What Can Doctors Teach Us About Problem Solving?
If you’ve ever been anything like I was, you were very confident in your problem-solving ability. As problems came up, you took decisive action and directed people in what they needed to do to get the situation handled.
As you read the above, you might be thinking that this sounds like good advice…and it is…under certain circumstances. But under other circumstances, it is precisely the wrong way to handle a problem! Let me explain.
If you want to reduce stress and help your team at the same time, it is helpful for you to prioritize problems before deciding on the appropriate response. Generally speaking, there are 3 kinds of problems, and each should be dealt with differently.
The first problem or phase is an “emergent” problem. No matter what your industry, you will have issues that are just beginning to appear. At this point in time, they are not issues that absolutely have to be dealt with today. These are problems that you note and perhaps even assign someone to look into further, but they are not critical, so you do not put all hands on deck to solve. You think in terms of a timeline to solve them and you are looking for the best, long-term solution to this problem. As an executive or leader, this type of problem should not be high on your list of activities, although you do need to maintain a view into its status.
During this phase, it’s a great time to get input from your team on the best solutions. It is not a time to be “decisive” and to “direct” the outcomes. Let your team work through this problem, learn ways to solve it and come to the best solution.
The second phase is the “mature” phase. At this point in time, the problem is becoming a bit more serious. You still have some time to solve it, but you really do need to have a deadline in place. In this phase, there is still time to come up with the best solution. However, you need your team focused on it, perhaps putting better skilled people on the problem so that solutions can come more quickly.
It’s still important during this phase for you to get input from your team on the best potential solutions. They don’t have the luxury of being able to brainstorm all solutions, but certainly some brainstorming can take place. The key is to get the best solution that can fit into a relatively short amount of time to get in place.
Finally, there is the “critical” phase. Now is your opportunity to be decisive! If your team has been doing their job in the first two phases, you won’t be in this position often. But we all know that issues come up that weren’t foreseen or they didn’t give us plenty of time to “see” them coming. There are times when things just happen and need to be dealt with right now. Think of Apollo 13 for an excellent example of this.
In this phase, you need your top people on the problem. If you’re one of those people, then take charge. If there is someone better than you, give them control. But all hands need to be on deck to solve the issue, and they will probably be working pretty close to 24/7. This is also a time where you may take very short-term solutions and do them in a dictatorial fashion just to get out of the situation knowing that you’ll come back later to redo the work so that you can find a long-term solution (the short-term solution took the problem back to “emergent” or “mature”).
Now, the above may be obvious to you, but what I find interesting is how many leaders make “emergent” and “mature” problems “critical.” In other words, every problem becomes a crisis! This reminds me of a sign that was on one of our support staffs’ cube: “Poor planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine.”
As leaders, we need to evaluate every problem that comes to us and categorize it quickly. We can always move to “critical” mode if we realize that it was bigger than we thought. But far too many of us make every problem a “critical” problem which does damage in several ways.
We burn people out on things that could have been done without the extra hours and stress.
We don’t get the best solutions to the problem.
We aren’t engaging employees and encouraging them to come up with out-of-the-box solutions. (We’re more or less dictating solutions.)
Therefore, learning does not take place, and learning is required to move your organization forward.
What I’ve described above is called “triage.” Doctors understand this process very well. For most of us, lives do not hang in the balance as they do with a doctor, but we can learn from them in our world how to sort out what needs to be dealt with immediately vs. those things that can be left for later and planned for in a better fashion.
Keep your sanity and your team’s by not making every issue a critical issue. Your stress level will go down as well as the team’s. And the best part is that you’ll find better solutions, which means more profit in the long run!