How many of you had experienced meeting up with colleagues, vendors or clients that they will just say ‘I don’t know’ when you ask them questions. Most of the people will just say ‘I don’t know’ when problem hits. They never think about the reasons and solution for a problem, they wait for other people to give them the answer. If you are a problem solver for your company, you will be the shining star. And problem solving skills is not that difficult to learn and practice. Let me share with you the 3 most popular problem solving techniques.
5W1H
I believe most of you already know what am I talk about. Yes. It is 5W1H. It stand for what, why, who, when, where and how. If there is a problem, you will need to ask what the problem is, why it happens, who involved, when it happens, where it happens and how it happens. If you really want to solve the problem, you need to ask 2H again. The questions are how to resolve the issue and how to prevent it from happen again.
5 why
The next technique is very powerful when you really want to nail down the problem to the root cause. It is to ask why continuous for 5 times. But this technique had a weakness as well. It may force you to focus on the wrong direction when your answer is wrong. Let go through an example. If you are having a sales performance issue in your company, you may ask the following questions. Why the sale is weak this month? Why previous quarter sale is better? Why the team is not taking any action to fix it? Why the market is not moving? Why the customer is not buying? Once you have the answer for all this questions, you can formulate a strategy to revive the sales performance.
Fish bone Analysis
This is another way to do problem analysis and it is very powerful as well. It can show you all the inter-relationship between all the root causes with the problem. What you need to do is to draw a fish bone on a piece of paper, write down the problem in from of the fish head, then write down all the possible reason why the problem exist on all the branches. By reviewing all the reasons, you will able to identify 1-3 key reason why the problem exists. Once you remove the obstacles, your problem solves.
There are many problem solving techniques you can learn, once you manage to master 3-5 techniques, you already ahead of many people in your problem solving skills which will help you to clarify all your career questions or doubt easily.