Want Better Answers? Think Like An Engineer!

Quality answers are buried in the right questions

This Edition - Using Questions To Solve Problems
Did you know that questions control the way your brain solves problems? The true power with business solutions is making sure you are asking the right questions.

Welcome to the gazebo and grab a seat. I am honored that you stopped by.

A few years back I was looking for a place to sit in a busy English pub when the family at the first table invited me to sit with them. I thought, “What friendly folks” and took a seat. Why not? After a few introductions around the table, the pub got quiet, and the announcer picked up the microphone. “Tonight’s Trivial Pursuit¹ topic is American and British music.” The whole family was looking at me and grinning. The light bulb lit up in my head and I laughed. “With you we are sure to win,” said the father. “There’s not another American in the place. Winners drink for free all night!” We dominated the game much to the disappointment of the other patrons. I can say from personal experience that Guinness tastes better when it is free! Let’s face it, we all like to win and free is good!²

With Trivial Pursuit the right answers were clear. What band wrote and sang “Help?” The Beatles. What folk singer was famous for writing many songs, including “Blowing in The Wind?” Bob Dylan. There aren’t any other correct answers. These are irrefutable facts.³

Initial image created using Dall-E2 and annotated by Ed Paulson.

Finding the “right” or “best” answer to a business problem is not so simple. The “right” answer is often not obvious, and “wrong” answers can be costly. As we have discussed in the prior few posts, our thinking has blind spots that can cause us to make quick, intuitive decisions based on past experiences that may not apply to the current situation. Learning how to capitalize on the best aspects of our thinking capabilities while also ensuring that we are focused on the right problem requires awareness and skill and is the topic of this post.

As a newly graduated electronic engineer, I thought my education taught me about technology, and it wasn’t until I had been out of school for a few years that I realized that what I had really learned was how to solve problems. Technology will change over time but the ability to look at a situation and determine the best solution to a problem always remains valuable. What differentiates a professional from a novice is a consistent way of addressing a situation to ensure that no important influences are overlooked in the process of determining a solution. In engineering we call them boundary conditions.⁴

Think of boundary conditions as the constraints within which any problem must be solved, and if any of the boundary conditions are not met then the solution is not acceptable. Typical business problem boundary conditions would include the budget, timeframe, available personnel, desired outcome, and others. The boundary conditions are determined, in large part, by the problem you intend to solve, so it is important to ensure that you have a high degree of problem clarity.

Business problems are usually sufficiently complicated to involve different departmental personnel, so it is important that you have clear consensus regarding the problem you intend to solve before you get too deeply into the analysis. This is where you want the analytic part of your brain (System 2)⁵ to be in control to avoid blindly accepting the most obvious, intuitive problem definition which might quickly come from your intuitive System 1.

This may sound obvious, but it has amazed me over the years the number of times that a client has asked me to find a solution to a particular problem, not realizing that the problem they asked about was not the one they were actually facing. My first exposure to this phenomenon happened early in my career in Silicon Valley. I was the production engineer for a specific product that was experiencing a stop order which halted all product production and shipment. I called a meeting of the top management to discuss the issues and possible solutions.

As the eight of us started talking the conversation quickly became filled with accusations and tension which made no sense to me, so I asked everyone to stop talking, pull out a piece of paper, and write down the problem we were there to solve. When done, I had each person read what they wrote. These were smart, experienced managers and you could have heard a pin dop in the room as each one read out a different problem statement. In other words, we were all there intently working to solve the problem, but we were all working to solve different problems!

“How about we first agree on the problem we are trying to solve?” I asked, and all agreed. From that point forward, the meeting was supportive, productive and we agreed on an actionable solution that worked. I have never forgotten that experience and have used it as a touchstone for every meeting since.

I pose these questions to the group at the start of discussions to ensure we are all on the same page:

• Q1: Why do you believe we are having this meeting?

• Q2: What would we all like to accomplish from having this meeting?

• Q3: How will we know if we accomplished our goal(s)?

• Q4: What are the external constraints to finding a solution?

• Q5: What has we done before that would limit what you can do today?

• Q6:  Is there anything else that we should consider before we get started?

After answering these questions we have everyone thinking in the same direction, which is critical. Otherwise, each of our intuitions would be filtering and evaluating information in a different context and coming to different conclusions, which would make the meeting unproductive and frustrating.

My guess is that many of you have experienced meetings just like this one and would like to avoid them in the future.

Your intent with the initial questions is to gain agreement before getting into the details. In this way, you can bring everyone back to the early agreements should the conversations go in an unproductive direction. At that point you table the superfluous discussion for another time or, through mutual agreement, update the agreements to the initial questions.⁶

I adopted this intent clarification approach years ago and it has consistently been effective, but it wasn’t until I understood the System 1 and System 2 concepts of Daniel Kahneman that I started to understand why it worked. Learning his framework in conjunction with a basic understanding of neuroplasticity changed the way I think about thinking, not only in problem solving but also in organizational communication and decision making. By asking the questions up front you are focusing everyone’s System 1 to interpret information and offer interpretations in a specific context that will more closely align with those of the other attendees which decreases misunderstanding.

Going back to the British family who invited me to join them, they exhibited excellent problem-solving skills by inviting me to join them. They knew the topic for the night and including me gave them an edge over the others in achieving their goal: to win the game and get free drinks! They understood the problem, knew the limitations of their resources (they knew mostly music from the British side of the “Pond”) and acted to strengthen their limitations. Their openness to using the resources around them (recognizing me as an American) in combination with their willingness to add me to their team (inviting me to join them before someone else did) put the odds of success on their side. Lucky for us, I used to do rock and roll lighting in a past life and knew a lot about American music. 😊⁷

The next time you find yourself quickly jumping to conclusions about an important situation, take a step back and slow down. Adapt the questions presented earlier to your situation and see what you find out. It only takes a few seconds but can help you and your team avoid the costly mistake of putting substantial resources behind a solution to the wrong problem.

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WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS ABOUT ALL OF THIS?

What are your thoughts about all of this? Does it feel right to you? Did you not buy it? Have you ever had a time when you unconsciously performed a substitution? Is your intuition ever wrong? How do you use questions in your work?

Sharing your thoughts will get others to share theirs as well and allows us to learn from each other. Help me understand where you would like the topics to go next, and I will do what I can to go there. You are collectively my System 2, telling me where to focus for future posts.

#meetings, #intuition, #questions, #focus, #engineer

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1. For more about Trivial Pursuit check out this URL. The game is a lot of fun, by the way. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trivial_Pursuit

2. It turned out that the husband had bought my “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Starting Your Own Business” book and the son was reading my “Using CorelDRAW!” book in school. That was cool and is a story for another time.

3. The Cambridge Dictionary (cambridge.org) says that a fact is “something that is known to have happened or to exist, especially something for which proof exists, or about which there is information.” Contrary to what some politicians would have you believe, an opinion is not a fact no matter how many times you repeat it.

4. You will also hear this term used in conjunction with solving differential equations, which I am happy to say we are NOT doing today.

5. According to Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Prize Winner and the author of “Thinking Fast and Slow” we naturally use two thinking approaches that he calls System 1 and System 2. System 1 is the fast, intuitive, automatic thinking part and System 2 is the slow, analytic part. They work in conjunction with each other every second of our lives and influence every decision we make.

6. Here is a tip that I adopted from President Obama. When his meetings were wrapping up, he would go around the room and ask each person if there was anything that they wanted to add, or if they had concerns about what was proposed. In this way everyone had a chance to speak up if they did not agree. This decreased the likelihood that they would later on say that they knew it wouldn’t work.

7. That is most definitely a story for another time.