MONDAY MINUTE: SOLVING A PROBLEM
I conducted a poll on LinkedIn asking, “what is your go-to root cause analysis or problem solving tool?”
I ask this question when interviewing Engineers. The answers range and spark interesting conversations. I know it depends on the issue, but in most cases people tend to lean on one.
I’m intrigued not necessarily in the tool they choose, but the reasoning behind it. I listen for the candidate to explain their thought process and how they engage others in solving problems.
Before you say, “Tiffany, I am not in STEM. I don’t use these tools”.
Don’t worry, regardless of what tool you pick or if you are not even familiar with them at all, there are two principles I want you to take away.
- Don’t Focus on the Tool. Focus on the Problem.
As a Continuous Improvement professional, I like to use the analogy of your car not working and you take it to the mechanic. The mechanic determines what are the proper tools to use to fix your car. You don’t know all the tools, but eventually the mechanic fixes it and you are on your way. Look at root cause analysis tools the same way. As the CI person, let me worry about which tool to use based on the problem you are trying to solve. Getting too far into the details of each tool can cause you to be distracted by the tool and not necessarily solving the problem at hand. - Get the Team Involved.
A good problem solving practice is involving a team to solve the problem. Don’t attempt to solve it alone because with a team you will get a variety of ideas and perspectives and that’s when the most creative solutions are developed. In addition, in many cases, the solution requires buy-in from impacted people, so it’s best to have them be apart of the entire process. Understanding the problem and the steps to the solution will allow quicker adoption of the solution.
So how did the poll go?
Between 5 Why, Fishbone, Pareto and Cause & Effect Matrix, most people who answered the poll preferred “5 Why”. It’s a technique where you start with the problem statement and ask the question “why” as many times as it takes to get to a logical root cause or causes to the problem. The number 5 is just a guide, but you can ask the question more than 5 times. In doing this technique, it can cause you to pause and question and it helps prevent jumping to conclusions.