Consulting Magazine - February 2017

the true root cause isn’t even on the list. This is why guessing won’t solve these problems.

What people say to cover up guessing:

into thinking it’s a good strategy and is going to work again, and made the habit harder to break in the future. Whether or not it works, it’s easy, and we find comfort in that.

• I have a hypothesis!

• I have a theory!

• I’m pretty sure X is true.

• We listed the most likely options.

• The group voted on this one.

• I’m not guessing, I’m taking action.

• I was right, so it couldn’t have been a guess.

• Our experience suggests…Over a period of 4 months the food processing plant had invested one year of work and $200K trying out about one-third of these ideas, and they’d not gotten close to solving the problem. They had actually created new problems for their production line as they installed new drive-chains for the sealing equipment and made many other changes. When you make 50 changes to a production line, and only one in 10 causes a new problem, you’ve still created five new problems.

Second, you haven’t developed a deeper understanding of whatever you’re trying to x, whether it’s yourself, a process, or a machine. Instead of spending time building some knowledge of the fundamentals that you can use in the future—new problems are popping up all the time—you’ve spent your time guessing and checking. So next time there’s a problem, you’re back to square one.

Taking an approach designed to solve hard problems took care of this issue in a few weeks, and demonstrated that the root cause wasn’t on the original list. Not a single guess was made in that entire effort. But “ structured guessing” had cost the business a lot, including time and money. We’ll have a closer look at this example in Chapter 8, “Make Fact-Based Decisions,” and Chapter 9, “Stay on Target.”

Third, and perhaps most importantly, you’re not becoming a better problem-solver. While guessing might eventually get the job done for problems of moderate difficulty (although at great cost), you rob yourself or your team of critical skills development. When you get to truly hard problems, you’re going to need all of the skill you can get: If you don’t practice using the right behaviors and method to solve moderate problems then you will never master them, and you’re going to get shellacked when you try to tackle the hard ones.

GUESSING IN POPULAR
PROBLEM-SOLVING METHODS
THE CURSE OF LUCK

Imagine Sherlock Holmes trying to catch a serial killer with guessing. “Maybe it was the butler!” So we throw the butler in jail, but the serial killer strikes again!

“Perhaps it was that shady fellow!” Six murders later we have seven more people behind bars waiting for the circus to end, but Sherlock has another hunch. “Maybe it was the chief of police!” At that point everyone rolls their eyes and tells Sherlock that he’d better not quit his day job. The practice of guessing so obviously fails in detective work that it’s almost shocking that we guess when we have important problems to solve.

Many businesses teach their people structured methods to help them solve problems. Structure can be very helpful in certain stages of the problem-solving method, adding rigor to defining the problem and finding a pattern of failure. These are import- ant steps beyond simple guessing or brainstorming, and they are critical to quickly solving problems of fairly easy or moderate difficulty. Many direct the problem-solver to spend significant effort studying the problem in situ, which is a significant step in the right direction away from solution-guessing at a table, in a conference room, or behind a computer. Understanding the pattern of failure allows a problem-solver to quickly eliminate some of the root causes by testing them against the pattern of failure. This can shorten the list of guesses and accelerate progress on some moderately difficult problems.

But let’s say you guess, and you get lucky: You found a solution and implemented it effectively. You may or may not have spent a lot of time and resources on it. Unfortunately, some bad side effects come with this rare victory.

First, you’ve reinforced the habit of guessing in your mind or in your organization, fooled yourself

Where most of these structured methods break down is that they ultimately resort to guessing to determine what root causes may be. While they can help you solve some moderate problems, you still depend on the hope that your guessed cause is on the list you developed. Hard problems are immune to them.