Solution Thinking

Questions of the week:?Why couldn't we use solution thinking to cut our work into half?

I write this article based on the insight of my conversation with my team in our monthly 1-on-1 call. I speak with each one of my team members. This article is a compilation of a whole week's takeaway. You can subscribe to the?Building our Team?newsletter (2000+ subscribers)

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

We have hit some workload which was not anticipated, and this article is a part of this subseries where I have created a system to demonstrate how the system can solve a problem; the complete outline will be shared in the coming weeks. The name of the system is Pressure Point Syndrome.

This article addresses the answer to 1 question I have asked my team as a part of the system. I am picking a few interesting responses out of 90 from my team and sharing my 2 cents. The response is marked in bold below.

Yeah it is possible with more team members but right now everyone is ocuppied. This is exactly how a problem based thinking looks like. Add more people or money to a problem is not a solution-based thinking. Solution based thinking, also referred to as solution focused thinking, is?a way of thinking whereby you start with your goal and work backwards to solve your problem. With Solution based thinking the majority of your mental energy is used solely for the purpose of solving a specific problem.

We cannot share our task to any team member because everyone is busy in multiple task. It does not even answer the question, the question was never about doing or sharing the task. It was about solution thinking to cut the task into half so that you get some time back. Because everyone is busy you all should have comeup with a solution that could help everyone at once. As you have seen in the Solution Strategy part how few of your team members have come up with solution of teams problem.

Rushing to complete tasks. The first answer that is related to the question I have asked to the team. Before thinking any solution we will focus on completing the task on time. This indicated you have not given enough time to think, plan and solve the task before starting with the execution. Rushing has cost us a lot in past several years, It ends up slowing us down. Doing all the free work. Cutting our profits and thus the growth. It only increases frustration, irritation and anger.

Not getting any chance to cut our work into half because of requirement. This is an legitimate issue and we can work to find an alternative solution to this. Have you given enough time to brainstrom it thoroughly? Are you reading enough articles that have solve similar problem? Have you asked a prompt to ChatGPT for an alternative approach or ideas. Have you sat with paper and pen for thinking differently?

Because multiple client going live. This is unprecedented and we cannot control this factor. Some business expert call these as good problem to have. Also this should make us think that because we have multiple clients going live does that mean we should stop thinking for them? This also gives us an opportunity to truly think out of the box to help our client gain better outcome.

What if solution didnt worked? do we have to restart from the beginning? An excellent example of how fear creaps into the work. It also addresses the risk of things not going according the plan. Right now the whole company is cornered with some pressure situation at least for 2 months. There will be a small risk of failing but the other path is doomed to fail like our current situation. However we can also learn better about the problem because we tried something new. This could help us next time.

Proper investigation is not being done for the tickets which will lead extra work in the implementation phase. I think the thinking part of the work should have a allocation of at least 25% if not less. Measure twice and cut once is something we should try to incorporate in our day today work. This is a trait of sloppy work form our side. We do technical work and it requires a set of planning and procedures before we emark into the execution phase. This shows a lack of professionalism form our side. It means we are adding more effort to cut corners in delivery.

Doing some task by myself to speed up the process by using my experience. Peacetime leaders. At the time of pressure is when the true leaders show up and taking up the hands on work has its time and place but a good leader will always lead. Good times or bad time the role of the leader is to help remove hurdles in from of her or his team and not to do the work. This is an indication that you need some leadership train or have the accountability to acknowledge the losses and damages you are incurring to the company.

One person on one project with strict deadline can't make it possible. This is concerning. I am not sure If i am reading this correctly. This already shows a lack of writing communication skills on my teams part. If it means that 1 person on 1 project with a strict deadline is not possible to deliver, which means you need at least a team of two people working on a project. In that case that would be the minimum capacity of the team size to deliver value to the client. This is a simple problem to solve by adding one more person but that means client has to pay for it and that could lead up to a pricing problem.

Those were the 9 points for this question I picked, and I hope this helps your team as well. I have been critical in this article, but the fact of the matter is that the pressure point has stopped the team from focusing on learning about systems in our culture call, and that's a long-term loss for the company. Also, to do a short fix, we have to ask for more help, hire interns and do some free work for clients. This takes a hit to our profits.

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