Structured Problem Solving

When people started forming improvement teams, often the team was simply thrown together and left to get on with it. Sometimes this worked but unfortunately often the teams ran into problems through a variety of pitfalls and the projects failed. Some of the most common pitfalls were:

A tendency for some people to want to leap to conclusions and solutions without really finding out what the problem is and analysing it. ”We don’t need to do all that, the answers obvious.”

Not planning ahead, particularly in implementation and particularly in terms of peoples reactions. "We'll cross that bridge when we come to it"

The team wanting to work on problems that are too general or large. ”The real problem around here is Staff Morale”

Not working as a team, but as a number of individuals, possibly in competition. When you have an aim or a goal, don’t stop to have a competition on the way.

What was clear is that often the people in the team were not sure how to go about solving problems. As a result, the structured problem solving approach and tools were developed and first used in Quality Circles.

Background

Structure problem solving is a collection of approaches and techniques designed to help people to take a complex problem, analyse it to establish the causes of that problem, and then identify alternative ways of resolving the problem and an action plan for doing so. The approaches and techniques are both analytical and creative and are particularly powerful when used by teams.

The approach has a long history but really came to prominence during the rise of TQM and quality of service improvement over the last twenty or so years. Initially such approaches were primarily used in high technology manufacturing by quality circles and their like, but have now gained a far wider acceptance.

The basic idea is that most of the problems we encounter in organisational operations are like the iceberg depicted below.

Problem Solving Iceberg

Six Step Summary

Step 1 - Identify, Select, and Redefine the Problem Definition

Try to ensure that it describes a problem or effect that you want to remove rather than a general area (training, or standardise forms) that you just want investigated.

Step 2 - Identify Possible Causes

Make a MAP of the problem. Use Brainstorming with either a Cause & Effect analysis or Process Mapping to create a diagram that people can use to map the possible causes.
At this stage an Action Team would draw up a simple Action Plan for the next two months, covering:
- redefinition of problem.
- what information to collect in order to identify which causes should be pursued in more depth, and how it should be collected.
- what sort of analyses and approaches to use.

Step 3 - Identify a "Temporary Fix" if possible.

Step 4 - Identify Root Causes

This usually involves several meetings collecting further data and analysing it using the other improvement tools.