
Take care to confine your analysis to an identifiable system: a team, a department, an organization, a partnership. Analyse the forces at work on the system – not on individuals within the system. Consider only those forces you can positively identify, not possible forces.
Identify the desired outcome or objective. As driving forces, look for:
As opposing forces, look for:
Address the opposing forces by creating constructed problems – ‘how to’ statements:
Collaboration is founded on identifying both the problem-owner and the solution-owner.
Think of the problem’s stakeholders as a valuable resource. List them and map them out on a power/interest grid.
The key roles in a problem-solving group are:
Process leaders can help by managing critical thinking, ego thinking, political thinking and rigid thinking when they arise. They can also help discipline the group’s thinking by focusing on the problem-solving process.
Two technologies – mind maps and rich pictures – are useful to help the group visualize problems.
Brainstorming is a well-known problem-solving technique with four basic rules:
We can improve the success of brainstorming sessions by:
A ‘how to’ session is a powerful kind of brainstorming meeting.
A group problem-solving session can add real value by concentrating on building a solution’s feasibility. It’s critically important to establish the solution-owner.
Solutions may provoke resistance among those affected by them. We can lower resistance by:
Force-field analysis helps us manage this resistance and lower it. It develops the idea of resistance from the level of the individual to the level of the system.
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