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During the course of day-to-day business, only one thing can be expected. That is that problems how will arise. Some businesses hold individual managers responsible to resolve problems. Others address problems through teams of managers aligned either organizationally or functionally with the problem. And yet other businesses intentionally or unintentionally ignore problems until they are so impactful on business outcomes that they must be addressed in some manner. The latter usually requires additional resource due to the crisis nature of the problem. In that business problems are a given, there should be a consistent methodology for addressing problems as they arise. The purpose of this document is to summarize one of the most effective was to identify, address and resolve business problems.

Identifying business problems.

One of the greatest challenges in business is separating problems from the numerous daily issues, challenges, competitive pressures and change. Many if not most of these are part of the day-to-day and must be addressed by the individual managers with functional or organizational accountability in the area where they arise. This is not to minimize the importance of these. It is just that they must be acted upon by the individuals who have accountability and responsibility where they arise. There are other business problems that go beyond the accountability of the individual manager. Some of their characteristics are:
- They impact the revenue top line against the business plan
- They impact the cost and/or expense against the business plan
- They impact market share against what was targeted in the business plan
- They impact customer satisfaction against the measure in place
- They impact employee retention and/or satisfaction against the measure in place

While there may be business problems beyond these that need to be addressed by a team and the process outlined below, these are the key indicators externally and internally for the success of any business. Any deviation in any of these measures against the business plan or other internal metric is a candidate for action by a cross functional and/or cross organizational action team.

Step 1: IDENTIFY THE PROBLEM IN CLEAR, CONCISE LANGUAGE

Team to resolve the problem

Now that the problem has been identified and documented in clear, concise language, the next step is who can address the problem. Short of the Chairman or the CEO, who is the business owner for the outcome or achieving the committed business result? This needs to be defined clearly within the organization at the functional and organizational level. Once that individual has been identified, she must be empowered by a senior leader (CEO ideally) to own and resolve the problem. Along with this goes the charter to establish an action team to work the problem to resolution. The CEO (or other senior executive) needs to be clear about the time frame for action. The problem owner must next reach within and outside their organization to assemble a team to address and resolve the problem. While this team may include members of organizations such as Finance, Marketing, Sales, Operations, Research and Development and Human Resources, the composition should be specific to the problem and not include more than one participant per organization or functional area. The members of the action team need to be committed to the project through their leadership and committed to a pre-agreed amount of their work time and project duration. While these may change at points during the project, they should be communicated up front.

Step 2: ASSEMBLE AN EMPOWERED TEAM TO RESOLVE THE PROBLEM

Initial Meeting

The action team must have an initial meeting for several purposes. First it should serve to communicate the problem to all participants. Secondly it should serve as an occasion for all the action team members to get to know one another. Thirdly, the timeline, expectations, and roles must be clearly outlined at the initial meeting. Finally, specific fact-finding assignments must be made during the initial meeting along with time frames for reporting out information from the fact-finding. More information is better. While business instincts are important, facts serve to take emotion out of the exercise. Whether individual or small teams, clear assignments must be made with the expectation of how the information should be summarized or presented to the action team and when. Ideally, they should be in the form of a presentation with back-up details in advance of the next action team meeting to allow for detailed review prior to the next meeting.

Step 3: DO YOUR HOMEWORK

The Second Action Team Meeting

Action teams must work in compressed time frames to be most effective. Within a short period following the initial action team meeting and the completion of the assigned research, the team should reconvene, in an environment where they cannot be interrupted by any normal day-to-day issues. These should be either delegated or temporarily reassigned during the action team meeting to allow complete focus on the task at hand. The action team meeting should be structured as follows:
- Restatement of the business problem
- Review of the direction from the CEO including the time frame for resolution
- Crisp presentations by each of the individuals or teams on their research topic
- Boarding (Post Its or large flip charts) the causes of the issue, actions to address the problem, other effects of those actions and good ideas and issues but unrelated to the problem at hand should be posted on a “parking lot”
- Vote on the issues and actions to identify the top three of each
- Assign a team to present each of the issues and a team to present each of the actions

Step 4: CLARIFY THE TOP THREE ISSUES AND RELATED TOP THREE ACTIONS

The Third Action Team Meeting

The action team should reconvene to present the top three issues and related top three actions. This could be the next day or the next week. It should not be more than two weeks after the Second Action Team meeting. The third action team meeting should be structured as follows:
- Review of the business problem and time frame for resolution
- A crisp presentation by each of the sub team of their top (one of three) issues and related action (one of three)
- At the end of each there should be a rigorous question and answer period. The points should be boarded on a flip chart
- When the discussion of all three issues and actions have been completed and documented, their should be a vote among all participants of the dominant issue and action
- The dominant issue and action should be documented to insure clarity among all participants
- Each participant should speak to their role in addressing the issue; this should not be constrained by resource, budget or organizational contention
- The agreed upon issue and action including first step organizational and functional roles should be documented and reviewed with the entire action team
- A target for presenting the action team issue, action and accountabilities to the CEO or senior business leader should then be scheduled

Step 5: ALIGN ON A SINGLE ISSUE, SINGLE ACTION, FUNCTIONAL OWNERS

Present, Close and Act

The agreed upon issue, action and owners with accountabilities and time frames must next be presented to the CEO or senior business leader. If the senior business leader agrees with the action team’s recommendations, the next step is to implement the action plan with specific objectives, owners and time frames (metrics). If the senior business leader does not agree with the action team’s recommendations, the action team must either go back and do additional research and follow the subsequent steps or if additional research is not needed then the team should go back to step 3.

Step 6: ACT, MEASURE, CORRECT, ACT, MEASURE, CORRECT

During the execution of the action plan, the individual functions and organizations must perform the roles, actions and within the time frames presented by the action team to and as approved by the CEO or the senior business leader. The action team does not own this, they must be owned by the functions and the organizations as part of day-to-day business. Otherwise it will be viewed as an action team issue and not a business issue. The time frames, metrics and readouts to the CEO or senior executive by the overall business owner are essential to resolve the business problem.

George F. Franks, III is the founder and CEO of Franks Consulting Group - a Bethesda, Maryland based management consulting and leadership coaching practice. He is a member of the International Coach Federation and the Institute of Management Consultants. Franks Consulting Group is on the web at:
http://franksconsultinggroup.com
See our blog at:
http://consultingandcoaching.blogspot.com

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FORWARD

I recently gave a presentation at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design on a topic entitled “Is creativity management an oxymoron?”

The essential confusion to people resistant to the idea of “creativity management” was the word “management.” Replace it with the word “optimization” and the resistance disappears; all we’re really trying to do is optimize the quality of the idea pool and optimize the implementation process.

Then you can suggest that most people already implicitly accept the idea of creativity management: if you ask them to solve a problem or engage in a particular endeavour, one of the things they’re likely to do is herd people into a room with a flip chart and conduct some sort of brainstorming session and implicit in that action is the acceptance that certain methods, processes and procedures enhance creative output.

Then you can begin discussing how to improve the enormous amount of creative output people generate, from problem solving in everyday business life right up to the level or art.

***

TIP OF THE DAY: Creativity, Innovation and Hierarchies

Convention has it that hierarchies hinder creativity and innovation. But why?

Also, organizational structure is resultant of many factors (logistics, history etc…) and not easy to change, so what do we do if we have a hierarchical organizational structure and want to increase creative output?

Well, hierarchies tend not to foster creativity because of factors such as multiple layers to decision makers, slow feedback systems and decision makers’ lack of intimacy with local problems due to distortion of filtered information.

So one way to counter the above is to enable teams with direct links to decision makers. This simple step speeds up decision making, improves feedback systems and decision makers’ familiarity with local issues.

***

The MBA research projects on Managing Creativity and Innovation, a DIY Audit, Good Idea Generator software and 50 slide powerpoint presentatation can all be bought at http://www.managing-creativity.com/

You can also receive a regular, free newsletter by entering your email address at this site.

Kal Bishop, MBA

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You are free to reproduce this article as long as no changes are made, the author’s name is retained and the link to our site URL remains active.

_________

For 188+ stages of the Hero’s Journey, successful story deconstructions and the Advanced Screenwriting Worksheets goto http://clickok.co.uk/

For Managing Creativity and Innovation goto http://managing-creativity.com/

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I witnessed some interesting behaviour from one of our premier management schools this summer. A behaviour that I have since discovered is not uncommon.

This summer I met the PA of an emminent professor at a business school.

I had met her on several occassions before and knew her to be a bright chatty woman who always enjoyed passing the time of day.

On this occassion when I asked her how her week was going she looked at me and I could see that she wanted to smile but the muscles in her face would not work and after a few twitches she gave up trying and looked back at the ground.

I asked her what was the matter and she told me that her department was undergoing change.

I asked her what that actually meant.

She told me that a “Change Manager” had appeared in the department and everybody was waiting to see who got the sack.

This was a woman, who is normally a capable and confident administrator, had been reduced to a nervous wreck because she perceived that an anonymous arbiter had been brought in to decide her future.

This was her reaction to the presence of a “Change Manager” based on her perception that change meant people being sacked.

How close was this perception to reality?

I met my PA again a month later and the way that she and her colleagues had been treated made me spit.

She had got over her first shock and was now extremely angry with the college authorities.

30 senior PA’s were now involved.

It seems that the chancellor and his senior team had announced the changes then brought in a consultant to ratify them.

The situation for the PA’s was that they had been told that their fates would be announced in six weeks.

They had no idea how many jobs would be left after six weeks but were told that nobody would be made redundant, alternative employment would be found.

The perception of the PA’s was that their managers had already decided how many would be let go and were only spinning it out under the guise of “Managed Change” because they wanted to pretend that the decision was part of a reasoned process and not the arbitrary wielding of a financial axe by the accountant.

It was awful to watch the diabolical way a centre for excellence was treating its own staff, and still had the temerity to continue to hold itself up as an example to whom we should look for learned guidance.

“What thickness is the ivory on their tower that prevents them seeing the consequences of their actions?”

My initial question was whether this girls perception of change was shared by others.

It seems that it is.

I spoke to my PA friend again last month and they were still telling her to wait while the decision was made about her future.

She could not endure the stress any longer and started to look for alternative employment.

As she said, she loved the job that she used to have,

The authorities had through their actions caused her to lose trust in them and come to hate the job that was now causing her so much stress.

She could not consider continuing to work for them even if they announced tomorrow that her job was safe because she could not continue to work for, or trust, people who had caused her so much pain.

This behaviour from a respected university that is held up as a centre of management excellence is, in its personal effect on these individuals, appalling.

It is interesting to note that the bosses of all the PA’s affected had by this time been asked to reapply for their jobs too.

The PA that I know told me that her boss has started to look for work elsewhere for the same reasons as she had.

Last week I met the PA again and she told me that both she and her boss had found new jobs, still working together, at a neighbouring school.

It does not have the same reputation but that is a situation that neither of them thinks will last for very long.

Having spent long hours discussing how diabolical the action of the college was the PA’s had come to realise that what was apparently just another example of Crass bad management was in actual fact best practice.

As a centre of management excellence one of the techniques that was advocated to avoid making redundancy payments when you need to get rid of people is too make the workplace so stressful that they choose to leave.

The favourite technique for doing this is to make people reapply for their own jobs.

I am happy to report in this instance that the management school were well and truly stuffed.

My PA, and a number of others who had all found alternative employment, accidentally neglected to tell the college that they had found alternative employment.

The result was that the college, when nobody left voluntarily, were forced to announce the redundancies.
Every single person made redundant took their payment then walked straight into a new job that they had already accepted.

The college still had to make redundancy payments to the people it had always intended laying off but in addition it also had the expense of recruiting new staff to fill all the other posts of the people who had left because of the shoddy way the college had treated their staff.

What goes around, comes around.

Score one for the good guys.

Peter A Hunter
Author of “Breaking the Mould”
http://www.breakingthemould.co.uk

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