Part III - What's your actual problem?

This next step (and design thinkers amongst you may spot the similarities between my thinking here and design thinking approaches – unconscious on my part but interesting to observe) requires the precise articulation of the problem statement to your stakeholders, building on the general acknowledgment of the problem identified in Step One. This question tends to be harder to answer then you might think. “The team is too busy”, or “We spend too much time on low value tasks” or “We don’t have good management data to inform decision making” may well be true reflections on the present state, but aren’t sufficiently tightly articulated to give stakeholders a precise problem which their cooperation is required to solve. Solutions to these sorts of non-specific problem statements generally go down the lines of working longer hours, deadlines slipping, or decisions being made on insufficient data – generally not the objectives of transformation programmes.

A tighter articulation of a problem statement might be “We regularly produce documents based off templates and it’s consuming large parts of our working days, with a material amount of time spent re-keying information that has already been gathered”, or “Our team applies what should be a standard set of steps to execute a process, but sometimes steps are missed”.

At the least, tightly articulated problem statements should achieve the following: stakeholders can easily understand the exact problem that the programme wishes to solve; large, nebulous problem statements are whittled into manageable bite size pieces; and communications between stakeholders are more effective with clear calls to action as to what needs to change. Tightly articulated problem statements should also make identification of the solution by the change management team more straightforward, and easier to deploy and, if necessary, build – although this benefit is not the focus of this series (I enjoyed reading Michele DeStefano’s thoughts on this related topic in Legal Upheaval: A Guide to Creativity, Collaboration, and Innovation in Law).

I’ve built out the table from the previous article to develop the general problem statements into specifically articulated problem statements. Next article to follow soon...