USING PROBLEM-SMELLING TO BUILD ALIGNMENT

Getting a good pattern of failure can build organizational belief that a problem is solvable. Often hard problems require a commitment of resources and attention from an organization to solve them and implement a solution, and a good pattern can develop buy-in to muster these resources.

One of my favorite examples of this comes from working with a national drink brand that was selling out in stores. The demand for this product was expanding rapidly as the marketing and sales teams had done a phenomenal job. There was huge pressure to increase production to retain as much of the available market share as possible, because copycat products were starting to fill empty shelf space. The organization was planning to build new plants and lines to do this, but it would take 18 months. In the meantime, the existing facilities were working furiously to get everything out the door that they could, and I was brought in to help.

Our analysis turned up a number of opportunities to immediately increase production. The most interesting was to increase the speed of one of the lines. The idea was understandably met with some resistance: Everyone knows that if you run faster you will make more stuff, and the local team knew this, but they also “knew” that the equipment was not capable of going faster. They proved this to me by turning up the speed and creating a huge mess of half-filled bottles flying onto the floor that three of us had to clean up.

I realized that the problem I needed to solve first was to give the local team hope and belief that the speed could be successfully increased (I’ll talk more about figuring out what problem to work on in Chapter 4, “Know What Problem You’re Solving”). Luckily, a conversation with the VP got me permission to work with the operator to test the speed and smell the problem, and we learned a lot. First, we saw that the bottles were kicked off the line due to being underfilled. With careful study I saw that the underfilled bottles came from the same three (of 36) filling heads.

Once the operator and I showed this to the VP, it was clear the problem was solvable, and we got the team on board to move forward. After all, if 33 of the filling heads work then the other three could be made to work as well. Pattern of failure alone had not solved the hard problem of how to get more output from the filler, but it had helped me solve the political one of how to get the team on board.

HOW MUCH IS ENOUGH?

Developing a thorough problem description and pattern of failure is not a matter of gathering reams of data and burying yourself with them. Bad problem solvers in businesses will download long histories of data from points along the entire process or even measure lots of new stuff to try to find something useful. They’ll compare every single part between a “good machine” and a “bad” one. These efforts waste a lot of time and money at best, and lead to red herrings in hard problems that mean bad solutions, wasted money, new problems, and a loss of credibility.

Great problem solvers develop the questions that they want to answer before they go about collecting information and data, rather than depending on whatever data streams they see. They grab the signal, not the noise.

But when are you done with describing the problem or developing a pattern of failure? In short: never. As you develop insight and dig into the fundamentals, you’ll be coming back iteratively to keep smelling: You’ll have new understanding to ask new questions. This isn’t a step: It’s a behavior. Smell the problem to answer questions about it that arise.

If you are a less experienced problem-solver then you will want to practice this rigor on some easier and moderate problems in order to hone the skills you’ll need to make rapid progress on harder ones. Some hard problems may only occur once or be very hard to see; being a skilled problem-smeller helps you make decisions when you face these more challenging scenarios.