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Step 1 • Orienting the Problem - Part 1

Perhaps the most important step in solving any problem is to make sure that you understand it before you try to do anything else. Frequently, eagerness to "get on with it" and "get it over with" can lead to attempts to press for solution before the prob­lem itself is clearly understood. Problem definition, essentially, boils down to finding out where you are going with all your sub­sequent work so that you will know when you get there!

Business or administrative problems seldom come to us in clear-cut, easily recognized and defined forms. Often, personal opinion or interpretations get in the way. For example, how many times have you heard someone say, "Gosh, the boss is in a bad humor today—everything I do is wrong!" Now let's just turn this state­ment around: "Everything I do is wrong—the boss is certainly in a bad humor!"

You'll notice that we've said almost the same things in the same words, but the nature of that problem is certainly changed!

Other business problems are often obscure because of lack of facts. For example, a national consumer product sells well every­where but in the New England states. As an academic problem, it would be easy to brush off—to say that it was due to the vagaries of consumer behavior in the New England states. But the sales manager for that company cannot brush it off—he has to start by digging out the facts to pin those vagaries down and then pro­duce the ideas to solve them.

Some business and community problems are difficult to define because they get into the chicken-or-the-egg question. For in­stance, nearly a hundred small cities throughout the country are fighting to keep what may be a key to industrial and commercial growth for them: scheduled airline service. The Civil Aeronautics Board has set a 150-airline-passenger-a-month minimum for any community that wants to keep scheduled service. And the service is important if the community is trying to attract new industry. In fact, if a town has the service, it is almost a safe bet that growth will follow. But on the other hand, before they can get the service on a permanent basis, they have to produce the business for the airlines.

Other problems become complicated by the human element which must be accommodated. A good example is what happens when, for economic or other reasons, a manufacturing company must close down a particular operation or plant, or move a plant to a new community. Younger workers may have the flexibility to accept transfers to other cities or to learn new skills on reas­signed jobs, but workers in their fifties and sixties may be reluc­tant to give up the town they have called home for many years, or they may not have the ambition to learn a new skill or even to learn to work under a new supervisor. The problem then becomes a highly complex one of effecting the changeover with a mini­mum of emotional or economic disruption, and of fulfilling what­ever moral obligations the company feels it has.

Frequently, as in medicine, the symptoms of the problem can obscure the disease. When this happens, the executive is apt to find himself putting out a continual series of small fires that seem to crop up in all directions, but around one central source. Until he gets to the base of the trouble and thoroughly quenches any latent sparks, he will never be able to put his fireman's hat away. As an example, a plant manager is concerned about his production —it is running behind schedule. Upon investigating, he finds that absenteeism is running at an abnormally high rate. Thereupon, he puts into effect various punitive and regulatory measures to deal with the absenteeism. But somehow, production does not respond. When his top management finally sends in a personnel specialist, the finding is that the plant morale is extremely low, and while the measures to curb absenteeism had indeed curbed it, the basic cause of the production lag was, if anything, aggravated.

Therefore, the key to effective problem orientation is a complete and thorough break-out of all the angles that may possibly affect the problem solution. It is important that you deliberately search for parts of the problem which may be hidden or obscure. One good way is to start out by writing down your first impres­sion of what a problem is. Then try to list every factor you can think of that could be a part of the problem. Don't worry too much about the sequence of your parts or their relationships to each other at this stage. The important thing is to get just as many subproblems out of the main problem as you can. Once this is done, then you can begin to rearrange these factors into logical relationships and sequences. Then look for the key factor. Fre­quently, when you run through such a list of problem parts, one will stand out—a person, a material, a design, or a need—which will so obviously be the key that, if you can solve that, everything else becomes a detail.

Related terms include business success and business quality.