problem solving learning intentions

Six Steps to Develop an Effective Problem-Solving Process

by Rawzaba Alhalabi Published on November 1, 2017

Problem-solving involves thought and understanding. Although it may appear simple, identifying a problem may be a challenging process.

“Problems are only opportunities in work clothes”, says American industrialist Henry Kaiser. According to Concise Oxford Dictionary (1995), a problem is “ doubtful or difficult matter requiring a solution” and “something hard to understand or accomplish or deal with.” Such situations are at the center of what many people do at work every day.

Whether to help a client solve a problem, support a problem-solver, or to discover new problems, problem-solving is a crucial element to the workplace ingredients. Everyone can benefit from effective problem-solving skills that would make people happier. Everyone wins. Hence, this approach is a critical element but how can you do it effectively? You need to find a solution, but not right away. People tend to put the solution at the beginning of the process but they actually needed it at the end of the process.

Here are six steps to an effective problem-solving process:

Identify the issues, understand everyone’s interests, list the possible solutions, make a decision, implement the solution.

By following the whole process, you will be able to enhance your problem-solving skills and increase your patience. Keep in mind that effective problem solving does take some time and attention. You have to always be ready to hit the brakes and slow down. A problem is like a bump road. Take it right and you’ll find yourself in good shape for the straightaway that follows. Take it too fast and you may not be in as good shape.

Case study 1:

According to Real Time Economics, there are industries that have genuinely evolved, with more roles for people with analytical and problem-solving skills. In healthcare, for example, a regulatory change requiring the digitization of health records has led to greater demand for medical records technicians. Technological change in the manufacturing industry has reduced routine factory jobs while demanding more skilled workers who can operate complex machinery.

Case study 2:

Yolanda was having a hard time dealing with difficult clients and dealing with her team at the office, so she decided to take a problem-solving course. “I was very pleased with the 2-day Problem Solving program at RSM.  It is an excellent investment for anyone involved in the strategic decision-making process—be it in their own company or as a consultant charged with supporting organizations facing strategic challenges.“

Yolanda Barreros Gutiérrez, B&C Consulting

As a response to the COVID-19 outbreak, Potential.com is offering individuals free access to our future skills library (20+ Courses) to support you during the COVID outbreak. It’s your chance to learn essential skills to help you prepare for future jobs. Register now for free using your details and coupon code: potentialreader .

Click here to register (coupon embedded) .

Having read this I believed it was extremely enlightening. I appreciate you taking the time and energy to put tis informative article together. I onc again findd myself spending a significant amount of time both reading and leavfing comments. But so what, it was still worth it!

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

Subscribe to our newsletter

MEDIATOR QUICK LISTS

• Mediators Listed by State/Region
• Mediators Listed by Practice Area
• About Mediation
• Public Policy
• All content
• About mediation
• Public policy

Seven Steps for Effective Problem Solving in the Workplace

Problem-solving and decision-making. Ask anyone in the workplace if these activities are part of their day and they answer ‘Yes!’ But how many of us have had training in problem-solving?  We know it’s a critical element of our work, but do we know how to do it effectively?

People tend to do three things when faced with a problem: they get afraid or uncomfortable and wish it would go away; they feel that they have to come up with an answer and it has to be the right answer; and they look for someone to blame. Being faced with a problem becomes a problem. And that’s a problem because, in fact, there are always going to be problems!

There are two reasons why we tend to see a problem as a problem: it has to be solved and we’re not sure how to find the best solution, and there will probably be conflicts about what the best solution is. Most of us tend to be “conflict-averse”. We don’t feel comfortable dealing with conflict and we tend to have the feeling that something bad is going to happen. The goal of a good problem-solving process is to make us and our organization more “conflict-friendly” and “conflict-competent”.

There are two important things to remember about problems and conflicts: they happen all the time and they are opportunities to improve the system and the relationships. They are actually providing us with information that we can use to fix what needs fixing and do a better job. Looked at in this way, we can almost begin to welcome problems! (Well, almost.)

Because people are born problem solvers, the biggest challenge is to overcome the tendency to immediately come up with a solution. Let me say that again. The most common mistake in problem solving is trying to find a solution right away. That’s a mistake because it tries to put the solution at the beginning of the process, when what we need is a solution at the end of the process.

Here are seven-steps for an effective problem-solving process.

1. Identify the issues.

• Be clear about what the problem is.
• Remember that different people might have different views of what the issues are.
• Separate the listing of issues from the identification of interests (that’s the next step!).

2. Understand everyone’s interests.

• This is a critical step that is usually missing.
• Interests are the needs that you want satisfied by any given solution. We often ignore our true interests as we become attached to one particular solution.
• The best solution is the one that satisfies everyone’s interests.
• This is the time for active listening. Put down your differences for awhile and listen to each other with the intention to understand.
• Separate the naming of interests from the listing of solutions.

3. List the possible solutions (options)

• This is the time to do some brainstorming. There may be lots of room for creativity.
• Separate the listing of options from the evaluation of the options.

4. Evaluate the options.

• What are the pluses and minuses? Honestly!
• Separate the evaluation of options from the selection of options.

5. Select an option or options.

• What’s the best option, in the balance?
• Is there a way to “bundle” a number of options together for a more satisfactory solution?

6. Document the agreement(s).

• Don’t rely on memory.
• Writing it down will help you think through all the details and implications.

7. Agree on contingencies, monitoring, and evaluation.

• Conditions may change. Make contingency agreements about foreseeable future circumstances (If-then!).
• How will you monitor compliance and follow-through?
• Create opportunities to evaluate the agreements and their implementation. (“Let’s try it this way for three months and then look at it.”)

Effective problem solving does take some time and attention more of the latter than the former. But less time and attention than is required by a problem not well solved. What it really takes is a willingness to slow down. A problem is like a curve in the road. Take it right and you’ll find yourself in good shape for the straightaway that follows. Take it too fast and you may not be in as good shape.

Working through this process is not always a strictly linear exercise. You may have to cycle back to an earlier step. For example, if you’re having trouble selecting an option, you may have to go back to thinking about the interests.

This process can be used in a large group, between two people, or by one person who is faced with a difficult decision. The more difficult and important the problem, the more helpful and necessary it is to use a disciplined process. If you’re just trying to decide where to go out for lunch, you probably don’t need to go through these seven steps!

Don’t worry if it feels a bit unfamiliar and uncomfortable at first. You’ll have lots of opportunities to practice!

Tim Hicks is a conflict management professional providing mediation, facilitation, training, coaching, and consulting to individuals and organizations. From 2006 to 2014 he led the Master’s degree program in Conflict and Dispute Resolution at the University of Oregon as its first director. He returned to private practice in 2015. Tim is… MORE >

Featured Mediators

Mediation in today’s news.

Read these next

Mediation vs arbitration clauses- which to choose.

Got a Visa card, Mastercard or almost any other credit card? Then you, my friend, are now subject to an arbitration clause. That means you agreed to waive your right...

The Value of a Psychologist Mediator

Consumers of mediation services have a range of options when it comes to choosing a mediator. For many, especially in this competitive economic climate, conservatism guides their choices. Most consumers...

Mediation Does NOT Work

... at least according to these folk at the sharp end; Marie1958 says yesterday over at LA Legal that... "Court ordered mediation should be taken out of our judicial system....

Find a Mediator

This is information that we want to show about a session.

• Name * First Last

Manage additional Featured locations

Spirituality, Creativity, and Solving New Problems

Creating a generative learning style.

Not everything that can be counted counts,

And not everything that counts can be counted..

  Attributed to Albert Einstein

Few business leaders make critical decisions of any kind without evidence of a trend. Today’s data rich environment provides vital information executives need to recognize and seize opportunities or to take corrective action. One challenge for leaders, of course, is capturing the right data; but, the real challenge is creating an effective organizational process for engaging the mass of incoming information through a generative learning style—one that 1) recognizes and places value on information, 2) evaluates the information through the lenses of knowledge and preconception, and 3) seeks solutions through experimentation. [1]

Figure 1: Generative Learning

Generative Learning Communities

Billions of invisible bytes of data feeding our dashboards create a picture of institutional performance as it relates to specific goals within specific initiatives. These invaluable bits of information may give an account of changing behavior inside or outside the organization that may require action; but they offer little instruction on how to address the phenomenon behind the symptom. To unravel that mystery, leaders must turn to another invisible resource to create a generative learning community with the imagination to conceive of a future reality and with the capacity to pursue that shared vision through creative problem solving. In order to cope in an age with an abundance of information and a deficit of insight, leaders must access the spiritual resources available to them through their workforce.

The vocabulary of business has largely excluded words such as love , hope , and purpose . If these terms do show up in business literature, they are often confined to discipline of organizational behavior. It is no wonder. Those of us in the western world live and operate under the influence of the age of Enlightenment, waning though it may be. Biblical scholar N.T. Wright says,

The Enlightenment notoriously insisted upon splitting apart history and faith, facts and values, religion and politics, nature and super nature…with one of the consequences being, indeed, that each of those categories now carries with it…an implicit opposition to its twin, so that we are left with the great difficulty of even conceiving of a world in which they belong to one another as part of a single indivisible whole. [2]

To be clear, it is not the author of this paper’s intention to pit the hard and soft sciences against one another. In fact, this author suggests that creating a generative learning team is essential to organizational effectiveness and such a team depends on spiritual and knowledge-based resources to solve problems. Given that data is flowing at accelerating rates, producing mountains of evidence, learning communities capable of discerning the meaning of the evidence have never been more important to an organization’s ability to cope, grow, and survive.

Neither is the author’s intention to consider spirituality in religious terms, though, personally, the author finds it hard to engage the concept of spirituality without encountering existential questions. The author finds Dallas Willard’s view of the nature of human existence to be compelling.

Human existence understood in the context of the full world of God—“all things visible and invisible,” can be as good as we naturally hope for it to be. As we increasingly integrate our world with the spiritual world of God, our life increasingly takes on the substance of the eternal. [3]

Again, the author raises the issue of spirituality only as it applies to the activation of generative learning communities. Like Willard, the author sees the world as an integration of physical and spiritual elements. That alone is enough for us to explore spirituality and its relationship to the learning communities we hope to create. However, to be as transparent as possible, like Willard, the author sees God as the life-giving source of both physical and spiritual elements.

Shared Assumptions

Separate from one’s religious leanings or lack thereof, many people in the organizations we lead long to connect their vocation to their latent existential and cosmological questions or yearnings. Practically speaking, the men and women in our organizations experience, on a personal level, the same shifts impacting our businesses. They, too, are tuned in to disruption, geopolitical conditions, financial shifts, and environmental concerns. Inwardly they wonder if they are part of the solution or are they part of the problem. Ultimately, many of the people who make up the organizations we lead care deeply about the planet and the well being of its people. At their core, most people want to love as they wish to be loved.

The substance of spirituality, if you will allow the characterization, is made up of intrinsic human impulses such as love, hope, purpose, meaning, and discernment. Invisible, though they may be, they provide the key ingredients for creative problem solving. Even more importantly, as Edgar Schein says,

The function of cognitive structures such as concepts, beliefs, attitudes, values, and assumptions is to organize the mass of environmental stimuli, to make sense of them, and to thereby provide a sense of predictability and meaning to the individual. The set of shared assumptions that develop over time in groups and organizations serves this stabilizing and meaning providing function. [4]

Schein observes that all human systems seek to achieve and maintain a sense of equilibrium in order to cope, grow, and survive. The integrity of the organizational system is held together, not only through financial resources and the physical plant, but also through beliefs, assumptions, identity, mission, vision, and values. Put another way, human systems are held together by both visible and invisible elements, with the invisible possessing substantive qualities as essential to the enterprise as the visible. Indeed, I would argue the spiritual forces give energy to the entire system.

In the abstract, spirituality as an energizing and organizing force of any enterprise may not be difficult to acknowledge. The challenge is figuring out how to activate it. Any thought of harnessing it, as if it is a renewable resource, is wrong headed. Leaders who attempt to tap into the motivational energy of their workforce by pandering in some superficial way to the deeply held, personal sensibilities of meaning and purpose or vocation and calling will be seen as inauthentic or untrustworthy if not abusive. The test of the leader is to first see, then cast, a vision of an organization’s contribution to a future global reality at which point they invite a learning community to participate in a shared journey, not only sharing in the vision, but also in the risks and rewards. In so doing, leaders can form and influence the health and vibrancy of an organizational community. More toward this point, L.W. Fry says,

Leaders must create a vision wherein the organization’s members experience a sense of calling in that their life has meaning and makes a difference. They must establish a social/organizational culture based on altruistic love whereby leaders and followers have genuine care, concern, and appreciation for both self and others, thereby producing a sense of membership. [5]

The key to activating spiritual resources is to access them in an authentic way by gathering a community around a shared identity and a vision of a future reality and engaging them at a personal level, meeting them on the spiritual plane. This requires leaders to come to terms with their own spiritual assets such as love, hope, purpose, and integrity. Business expertise alone, whether in finance or marketing, does not qualify one to lead a community into a complex future in a hopeful and productive way.

Shared Vision

While I hope the ideas presented to this point have been meaningful, I doubt they have satisfied the practical questions that hover near the top of mind. How do personal values and beliefs translate into motivation and action? How do they reach the bottom line of the balance sheet? Admittedly, we may not be able to draw a clear straight line from the spiritual plane to the investor’s return, but we can clearly see the role it plays in improving organizational effectiveness.

Peter Senge famously referred to a shared vision as a “common caring.” He says, “Few, if any, forces in human affairs are as powerful as a shared vision.” [6] Again, in the abstract, we sense that mission and vision are somehow important if not vital, but we find that the real struggle is to activate them to address real world problems.

Given that today’s leaders find themselves at the relative beginning of the age of hyper acceleration, coping and surviving have become daily agenda items. Reactive leaders seeking resources to cope with disruptive change are finding that material resources alone are insufficient to solve the problems associated with accelerated change. Once visionary leaders are now focusing less on the future state of their organization in favor of preserving the mission for today. They do so at great risk to their long-term goals. Minus an animating vision of a future reality, or a desire for the “struggle of shared aspirations,” [7] organizations will labor as adaptive enterprises, reacting to real time challenges and opportunities. In the age of hyper acceleration, adaptive organizations will likely respond too slowly and the great struggle to cope, grow, or survive will create chronic institutional fatigue and eventually failure.

The speed of change and the growing rate of disruption in the current and future environment is prompting leaders to create generative learning [8] organizations that gather information, data, and process it through new filters to view old solutions differently. Generative learning calls upon teams to solve problems by working with both spiritual and knowledge-based elements. The common struggle to reach for the future destination motivates teams to see their future in the context of a world with its many promises and problems.

“Shared vision,” Senge says, “is vital for the learning organization because it provides the focus and energy for learning. While adaptive learning is possible without vision, generative learning occurs when people are trying to accomplish something that matters deeply to them.” [9]

Figure 2: Activating Spiritual and Knowledge Based Resources

The world needs people who can select, interpret, and use information to solve new problems they have not encountered before. Today’s focus on twenty-first-century skills such as creative problem solving, critical thinking, adaptability, complex communication, and constructing evidence-based arguments can be seen as a call for generative learning that helps people develop “transferable knowledge and skills.” [11]

While the skills of the generative learning team are key to interpreting information and identifying and discerning the nature of new problems, the greatest benefit to the organization comes through the motivational factor. Motivation is the internal, cognitive state that prompts and gives energy and sustainability to goal-directed behavior. [12]

With this in mind, today’s leader must consider the energizing, discerning, and productive qualities that spiritual resources provide. While asking the functional questions that shield the organization against risk, leaders must also ask some of the most enduring questions with which humans have wrestled over the ages.

• What is real?
• What is true?
• What is my purpose?
• Who is my neighbor?

These questions, though soft or sentimental to some, are in reality the questions that drive everything. They always have. The colleagues you lead are longing for you to ask these questions and to relate them to the work your organization has been called to do.

[1] Wittrock, M. C. (1992). “Generative Learning Processes of the Brain.” Educational Psychologist, 27 (4), 531-541. doi:10.1207/s15326985ep2704_8

[2] Wright, N. T. (2015).  The Challenge of Jesus: Rediscovering Who Jesus Was and Is . Downers Grove, IL: IVP Books, an imprint of InterVarsity Press.

[3] Willard, D. (2014).  The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God . London: William Collins.

[4] Schein, E. H. (1996).  Organizational Culture and Leadership . San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

[5] Fry, L. W. (2003). “Toward a Theory of Spiritual Leadership.”  The Leadership Quarterly,14 (6), 693-727. doi:10.1016/j.leaqua.2003.09.001

[6] Senge, P. M. (1990).  The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization . New York: Doubleday.

[7] Fry, (2003).

[8] Wittrock, (1992).

[9] Senge, (1990).

[10]  Senge, (1990).

[11] Pelegrino, J., & Hilton, M. (2012). as quoted in Fiorella, L., & Mayer, R. E. (2015).  Learning as a Generative Activity: Eight Learning Strategies that Promote Understanding . New York: Cambridge University Press, p. 69.

[12]  Pelegrino, (2012).

Spiritual Leadership

Often, a company’s competitive advantage depends on how intelligent the firm is at observing and interpreting the dynamic world context in which it operates.

GBR Special Issue: Spiritual Leadership

Living in a complex world and moving into the smart machine age, the need for good leadership is even greater; spiritual leadership provides a compass to navigate through difficult decisions.

EDITORIAL: Research and Teaching on Spirituality and Spiritual Leadership in Management

Research and teaching in the field will help future managers and organization leaders cope with the stress and anxiety and sometimes rancor that organizations may be experiencing.

Ecologically Conscious Leadership

Spiritual convictions may help business leaders to develop ecological consciousness required for achieving sustainability in business functioning.

Leadership “Jesus Style”

Jesus of Nazareth manifests character traits in His speech and actions that transcend time and culture and offer insights into leadership practices and priorities worth serious consideration.

Does Spirituality Make a Difference in Leadership?

This article examines the topic of spirituality and leadership using the example of the Apostle Paul as an exemplary leader for contemporary times.

The Final Issue of the GBR Is Dedicated to Dr. Owen Hall, Jr.

Junior was a man devoted to Pepperdine, his students, and his colleagues and was a stalwart member on many committees, always looking for how to best serve the Pepperdine Graziadio Business School and the University.

Editorial: How AI Can Help Developing Countries Post COVID-19

The COVID-19 crisis is one event that has intensified the need for urgent action by developing countries to utilize technologies like AI to drive economic growth.

Pandemic Demonstrates the Necessity of Intuitive Decision-Making Skills

The pandemic has clearly proven that the rational decision-making model, business schools’ ideal and its theoretical definition of how decisions should be made, is not valid under conditions of VUCA.

3 Reasons Not to Solve Other People's Problems