Avoid the solution fixation trap

Faced with e.g. the problem of declining sales, figuring out why a marketing campaign is not effective, ..., we have all done it or have all witnessed this behavior when working in team: we get enthusiastic or we are striving for efficiency (shorter meetings) and we want to immediately jump into the solution part. In each case, the phenomenon of solution fixation appears meaning you are hang on to one solution too quickly (you become fixated) and are not welcoming a diversity of solutions anymore. For sure, I have done this also myself and I definitely have also witnessed it already many times when facilitating groups ideating on innovative solutions.

Therefore, I like the research done by the authors Sohrab, Waller & Uitdewilligen (with an HBR article in October 2023: Is Your Team Caught in the Solution Fixation Trap? (hbr.org)) as they tackle some interesting questions:

• How does a team go about making a decision? What are the different phases?
• Do high-performing teams tackle this differently than low-performing teams?
• Is one team more efficient (faster) in doing this versus another one?

Here are some responses:

How does a team go about making a decision?

Typically you go through 4 phases:

• Information processing: you ask for more info, you answer questions, you try to raise things other people don't know about the problem or situation
• Solution explanation: you propose solutions, evaluate them and expand upon them
• Confirmation: you ask for everyone's agreement
• Executive action: you document and have guidelines on the process to follow

In reality, we don't go through these in a completely linear way but typically you start with processing some factual information, you then first explore some solutions, you add a bit more information, you deepen some solutions and then you ask for everyone's agreement before you conclude with documenting the outcomes.

Do high-performing teams tackle this differently than low-performing teams?

What you immediately observe when looking at the figure below: in the low-performing phases visualisation, there is much more green than in the high-performing phases visualisation. This means that low-performing teams became more fixated on the solution exploration.

"If a team member in a low-performing team asked, “What do we know about X?”, low performers would typically ignore the question and continue discussing potential solutions without substantiating them. This fixation on debating solutions limited the low performers’ ability to reveal and fully evaluate all the information available to them, which in turn led to poor decision outcomes."

Is one team more efficient (faster) in doing this versus another one?

When comparing low and high-performing teams, no significant differences in time needed to come to executive action were observed. Teams that rushed into debating solutions did not finish the overall task any faster than the high-performing team. This shows that jumping into solutions faster do not lead to time savings. It just means there is more debate around that solution which does not seem to add to the performance level of that outcome.

Some concluding tips, when facilitating a meeting or taking part in a meeting,

• always try to make sure enough time is spent on tackling the root cause of the problem (getting to key insights) as it will lead to higher performance,
• dare to park solutions participants raise in order to get to more diversity in solutions,
• visualize e.g. on separate sheets/boards the problem related statements and the solution related statements. That way, it is visually clear for everyone from the amount of comments whether you are not jumping too much into conclusions on solutions.