Here I am, getting into the client office and everybody seems to be bursting to tell me what the problem is. Sales wants more leads. Customer service is drowning in emails. Quotations take too long. Finance wants invoices out faster. A key specialist has become the person everybody needs for everything, which means everybody is waiting for him. And somebody thinks the new software will sort out most of it.
Fine. We certainly aren't short of problems.
The temptation would be to start picking them up as they arrive. I don't. Before getting too excited about any particular one, I need to understand enough of the business and its operation to know what I am looking at.
First I need the landscape
What is the business trying to accomplish? What is actually happening now? Where are the gaps, what consequences are they producing, and where do they show up?
That initial inquiry matters because the first problem I hear about isn't necessarily the most important one. It may simply belong to the first person I talked to.
It also stops me from making the opposite mistake: trying to force everything I find into one grand explanation.
Suppose this service company really does have a sales problem. At the same time, Finance may have a completely separate receivables problem, and a project team may have a capacity problem. All three can be real. If the right people have the time, authority and resources, all three can be worked on at the same time.
I don't need to crown one of them King of the Company and make everybody else wait.
But now suppose Sales says the company needs more leads, while I discover that enquiries already sit unanswered for days. Quotations take a week to prepare because technical specialists have to get involved in almost everyone, and those same specialists are already holding up client work.
Now I am interested.
More leads may still be useful, but pouring another bucket of them into the front of that system could make an already interesting situation considerably more interesting.
Which problem am I actually looking at? This is where apparently simple questions start becoming useful.
Do I have a lead-generation problem? A slow quotation problem? A specialist-capacity problem? Several problems that happen to interact? Or am I looking at consequences of something else that I haven't found yet?
I don't know. And that's fine, I don't have to know yet.
The people in the business know their work far better than I do, and I want to hear what they think. I also want to understand what actually happens rather than what the process is supposed to look like.
Sometimes I ask questions whose answers I think I already know. Occasionally somebody looks at me as if I really should know better.
Also fine.
A slightly stupid question has rescued me from a clever assumption more than once.
Problems don't all need the same treatment. Even when I know which problems deserve attention, I don't necessarily approach them the same way.
Sometimes the problem itself is reasonably clear, and I need to keep following the causal trail until I understand why it happens.
Sometimes there are several plausible causes, and I need to spread them out, look at them systematically and see which ones survive contact with reality.
Sometimes something visible is masking what is really going on underneath and removing that mask changes the investigation completely.
And sometimes I understand the problem quite well already. More diagnosis isn't going to impress anybody except perhaps myself. The real work is figuring out what needs to change, who needs to make it happen, whether they have the authority and resources to do it, and how we will know that anything actually improved.
Those are different situations. Using the same favourite problem-solving tool for all of them would be wonderfully convenient, but businesses have never shown much interest in arranging their problems around my toolkit.
Then comes the awkward word: priority
If three problems can be handled independently by three capable teams, I may not have much of a prioritisation problem at all.
The question becomes more difficult when those problems compete for the same people, money, authority or management attention. It also becomes difficult when one action depends on another, or when apparently separate problems begin feeding each other.
That's when I want to know what happens if I act here rather than there. What becomes different?
What happens to the result that actually matters? What else moves with it?
And what happens if I leave this problem alone for now? This one is easy to forget, though. Once I have found a problem, there is a strange temptation to reward it with an action.
Some problems can wait. Some are irritating rather than important. Some cost less to live with than to fix. Some will disappear when another change happens.
Other problems look innocent enough until I ask what another six months of doing nothing will cost. So, leaving a problem alone can be a perfectly sensible decision. I just want it to be a decision rather than an accident.
So, which business problem should I solve first? Sometimes there isn't one answer because several problems can and should be worked on at the same time.
Where there is a genuine choice, I don't start by asking which problem shouts loudest, has the biggest number next to it or happens to have the most enthusiastic sponsor. I first need enough understanding of the landscape to know what the problems are, how they relate, which can move independently and where resources or dependencies force a choice.
Then I can decide where action is likely to make a worthwhile difference.
Occasionally that takes me straight back to the problem everybody pointed at when I arrived, but the long way. They were right.
Occasionally my own beautiful theory doesn't survive the first afternoon. They were right about that too.
Fair enough. I would much rather lose my theory than spend the next three months defending it.
From the outside, this can all look surprisingly calm. A few conversations, some questions, some looking around and perhaps another coffee.
The duck seems to glide effortlessly across the water. Nobody sees how fast its feet are paddling underneath.
If several business problems are competing for your attention and it isn't quite clear to you where to start, that is exactly the kind of conversation I enjoy. You can find me at www.baleteworks.com.
Rooted knowledge. Real improvement.