It’s very cold in Scotland today and there’s lots of snow at my home, lovely but a pain in the neck. On cue my heating broke. I called the number on my gas boiler. The PHD in boiler repairs that I spoke to asked me to specify the part I needed. I told him that I was a lover not a fighter and therefore not really a man hence had no idea about boilers. It simply wasn’t working and we were cold. He was a complete pain in the bum, stating that unless I could specify the part needed he wasn’t coming out! Not only was his service appalling he was trying to get the solution to the problem before he fully understood its extent or symptoms. It reminds me of…

Three years ago I got a phone call from a potential client. The call went like this: “We need a new database for our service but our boss won’t give us the money unless you come in and tell us we need a new database.” I explained that we didn’t work like that so we agreed to start the project by first trying to understand the problem.

The company serviced gas boilers for the public sector and unlike in the private sector doing this work was mandatory. So what was the problem? Quite simply: That not all boilers were getting serviced every year and as a result the local authority was exposed to legal action if an appliance went wrong.

You’ll probably notice that we started by re-defining the problem, we didn’t for example say that the problem is ‘we need a new database’ because doing that would have led us to building a new database…not the problem.

But identifying the real problem is only the start; we then wanted to know the extent of the problem and then try to get a handle on its causes. By starting to dig a bit deeper we found out that in a typical year around 30% of boilers were not getting serviced, and the consequences were quite serious. If an appliance were to fail that could mean that a vulnerable person was left without heating, or even worse if a boiler were to explode council customers could be injured or killed.

Time to have another go at re-clarifying the problem – ‘In a typical year 30% of council boilers are not serviced the consequences of which are that people could be left without heat or worse be injured.’

So why is problem clarification so important? On a personal level have you ever had an argument with your partner only to discover that after three days of sleeping on the sofa you were both arguing about something totally different? Have you ever sat in a meeting only to find that no-one is actually clear on what you’re trying to achieve? I recently attended a meeting where the problem in a waste collection service was defined as, ‘we have to move to a system where we collect the bins fortnightly’. The problem was that I simply didn’t understand the problem. Here’s another example from the call centre world, ‘We have to take on more staff because we can’t handle the level of demand.’ In both cases the manager is about to spend more money and then won’t know if the problem has been fixed… why? because they didn’t correctly identify the problem.

The solution is to define a problem by capturing its symptoms without assuming the cause.

And the better you can define the consequences the more you can add context and create urgency for change. When Al Gore, former US Vice President and climate change activist, defined the global warming problem he didn’t say ‘there’s some snow melting somewhere north of Seattle, a penguin might get ill.’ Instead he presented Antarctic ice coring data showing CO2 levels higher now than in the past 650,000 years, explained that the 15 hottest years in global recorded history have all occurred since 1995, that extreme weather is getting worse, that glaciers and ice sheets are retreating all over the world and that if this continued it was possible a major ice sheet could collapse raising global sea levels by approximately 20 feet, flooding coastal areas and producing 100 million refugees.

The next step is to try to contain the problem. The goal here is to deliberately put sticking plaster over the problem. You know you’re not trying to solve it, merely to avoid the amplification of the problem to buy some time to allow you to get to the root cause. For example in our boiler servicing process you may put on some overtime with the explicit agreement that it’s only until you get to the cause of why so many appliances don’t get serviced within the agreed timeframe.

Now you’re into analysis. The job is to get sufficient knowledge about the problem to enable you to identify the root cause. You may use tools such as process mapping, tally charting, demand analysis or capability charts. And in this case the cause was that in 45% of cases the engineers did not get first time access to the property. Further investigation then showed that the design of the outbound appointment setting process was at fault. In other words had we taken the word of the manager the client would have spent £30k on a new database that would not actually have solved their problem.

As you can imagine the client was very happy, not only did he avoid spending money needlessly and solve his problem, he also got a team trained in how to look at problems differently and this is the real value here.

So the next time something goes wrong in your business take a moment to ask a few more questions before jumping in with what looks like a solution, you may find that you’ll solve the underlying problem faster and better, and learn something in the process.

Note to my boiler repair person: please read this article as I’m still freezing, I really need your help.

Stuart

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