A Universal Problem Solving Tool
An edited selections from Solving Problems: A Guide To Being a Person of Impact
The following selection is from
Solving Problems: A Guide to Being a Person of Impact
Chapter Six: Impact Day: A Fresh Approach To Problem Solving
and
How I Discovered Problem Solving
As a child, not only did I assemble models of cars, airplanes, and ships, I read a lot of biographies. Two that I reread often were on Madame Marie Curie, a pioneering scientist in the field of radioactivity, and Wilbur and Orville Wright, pioneers in early aviation and the first to fly a motorized airplane. Their stories of innovation in new fields of endeavor inspired in me a love for the adventure of discovery. Like the Star Trek motto, “to go where no man or woman has gone before.”
It was also the time when the adventure of space had captured the country’s attention. As a nine-year-old, I remember hearing a portion of President John F. Kennedy’s Go-To-The-Moon speech on the news.
He said,
“But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? … We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills ...”
Being a problem solver elevates us to become the best we can be. I know that is a tired old cliché. For many people who speak of such things, they don’t do the hard work to go where no one has gone before. I saw this early in my life. People who talk a great game but rarely deliver when the game is on the line.
Problem-solving is more than the techniques. It can be something that defines us as persons. Think back over the course of your life. What challenges did you face that required you to test, organize, and measure the best of your energies and skills? This is the spirit of impact that I began to see as the answer to the problems I found in organizations.
It was a natural thing for me to go start my own consulting practice. Even though I had never run a business nor been a consultant. My reasons had to do with the problems that I saw originating in traditional assumptions about leadership and the management of organizations. Those assumptions are still prevalent today and are the source of the problems that I still see plaguing people, organizations, and communities.
Why do these problems persist? Why do people, once they identify a solution, back away from implementing it? What ways of thinking inhibit problem-solving processes? Why do incremental changes seem to be emotionally satisfying yet not really address the deeper structural issues of problems? What effect do executive attitudes have on employee willingness to solve problems?
A Universal Problem Solving Tool
Out of the experience of asking questions like these, the Circle of Impact model of leadership was born. The model represents a picture of three dimensions that command our attention in every arena of our lives. They are the dimensions of ideas, relationships, and organizational structure. Whenever you have a problem, its origin is in one or more of these dimensions.
The three dimensions are a way of seeing the whole of life. Every aspect is incorporated into one of these dimensions. The distinctiveness of the three can be understood simply. We all think, imagine, or conceptualize what life is. We develop relationships where we communicate, collaborate, and congregate as families, communities, networks, and societies. We organize the world around the structures of organizations. Every problem or opportunity is represented by one or more of these dimensions.
The Circle of Impact is designed as a simple tool for planning, problem-solving, and training for people to be impact leaders. The focus is on identifying the impact we desire. Impact is a change that makes a difference. The model is interested in identifying how each of the dimensions contributes to this impact. The goal is to align the three dimensions for impact.
The Impact Day methodology applies the Circle of Impact model as a universal problem-solving tool. However, to really make this work for you, it requires a willingness to take responsibility for the problems that you want to solve. This is why “all leadership begins with personal initiative.” In this sense, the first problem to solve is our own motivation and willingness to do the hard work of change.
My experience convinces me that anyone can learn to solve problems without reservation or fear. If you could learn to do so, your life will gain a degree of purpose that builds confidence that you can face any obstacle. Wherever you face fear, you have a problem that the Circle of Impact can resolve.
Problem-solving is a strategy for living in a world that is in constant transition. It should not be the last thing you turn to when you have no other options. It should be how you approach your life and work.
Consider what it would be like if everyone on your team or company could be problem solvers. Imagine what it would be like if everyone in your family learned to solve problems. Can you see how it could change the nightly dinner table conversation? If we learned to be better problem solvers, I believe we would be less likely to blame others, looking for scapegoats, and seeing problems coming before they reach a critical stage.
More specifically, we’ll discover that situations we once saw as problems have become opportunities. Opportunities to fulfill our purpose and realize the desires that we have for a life of meaning and impact. We move from being stuck in place to constantly moving forward.
This method digs deep into the reasons for the problems. Yet, does not get lost in being overly abstract or as I often hear, “getting lost in the weeds.” The focus throughout is to understand the problem from the perspective of the impact that the solution can create.
If a problem-solving methodology is not practical, it isn’t solving problems. It is just kicking the can down the street for someone else to pick up and try to fix it. As a result, the best way to approach learning a problem-solving methodology is to solve a problem.
The Impact Day Process
Impact Day has three basic steps.
First, we identify the problem.
Second, we decide what kind of problem it is.
Third, we ask direct questions related to change and impact.
We end up reframing the original problem and drafting a strategy to resolve it.
We begin by asking what the problem is. It seems that this should be simple. It is not easy to clarify what our problem actually is. One of the goals of the Impact Day process is to clarify what the exact problem is.
Often, I find that the first attempt to describe a problem has more to do with their symptoms. The point is to establish a starting point. By the end of the process, we will see the problem differently. The whole idea is to make clear what is going on so that we can make the right decisions about what to do.
Here’s an example that I frequently use. It is a problem that we all have. In various ways, this problem manifests itself as a perfect example of how the Impact Day process works.
Problem: There is a breakdown in communication within the team that is affecting client relationships.
Once we have decided what our problem is, we ask,
“What kind of problem is this?
Is this an Idea problem, a Relationship problem, or a Structure problem?”
Our initial intuition may lead us to think this is a relationship problem. However, our intuition may not always be right. We need to dig deeper into what is happening with the three dimensions to understand where the problem originates.
Measuring the Impact of the Three Dimensions
We measure each of the dimensions through the lens of quality. Why is quality important? Is quality too subjective an idea? Do not quantitative measures provide a clearer perspective? Quantitative questions measure how resources are being utilized and developed. Do people, in general, measure their lives quantitatively? What numbers do they track? In particular, do they measure their finances, making sure they pay their bills, file their taxes, and save and invest for retirement? They want to be able to have money to buy a car, go on vacation, and send their children to college. However, is that the measure of a life?
People are conscious of quality of life issues. Quality is a measure of the strength to create change that makes a difference that matters. Numbers follow quality. People save in order to buy the things that manifest a quality life. A place at the beach. Season tickets to the local pro sports team. Winter vacations in Mexico. Quality of life could be described in terms of philanthropy and charitable giving. Establishing a financial trust to provide for grandkids after our passing. Quality of life is defined by the values that matter to us. Quality measures track whether what we do, how we do it, and with whom we do it fulfill goals that define who we are.
Let’s go a step deeper. How do we measure our life purpose quantitatively? It certainly isn’t by collecting multiple purposes. No. It is the opposite. We want our purpose to be clear and focused. We create clarity by identifying how our purpose points us toward the impact we want to achieve.
How do you measure your life? Is it by how much money you earn? Is it by how long a life you hope to live? Is it how many things you own or how many people you are connected to on social media? Those quantitative measures don’t capture the quality of our relationships nor the quality of the life we live each day. Instead, they tell us whether the structure of our lives can produce the quality of life we desire.
We should then be asking: What is my purpose for impact?
Impact is the measure of the quality of the structure of our lives. In a business, we can measure structure quantitatively by sales numbers, profit and loss results, and industry standing. Those numbers don’t account for impact. How do we understand a 5% growth in revenue during a calendar year from the perspective of impact?
How does the structure of our work impact our relationships? What is the impact you want for your clients? How about the impact your work has on your family? These are quality measures that are important for understanding the context of the problems we face. Every problem functions within the context of some structure.
We can look at structure from two perspectives. Think of them as external and internal structures. The external is the organizational superstructure. The internal is the social life that fills the structure. It is the culture that the ideas and relationship dimensions create to give the external structure its life.
There are four functions to every organizational structure. There are product sales and services, operations to support that function, finances that fund those functions, and governance to guide all of them. Each needs quantitative measures. However, to really understand how the organization is functioning, we need quality measures. What is the impact of our products, our services, our finances, and our governance function? What changes do those functions have that make a difference that matters? Clarify the change you want, and the problem areas will reveal themselves.
The social structure forms the culture of a company and of a family. Think of this culture as how people relate to one another and to the organizations. If the culture is problem-filled, we can see it in a lack of respect, trust, and mutual accountability between people. Where the quality is present, we will find “a persistent, residual culture of values.” Values are the glue to culture and guide what our purpose and vision for impact should be. As a result, the social structure will be a culture of clear values that will persist because those values reside in the relationships of the people.
By asking what kind of problem ours is, we look for the quality present in the three dimensions. This chart provides a way to analyze our situation to see where a problem may exist.
What is Missing?
The first two steps in problem-solving is to understand what the problem is and its source. For the process, it is sufficient to write a single sentence stating our perception at this point as to what the problem is. Our understanding doesn’t have to be complete or perfect. This statement is just a starting point.
…
The third step of the Impact Day process focuses on questions we ask to unlock the insights the Circle of Impact model can provide us. The questions we ask must open our perception to see the problem from a broader perspective. The Five Questions That Everyone Must Ask were developed for this purpose.
These questions are designed to be asked about everything we do. They can be used for problem-solving, planning, and to frame strategic conversations.
Let’s look at this in the context of our problem that has to do with team communication. You are the team leader. You know there is a problem. You don’t know why or how it developed. You have a team meeting scheduled for later this week.
Your first step in preparing for the meeting is to ask the Five Questions.
What has changed with our team? How are we in transition? Can we identify a date or an event where things changed?
What is the impact of this change? What difference, positively or negatively is this change?
Who is being impacted by this problem? Team members? Customers? Others?
If we were to resolve this problem, what opportunities would we have?
What problems have we created based on the quality measures of the Circle of Impact? What obstacles do we face to resolving this issue?
This meeting represents one step along the path of transition that has already begun. You take your team through the same Five-question process. Following the meeting, you evaluate the process by asking the Five Questions again.
See Solving Problems: A Guide to Being a Person of Impact for the complete description of the Five Questions in practice.
The Discipline of the Five Questions
I have already said that you can ask these questions in any situation. Let me reframe what I said from a suggestion into an imperative.
I am convinced that if you were to ask these questions at least once a week for the next year, your life would change. You would gain awareness, find focus, learn to be more discerning, and be able to turn away from opportunities that hold no real impact for you. In effect, life would become fuller and simpler.
An example of how this can work. A decade and a half ago my phone rang. It was my friend and leadership colleague Galba Bright, an emotional intelligence coach and consultant serving government and business in the island nations of the Caribbean. He called to tell me how the Five Questions had impacted his work. Over his computer monitor, he posted a diagram of the Five Questions that I had distributed. Galba told me that every Sunday night, he would plan his week by asking the Five Questions. Over the next year, his emotional intelligence website grew to be the most visited EQ site in the world. He attributed it to asking the Five Questions. I was honored and pleased to hear his story.
Galba, who sadly is no longer with us, asked these questions once a week. It isn’t his timing that matters. It is yours. Ask when you need them. However, the more you ask them, the easier the answers will come. You are training your mind to be aware of not just circumstances at this moment but to be able to see the progression of changes over time. This is what I call transition. If you can identify the transition that you have gone through from the past to the present, you can imagine a similar transition from the present into the future. Take action on what you see.
Aligning for Impact
The curious thing about problem-solving is that we think the solution is found in the problem. In our example of the team communication problem, we identified a breakdown in the team’s relationship with one another. I pointed to the insight that directly addressing the relationship problem will not fix the problem. We can’t force people to change. We can only provide the right kind of motivation to do so.
The Circle of Impact emerged in my mind through my consulting work. It is a picture of patterns of behavior that are inhibiting an organization’s functioning. By pattern, these were behaviors that I saw in many diverse organizations. The essential pattern is a broken connection between ideas, relationships, and structure. I discovered that leaders and their organizations lack much more self-awareness than you could imagine.
Even though we spend a third to a half of every day immersed in the structure of our business, we are blind to much of it. Structure to people is like water to fish. We can’t see it until its toxicity reaches a critical level. One of the behaviors related to structure is that it dominates everything. Both ideas and relationships are subordinate to structure. This is especially true in large organizations. There you can find layers and silos that block open communication vertically between the executive, the managerial, and workers and horizontally between the departments. Team communication in most organizations is a function of structure. Where it isn’t you have someone who has elevated aspects of the relational and conceptual to change how their teams function. If you want a team that exhibits respect, trust, and mutual accountability, then you have to change the structure. In order to do that, you have to be clear about why it is important. Though it is a circle of three dimensions, the beginning point for fixing structural issues is through the clarification of values, purpose, and impact.
This means that every problem, everyone that you or I can describe, literally everyone that we have had and will ever have, operates through the interaction of these three dimensions. Whichever dimension we root the problem in, the other two are our resources for change. This makes problem-solving simpler. Identify the problem dimension. Figure out how the other two dimensions can influence change. I realize this sounds like an over-sell. It isn’t.
During a book signing, a man came to my table and challenged me to solve his problem. His work situation was changing, and he didn’t understand what was happening. I asked three questions, each one related to the quality measures of the three dimensions. I asked if he was clear about what his job was and why he was doing it. He said that he was clear. He was a software systems implementer for a company with many government contracts. They would send him into the field to install the system. He told me that for the past couple of years, they had repeatedly been pulling him off his current project and sending him to another one. He was never completing the projects.
I asked him whether he felt the company respected his work. He said no. My last question was whether he felt the company was in trouble. I wanted to know if it was clear what their desired impact was. He said no again.
Here is a man working in an organization where all three of the dimensions are broken. It is a perfect storm of crisis and chaos. I said to him that I believed that he was being set up as the scapegoat for the company’s failure. All this movement of him to different projects that he was never finishing showed that his hands were all over the failures of the company. My advice to him was to leave and find another job. He told me that he realized that this was what was happening. He had already left the company for a new job.
The solution to every problem begins with clarity. We need to be absolutely clear about why we are in the situation we are in. We need to be self-aware about our own contribution to the problem. We need to understand our relationship to other people’s problems. Even if the problem is not directly related to us, we are impacted by it.
This problem-solving methodology fits into a program called Impact Day. It also includes planning and self-awareness for leadership impact. Once you learn the method, there is never any reason to be in the dark or out-of-the-loop. You actually may intentionally be excluded from understanding what is going on. However, by being aware that you are, you can establish an understanding that prepares you to respond effectively when called upon.