How to Avoid the Conclusion Trap with Dan Markovitz

What can we do to improve our ability to solve important problems? To explore this question, we invited Dan Markovitz to join us on The Believe Show. Dan is the author of The Conclusion Trap. He contends we should stop being in such a hurry to get to the solution. There are important questions to ask first.

To watch the entire conversation, click here or play the video embedded below.

Senia: What do you believe that others in your field may not believe?

Dan: People spend too much time focusing on problem-solving and not enough time understanding problems. By truly understanding the problem, we can make better decisions. There’s a famous quotation often attributed to Einstein: “If I had an hour to solve a problem, I’d spend fifty-five minutes thinking about it and five minutes coming up with a solution.” I wouldn’t recommend as much time as Einstein did, but we should spend at least sixty to seventy-five percent of time understanding the problem.

Senia: How did you come to this belief?

Dan: Through a variety of events, I learned that people are quick to jump to conclusions, leading to premature solutions.

Let me tell a story. Hospitals are graded. Among the grades and scores collected are customer patient satisfaction scores. This helps hospitals understand what's working well and what's not working well. A friend of mine consulted one hospital where patients were complaining about excessive noise. It was just very, very loud. It was hard for them to talk to their families. It was even harder to sleep. 

The hospital CEO had not spent a lot of time on the floor talking to the patients. He just looked at the scores and made an assessment. He said, "Well, hospital floors are linoleum, right?" He reasoned the bumps in the linoleum made stuff rattle when they are wheeled up and down. He said, "We're going to put carpeting down because carpeting is a sound deadener." Not only did the carpeting make it more difficult for nurses to roll carts, but that wasn't actually the problem. While he was spending tens of thousands of dollars putting in the carpeting, the nurses were talking to the patients. They realized that the big issue was TVs playing loudly. The nurses had been keeping the doors open in order to hear when patients needed them.

Had the CEO just spent a little more time understanding the problem, he could have achieved a better outcome more efficiently, saving time, energy, and effort. 

A 4-Step Alternative to Jumping to Conclusions

In my book, The Conclusion Trap: Four Steps to Better Decisions, I outlined four steps to help individuals better analyze problems and discover more effective solutions.

1. Go and See: We need to assess the situation for ourselves. During an investigation, the police officers don’t just hang out at the police station. They go where the crime happened. They look at the buildings, windows, and streets. They search for bullet casings and gather information to get the most accurate assessment of what happened. The hospital CEO should have gone to patient floors, talked to nurses, and talked to patients in order to assess the noise problem fully.
2. Properly Frame Your Problem: State the problem without embedding a solution. Imagine someone says “The problem is our sales team doesn’t have enough administrative support.” The words "The problem is..." do not make the sentence a problem statement. It’s really a solution masquerading as a problem. When assessing a problem, we have to be sure we aren’t incorrectly framing a solution as a problem. It's also important to be specific. A client said to me, “The problem is that I need a sales manager I can trust.” My response was, “One, this is a solution. Two, what does that mean? You don’t trust them to follow the traffic signals? You don't trust them to not steal from the company? Or is it that you don’t trust them because they make promises that your software development team can't deliver on?" It’s important to be specific to truly understanding the root of the problem. The hospital CEO should have focused on the patients. It was the patient satisfaction scores that were too low.
3. Think Backwards: The fishbone or Ishikawa diagram (picture below) developed by Ishikawa at Tokyo University is a brainstorming tool for grouping potential causal factors that might be driving the visible symptoms of the problem. What I've seen over and over again is when people start to brainstorm, they are all over the place. The fishbone diagram helps people focus on the various factors. In the hospital story, we could explore when people are complaining. What's going on then? For example, in the night people want to sleep. We could look at the types of noise. There are televisions, alarms, gurneys and wheelchairs. We can look at staffing. Are there high levels of staff or low levels of staff? We could start to map out primary and secondary causes. By looking backwards, we’re saying, "Here's the visible problem. What is below or beneath that’s leading to it?" The diagram helps us see and understand the contributing factors. It increases the likelihood of solving a problem in a meaningful way.
4. Ask Why: There’s a concept called the five why’s. The idea is that we don’t want to stop at a surface solution. When we do, we are probably putting a bandaid on a major issue. For your situation, it might not be exactly five - it might be three why's or eleven why's. Using the hospital story, we could ask, Why are patients complaining about the noise? Because the TVs are loud. Why is the TV noise so easy to hear? Because the doors are kept open. Why are the doors kept open? The nurses don't have an easy way to hear the patients. Why don't they have an easy way? Because the rooms haven't been outfitted with microphones or speakers. By asking multiple why questions, we may discover that the problem is more deeply embedded than originally thought. 

The steps, handouts, podcasts, and other related information are available for free on my website, The Conclusion Trap.

Senia: What is one thought that you would like to leave with everyone?

Dan: We are trained to raise our hands to say, "I've got the answer." It's better to take two steps back before taking one step forward. It's better to ask, "Can we make sure we understand the problem we're trying to solve?" People are often rewarded for being fast with an answer. I would prefer that people be rewarded for being fast with the questions, "What problem are we trying to solve? Do we really understand it?"

Senia: What’s one action you would like everyone to take? 

Dan: Tell your husband, wife, spouse, partner and parents that you love them very much. From a business standpoint, during meetings before something is to be decided, ask, "What problem are we trying to solve?"

Photo by Tanyae from Dreamstime

Fishbone diagram from wikimedia.

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