Blog posts on problem solving

Posts selected fromManagement Blog - Engineering Blog - Investing Blog and other blogs

• Improving Problem Solving

  suggest reading this excellent paper on Improving Problem Solving by Ian Bradbury and Gipsie Ranney. As they note, problem solving is not a substitute for innovation and improvement as solving a problem solving only returns you to the status quo. The paper also considers the relationship between problem solving and system improvement.

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• Root Cause, Interactions, Robustness and Design of Experiments

  A single root cause is rare. Normally you can look at the question a bit differently see the scope a bit differently and get a different “root cause.” In my opinion “root cause” is more a decision about what is an effective way to improve the system right now rather than finding a scientifically valid “root cause.”

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• Children are Amazingly Creative At Solving Problems

  “The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance – it is the illusion of knowledge.” Daniel Boorstin

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• Leadership While Viewing the Organization as a System

  Over time, I have become more and more focused on the overall system and figuring out how to look at whatever problem we're having within a larger context. And I find that usually leads me to a better solution. There are a couple of ways to see this in respect to leadership.

  The first one is when you have one of Deming's deadly diseases (or his 14 points), like the mobility of top management...

   

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• Don’t Ignore Customer Complaints

  If the complaint is not something that should be addressed or explored fine. But that has nothing to do with the category of the person (“complainer” or not); it has to do with the merit of the complaint.

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• Stupid Bureaucratic Requirement

  Is it really unquestioningly doing whatever you are told that is the value that is what is being aimed for? Seems pretty clear to me from even this short article this teacher understands the constitution much better than most people and cares enough to take the values that constitution endorses seriously. While the government looks like they only care about getting their form on file and don’t care at all what the purpose of that form is (the purpose can’t really be just to coerce everyone to sign it, can it?).

  ...

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• Practicing Mistake-Promoting Instead of Mistake-Proofing at Apple

  Mistake proofing is a wonderful management concept. Design systems not just to be effective when everything goes right but designing them so mistakes are prevented.

  ...

  But guess what, the unnecessary steps Apple decided to force me through are broken so I can’t just waste my time to make them happy. No. They have created a failure point where they never should have forced the customer in the first place.

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• Hacking Saved Apollo 13

  The hacking culture is much more about figuring out ways to make technology work for people than about criminals. We shouldn’t let a small sub-set of hackers defile the term.

  When the oxygen tank exploded, Commander Jim Lovell made the famous statement: “Houston, we’ve had a problem.” The engineers on the ground and astronauts had to devise solutions to several very difficult problems and execute them quickly in order to return the damaged spacecraft to earth.

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• Root Cause - Addressing Systemic Causes Not Symptoms

  It isn't that there is this "true root cause" that created the current problem. There is a way to look at the issue and find a deeper cause that will allow you to address it and improve the future performance of the system.
  
  Depending on how you look at the problem there can be many different "root causes" that are sensible from their different perspectives. The important thing is by aiming to fix root/systemic problems you will not just treat the current symptom you are dealing with today but eliminate future problems from occurring.

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• Spend More Time Doing What You Do Well

  I think often the most productive thing is to spend time working on the system to maximize the use of people's strengths and minimize the use of their weaknesses. This often has a big impact without much effort.  Changing the system can be a better solution than pouring resources into changing people so they fit the existing system better.

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• Businesses Need to Capture Potential Information and Use the Creativity of Employees

  My father wrote an article a long time ago on how to use ~"two resources, largely untapped in American organizations: potential information and employee creativity."
  
  I think it provides worthwhile ideas.

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• Visual Management and Mistake-Proofing for Prescription Pills

  Mistake proofing is often really mistake-making-more-difficult (for some reason this term of mine hasn’t caught on).

  But the idea is pretty simple: when you have processes that are important and at risk of failure, design processes with elements to make mistakes hard (and ideas such as mistake-proofing and visual management can help you guide your mind to ways to create better processes).

  The entire process needs to be considered...

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• Process Behavior Charts are the Secret to Understanding the Organization as a System

  the power to improving performance is understanding if the problems are due to common causes or special causes. For common causes we need to explore the entire system, and all the data, and seek to improve the overall system. For special causes we need to seek what is special about the bad result and seek to eliminate that problem from causing problems in the future. Unfortunately most problems are system based and we most often jump to special cause thinking (so we often take the wrong approaches to improvement).

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• The Edge-case Excuse

  I have found “edge cases” to actually mean we don’t want to fix it. Often the issue isn’t needing some special code to deal with an “edge case” it is the coding was done poorly and breaks in many different “edge cases.” It isn’t that those edge cases need to be coded for. It is that the code should have been written in a robust way that didn’t break for lots of “edge cases” but the excuse given for not fixing the fundamental coding fragility is the bugs found are just “edge cases.”

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• US Fish and Wildlife Service Plans to Use Drones to Drop Vaccine Treats to Save Ferrets

  To date, SPV has been applied by hand with people walking pre-defined transects and uniformly dropping single SPV baits every 9-10 meters to achieve a deposition rate of 50 SPV doses per acre. Depending on vegetation and terrain, a single person walking can treat 3-6 acres per hour. All terrain vehicles (ATVs) have been considered but have various problems.

  If the equipment and expertise can be developed as proposed here, a single UAS operator could treat more than 60 acres per hour.

  If the equipment can be developed to deposit 3 SPV doses simultaneously every second, as they envision is possible, some 200 acres per hour could be treated by a single operator.

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