When Answers Aren’t Enough to Solve Your Business Challenge

Imagine this…

The head of your business unit has stormed into your office. And she intones:

“Your brand has lost market share to that new competitor for three consecutive months. I need you to turn things around and take back our market share!”

The request is clear: ‘Take back the market share that your brand is losing.’ But the root cause is not.

The instinct of most brand team leaders tends to be:

• Call the ad agency and yell at them to fix it OR
• Convene a meeting and start brainstorming “how to take back share”

However, neither of these approaches is enough to crack your problem. And it’s not because your ad agency or your team are incompetent. The underlying barrier that’s going to inhibit your team is that you’re trying to solve a problem before you’ve intimately understood the facts and clearly defined what you should be brainstorming on.

Your team needs to start with fact finding.

“The brightest flashes in the world of thought are incomplete until they have been proved to have their counterparts in the world of fact.

– John Tyndall, 19th Century Physicist

The Fundamentals of Fact Finding

Fact finding is an important methodology that is used by strategists, consultants and businesspeople around the world. It has its roots in Creative Problem Solving and as a deliberate technique, it goes back more than 70 years. The aim of fact finding is to better understand a fuzzy problem, build insight and occasionally to build alignment with disparate stakeholders who view their problem differently. At its core, fact finding is asking and answering a series of questions. But when done right, fact finding is a whole lot more than just simply question asking. By employing a fact-finding approach and mindset, we ensure that we understand a problem well enough to begin reframing it so that our solutioning is more productive and focused.

“A Problem Well-Stated Is A Problem Half-Solved.”

– Charles Kettering, General Motors, Head of Research (1920 to 1947)

How to Conduct Fact Finding

Fact finding is a multi-step process that is equal parts preparation, facilitation and analysis. Here are the steps that I generally follow when I’m preparing to do fact finding with a client or customer.

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Step 1: Select the Right Questions.

There are literally hundreds of questions you can ask as prompts in fact finding. But you will likely only have time to ask a few. While there is no secret formula for which questions to select, I tend to start with a few broad questions that relate back to the four key fact-finding categories, which are:

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Purpose & Goals:?We use this to define the aspiration and outcomes you’re looking for, both in the short term as well as in the long term.

Context:? The context is everything around the challenge that gives shape to the problem and helps you understand the missing pieces.

Constraints & Resources:? Here is where we uncover the potential barriers, blockers and things that are getting in the way of solving the challenge.

People & Perspectives:? You should understand who may be an enabler as well as who might be a derailer of your success.

To see an expansive list of questions that I ordinarily draw from, check out: 124 questions to ask before you start solving your challenge.

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Step 2: Pick a Medium for Fact Finding

Now that you have your questions, the next action you need to take is to decide which medium you will use with the participants to do the fact finding.

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There are many different ways to administer this tool. Here are just a few ways:

• Send out a survey and then input responses in a template or spreadsheet
• Facilitate live and use an interactive response tool, such as Poll Everywhere
• Use a collaborative white boarding technology like Miro or Mural.
• Or, do it the old-fashioned way, and facilitate live and record on post-it notes and on an easel

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The right medium is going to depend on the team, the project timing, whether it’s in-person or virtual, the level of your and the team’s tech savvy to name a few considerations.

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I personally use all of these different mediums and will mix and match mediums based on the circumstances.

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Step 3: Prime Your Participants

Now that you have the questions and the medium set-up, you’re almost ready to start asking and answer questions.? But before starting, I always prime my participants to make sure they are fully aligned on the exercise and the right behaviors. So before I start, I will:

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Signal to participants that this is a divergent exercise…at this stage we should not be judging the facts.

• Encourage everyone to contribute
• Make sure all participants understand what a good fact is versus weak fact
• And finally, I remind everyone of the problem we are focusing on and the outcomes we are ultimately after

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Once we ground everyone on these reminders, we’re ready for the next step.

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Step 3: Reflection and Elaboration

When I’m fact finding, I find it’s simply not enough to just ask questions. There is some finesse and technique. And I think of it as using the power of reflection and elaboration. Here’s what I mean:

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Reflection: People need time to relax, think and share. Most people cannot provide substantive answers at the snap of a finger. So my approach is to always ask participants to take a few minutes to quietly reflect on a question first and then to begin recording their facts. That moment of reflection allows the mind to wander and discover.

Elaboration: Just like in brainstorming, the first idea is rarely the best one. But it is a starting point. This is true for facts as well. We tend to oversimplify or use jargon when we record our facts and truths. The process of elaboration allows for the authors to explain and help the group to understand what was meant by each fact. Furthermore, elaboration is time not only for the author to expand but also the group. Inviting the group participants to build, or elaborate, on an initial fact serves as a stimulus for adjacent or connect thoughts that can allow deeper discovery.

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Step 4: Synthesis

The purpose of Fact finding can vary by the team and engagement. Sometimes, the overarching goal is to simply have all of the members of a group to share their perspective and ensure there’s alignment. But more often than not, the intention is not only alignment but more importantly to identify themes and to reframe your problem.

To help with synthesizing the facts, I will often do the following:

Organize: I will start by grouping and reorganizing the facts to reduce duplication as well as to ensure it’s easily understandable. Oftentimes, I will invite the team to collectively move the real or virtual post-it notes around with the facts. I will instruct them to organize in a way that makes sense to them.

Spot Patterns: I will then invite participants to look for themes that cut across all of the responses from all of the question. I’m usually looking for what is important and stands out for the group. It’s worth noting, that sometimes, an important theme doesn’t have multiple facts associated with it. One single point could be a particularly significant theme on its own for the team to explore.

Describe the Theme: I will ask for participants to individually describe the theme and prompt them to make sure that the theme has relevance to our overarching challenge and goals.

Turn the Themes into Questions: Using the practice of questionstorming, I will have participants turn the facts into a series of questions that we will want to rank and prioritize.

Converge: From the many questions, I will challenge the group to select 2 -3 questions. Those questions begin to draw the group closer to focusing on the right problems to solve.

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Step 5: Test the Questions

The last step is to test your questions. These newly formed questions are meant to bring the group closer to focusing on the right problem to solve. But how do you know if the questions are well formed and will evoke the right solutions? We test them.

As a group, I will invite the team to do a 3 minute rapid brainstorm on each of the prioritized questions. As the leader of the session, I am looking for 3 things:

• Does the question spark creative ideas?
• Does the question generate many possibilities from participants?
• How strategic and aligned are the starter ideas to the original challenge and goals? (i.e. if you generate creative ideas but they have no connection whatsoever with your original goals, you may have a poorly constructed question)

If the question passes the test, we are ready to unleash those questions into the next steps of the creative problem solving process.

In summary, the Fact Finding method is a powerful way to understand your challenge, uncover insights and delay us from jumping into the deep end of the brainstorming pool. By systematically exploring the facts of your strategically significant challenge, you can build a comprehensive view of the problem, reframe the issue and ultimately formulate the more beautiful question(s) that will pave the way for innovative solutions.

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To learn more about Fact Finding and the many other Deliberate Problem Solving Tools, Visit Deliberate Approach to Creative Problem Solving

About Deliberate Innovation: We help forward thinking leaders in highly regulated organizations to solve their most unsolvable challenges.