Problem Solving 101

Sarah Tilkens

Emily Smit

I just want to take a minute to introduce Sarah, who will be presenting today. Sarah is a lifelong learner, a scientist turned operations manager, and a certified life coach and true lover of people and community. She is currently the Senior Operations Manager for operational excellence at GE Healthcare, and the CEO and founder of the KPI Lab. She has over 15 years of experience in Lean, Six Sigma, Strategy, Execution, and Project Management. Without further ado, I will turn things over to you, Sarah.

Sarah Tilkens

Thank you. I can go ahead and share my screen. Can anyone confirm for me that you can see?

Emily Smit

Yes, it is not in full presentation mode, but we can see your screen. Present.

Sarah Tilkens

There we go. I'm going to minimize the view, but if you guys want to talk to me, feel free to take yourself off mute and just talk. I've got some questions, so especially as we jump off, I'm really curious your current perspective on problem-solving. I like for this to be super interactive, so the more that I can learn about the types of problems that you're solving, the better I can tailor this content to hopefully serve you. Again, welcome to Problem Solving 101. I will lead with this is probably one of my favorite things in the entire world to talk about, so I am just really grateful for the audience. All right, so the first question that I have for you guys, and again, feel free to just hop off mute if you're comfortable, but why do you think that problem-solving is important?

Participant

If you don't, you can't move forward? You get stuck?

Isabel McDonough

Yeah. We face different problems every day. Yeah, it's a pretty versatile skill set, right? The sheer.

Participant

Satisfaction of completing something.

Sarah Tilkens

I love that. And their opportunities. If you choose to see them as such.

Participant

If you don't solve the true problem, then you never actually get a resolution.

Sarah Tilkens

Yeah, I feel like I say often if you don't change something, nothing changes, right? Okay, my next question is... Hang on, I skipped one. What do you guys think makes problem-solving hard? Solutions.

Jess Kent-Johnson

Sometimes the solutions might not feel under our control or maybe we don't know that we can do it by ourselves. Not everyone has the same definition of what the problem is.

Participant

I was just going to say the same thing.

Participant

I try, Zach.

Participant

Or they may have different solutions, right?

Sarah Tilkens

Mm-hmm.

Participant

You may not agree with? Yeah.

Participant

You might have to have some difficult conversations with people.

Sarah Tilkens

Yeah, love that. I'm just taking some notes so I can make sure to circle back to all that stuff. Then my last question, again, if anyone would be interested in sharing, is what would be the impact for you if you were to become better at problem-solving?

Participant

Less panic and more confidence.

Participant

Efficiency.

Participant

A better leader.

Participant

The ability to be more proactive and not reactive.

Participant

Yeah. I'd say less time wasted.

Sarah Tilkens

Amazing. Thank you guys all for sharing. All of those answers resonate with me for sure. And I think time spent doing things that we love is such a unique thing that we can create for ourselves. So the more that we can get rid of the problems that burden us, the more time that we have to, again, create. All right, so you've got a little bit of an intro. Apparently, some of my photos aren't going to work. But just again, my name is Sarah Tilkins. I am a senior op ex leader at GE Healthcare. I work in our imaging business. So we build CT systems for hospitals. I'm based out of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I am also the CEO and founder of the KPI Lab. At the KPI Lab, I do problem-solving for people and process. So leadership, development, and coaching, I do specialize in working with operations leaders and process improvements. So lean, Six Sigma, optimization, and elimination of your problems. As also I have alluded to, I am a certified coach through the International Coaching Federation and Co-Active. And so I really love blending my passion of people and improvement in this space that I've created at the KPI Lab.

Sarah Tilkens

Where I always like to start in talking about problem-solving is mindset. If you guys run with the perk, I'm assuming that people understand that really our thoughts create our feelings, which create the action and the results that we're able to generate in our life. So often, and you guys already alluded to some of this with sometimes where we get stuck with problem-solving is people have different ideas of solutions or defining what the problem is. I often find that if you're problem-solving for yourself or if you're supporting people in problem-solving, if you can orient yourself to become an explorer and to lead through this process with curiosity instead of assuming that you know literally anything, it tends to serve you. So instead of the mindset of this is hard, if we can adopt the mindset of there's something to learn here, I think that it just is going to open you up to really experiencing problem-solving in a different way. I also want to introduce the concept of convergent versus divergent thinking. Throughout the problem-solving process, and I'm going to give you guys and a framework to follow along with me, I will offer there's sometimes an opportunity to think broader, and sometimes there's an opportunity to make a decision.

Sarah Tilkens

So, divergent is just, again, that broadening. It's brainstorming. It's thinking of all of the different possible ways to move forward. And then convergence is taking all of those options and making a decision so that you have one path. So you will hear me talking about different tools that support convergent or divergent thinking throughout the process. And really, there isn't a right time to do one or the other. It just depends on where you're stuck. So regardless of where in the process, if you find yourself stuck, I want you to just consider flipping from convergent to divergent or back. So if you feel like you only have one choice to move forward, think about the hundred different choices that might be available for you before you choose. And if you have a bunch of stuff in front of you and that's what's creating the feeling of stuck, sometimes just deciding and creating some action is really going to help serve you in the process. Okay, so if anyone has heard of or is familiar with Six Sigma, Six Sigma is essentially a problem-solving methodology. It's been around for a long time. It's often linked with Lean, but in my mind, it's just a subset of Lean.

Sarah Tilkens

And again, it's a problem-solving tool and framework. It tends to be really statistical in nature. I've been a black belt for a long time, and I've used Six Sigma very few because typically I can solve the problem without all of the analytics. But what I love about it is a very simple framework where we can see where in the process of problem-solving we land. Step one, define the problem. Step two, measure, which is just, again, understanding the quantification, like how big is this and what do we stand to gain. Analyzing, which is this allows us to go deeper into what is the root cause versus just the assessment at the symptom level, actually improving the problem and then controlling it so that you don't see drift when you walk away. We're going to walk through all of these steps as part of this presentation. This at first glance might look intimidating. I have my contact information at the end of this. If you would like a template, I have this one and I have a light format, but I would be happy to share. Just send me an email and let me know that you're interested.

Sarah Tilkens

I promise hopefully by the end of this presentation, this will not look intimidating, and it's going to help you solve all of your problems. But what this is, is just again, a one-stop shop and a framework for how you work through the problem-solving process. Similar to that define, measure, analyze, improve control, you'll see that I have this problem-solving report broken out as such with some guidance within each of those buckets as to what is required in order to help you on your journey. Again, this is a lot of stuff. There is some right way to do this. But what I like to say with using a framework like this is essentially it's like getting fit. So you're just starting and you're lifting weights. And there's a lot of value in doing the same exercise so that your body understands what it's for and how to use the muscles appropriately. So I think it's the same with problem-solving as if you're new, the structure creates a lot of value because it's just going to offer you that stability and that reminder of how to build the muscles appropriately. And once you're good and ripped, you can come and you can play around in here all you want.

Sarah Tilkens

But I often just have to come back to the framework too, because we have tendencies to hop around or even I have a lot of tendencies to go to a solution before I really understand the problem. So this is always just a really solid reminder of how you flow through a problem-solving process. All right. With that, step one is define and measure, which I'm bucketing together. There's a lot of different parts of the define and measure phase, and we'll go through them one by one. One of my favorite quotes in this place is a quote attributed to Einstein, but he says, If I had an hour to solve a problem, I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions. Really, what I think is important about that is, again, just how easy it is to let our brains wander into the space of, Well, I could do this, and I could do this, and I have to change all of these things without actually being certain that maybe we have a problem or that the problem is important for us to focus on. Really what we do in this section is get super clear on what that problem is and what the impact is and how we measure it such that as we move into the analyze and the Solution area, we're really utilizing our time wisely.

Sarah Tilkens

I also talk about... I use different ways of explaining different parts of the process. It's sometimes hard for me to follow the same example. In a manufacturing setting, I'm great at it, so I apologize if that throws anybody off. But again, if you want to see your problem talked through in any of these different parts of the process, just holler and I can give you guys different examples to help you understand how they fit into the framework. With regards to just articulating the problem and the KPI affected, so KPI for anyone who doesn't know that term is key performance indicator. It's essentially a scorecard or a measure of some problem or of anything. Kpi could be delivery, it could be revenue, it could be weight. It's really, again, just a measurement system that aligns with something that we deem important to be measured. The other little caveat here I have around KPIs is there's leading indicators of success and there's lagging indicators of success. You always get to choose your own adventure here of what you think serves you. I'll talk a little bit about what is leading versus lagging in this example. If we're using the problem of physical health just to walk through this, first off, you can articulate that problem in a couple different ways.

Sarah Tilkens

I would offer that you always want to get really curious with how you articulate the problem here because it's easy to say... To see how choosing one can take you down one path. This is again that I want you to think of divergent thinking first. We're saying physical health is a problem. What are all of the different ways that you can articulate that problem? And which one do you want to choose that you think is going to put you on the path to creating the solution that you really want. So if I say I want to lose weight, I might measure that in my weight. I might look at my body mass index, but you're really just confined to weight loss is success. And if you think about the journey versus the destination, I might say, okay, so if your goal is to weigh 150 pounds, if you make it to 151, but you're running your fastest mile that you've ever ran and you're feeling great and you're really healthy, did you fail? So really, it's again, just out of curiosity, is this what you want to bind yourself to as the way that you articulate the problem and set yourself up to win or lose?

Sarah Tilkens

A different way that you could, again, play in the same space is I want to move my body more. Ways that you might measure that are active minutes per day, daily step count, calories burned. And I would say that all of these three measures in this category are what I would call leading indicators of success. So leading is again, I believe that if I do these things and measure these things every day, the impact will be weight loss, improved BMI, I will get healthier. So it's just again, there isn't a right way. It's just what is going to motivate you to play in this space. Another way that you could articulate the problem of physical health is you want to create healthy habits. Maybe you're going to measure meals eaten at home. Maybe you're going to measure how many flights of stairs you climb. Again, those are more on the leading indicator side, but I just want to offer that there's a lot of different ways that you can choose to select the problem you're solving. When you're doing this in an organization too, this is exactly what I would do if I was leading a group through this process.

Sarah Tilkens

Someone mentioned it, but it's often really challenging to get people on the same page about what problem we're solving. Again, even with that Einstein quote, Please spend the time here, because if you don't, you're going to spend your time out in space creating solutions that might not actually come back to solving the problem that you set out to solve. All right. Impact is the next thing that I want you to think about here. You can ask yourself the impact in a lot of different ways. Again, if you're solving something personal to you versus if you're solving something in your organization, make sure there's some alignment there. But if I'm talking about increasing revenue for my organization, I want to increase revenue from $1 million to $2 million, what's the impact for me if I'm able to solve that problem? Well, I'm going to feel really confident. Maybe it's going to position me in a certain way in my organization. Maybe I'm going to create possibility for others that something like that can happen. And so it's again, just making sure that if you're going to set your path on solving this problem, that it matters.

Sarah Tilkens

And then I might say, great, and what is the impact to your company? What is the impact to your customers? So it's really just, again, grounding us in the why. And I'll offer, this has happened with my clients. This has happened with my coaching more times than I'm willing to admit. But I get super focused on this is a problem and I'm deep into solutioning. Often I come back to, Is this problem really a problem? 80% of the time, for me personally, the answer is no. I find that I breeze through this often because, again, my brain likes to go into the problem-solving. But if you can orient yourself around why is this important, and I see this in organizations all of the time as well, it'll just really hold that you're putting your effort into solving something that really matters. Okay, caused and created problems. This is like a circle the box on that framework that I created, that problem-solving report. So all problems, I think, are either caused, created, or can be both. So a caused problem is something happened in the past and something changed and I'm no longer where I used to be.

Sarah Tilkens

I used to have, I think an example I use in this is I used to have 30 discovery calls with clients a week. I was consistently booking 30 discovery calls with clients a week, and that's what was helping me generate results. And all of a sudden, I'm really only getting 10 a week. I used to be at a good place. Something shifted. I'm no longer there, and I need to get back. So that's what it's got the detective hat on because a lot of the way that you're going to ask questions about a cause problem is when did it happen? What changed around that time? Was it a sudden change? Was it a long term shift? So just again, you're looking back for answers on how you can recreate what you used to have. A created problem on the other side of things is when you set out to achieve something that you've never achieved before. So this is again, my profits were a million dollars last year. I want to double them. I want to make two million dollars next year. I've never done it. So really looking back can serve you in some ways.

Sarah Tilkens

Like what's working really well that I want to bring forward into this new goal that I'm trying to achieve, but you also need to cast that vision forward. So what are you trying to achieve? When do you want to do it by? And again, that divergent thinking of what are all of the different ways that you can create this new state of being for yourself? Again, sometimes it can be both, but I find that this is just a useful categorization that gets our brains, again, in that curious mode of problem-solving that helps us start asking really good questions so that we put ourselves on the right track. Okay. In the measure side of things, trend graphs. Sometimes you'll have a trend graph. Sometimes this will be useful to you. Sometimes you might not have access to data historically to create this for yourself. But whenever you do, especially when you're solving problems for your organization, I really encourage you to look at some history of the problem. So trend graphs can be a little tricky, but there's a lot of resources out there to help do them right, holler if you need help. But essentially you have time on your X-axis and you have the thing that you're measuring on your Y-axis.

Sarah Tilkens

And if I'm again looking at my weight, for example, I might say, okay, across the past six months, what has my weight been doing? And this is another tool that just serves you and asking good questions that help you in the problem solving process. So if my weight has been slowly trending up, okay, I might ask what's behind that? What changed in my habits? What do I know about that? What could be creating it? Versus if my weight is seasonal or cyclical, you might ask what happens on the upswing versus what happens on the downswing? Or is there something critical about these switch points? What is that trigger that turns me from trending in the right direction to trending back in the wrong direction? And there's never again, blame here. It's just information that allows you to get curious about the historical nature of your problem. A regular this is pretty common too. There might not be any pattern to what you're looking at, but if you consider a mean or an average versus variation. I might look at an irregular trend like this and I might say, yeah, maybe on average I come back to the same spot, but there's a lot of highs and there's a lot of lows.

Sarah Tilkens

And that's what we allude to with variation. You might say, how can I create more stability around this problem before I even think of shifting the mean or the average? It just can be another way, again, of articulating that problem that can create some opportunities for you. Okay. The gap analysis. This is again another really important part of the define and measure stage. This is where, simply put, you're going to take that KPI that you've decided to measure, revenue, weight, profit, delivery to customers. And you are going to say your target, where you're at now, and the gap. I want to be doing 30 discovery calls a week. Right now I'm doing 14, which means I need to figure out how to close a gap of 16. It's really just your target minus your actual is your gap. My little pro tip here is whenever possible, it's much easier for some of the next steps if you can use whole numbers versus percentages. We do a lot of quality problem-solving, and with yield or performance, we tend to say, Oh, we made 90 % good parts. Again, it's easier if you can say, I made 110 defects, instead of 10% of what I made are defects.

Sarah Tilkens

That'll make a little bit more sense in the next area, but you can do it whatever way. I have just found that if you can actually count in this space, you're going to be able to break down the problem in a little bit simpler language as you move forward. Last but not least, before we move into Analyze, I always just like to have people re-summarize the problem statement based on more of the context that they received throughout this process. I say use tags, and tags just means target, actual, gap, and summary. A good problem statement is discovery calls have steadily been decreasing since January. As of fiscal week 14, my discovery calls were 14 to a goal of 30, leaving a gap of 16 calls. What I would say is not a great problem statement is profits are down 27% year over year and we want to improve profits by $1 million. So why this is lacking? Just a couple, again, things is you don't have a consistent actual, right? You have a target to get one million more, but you don't really know where you're starting from. The gap could be one million, the target could be one million.

Sarah Tilkens

It doesn't talk about trends. It doesn't really make any sense to use a percentage and then flip to a dollar sign. If you can stick to the tags, it'll help you just really formalize your problem statement in a concrete way. Typically, this is where when I'm doing it in an organization, I can really generate a lot of buy-in and alignment. Because if there's any people who don't believe that this is the right thing to go after, you have it written out in such a succinct way that you can, Here's the data that's allowing me to get to what my target actual the gap is. You're quantifying it with numbers. You've talked about the trends. So usually when you land here, it's pretty easy to get consensus versus just saying, Well, the problem is we don't have enough discovery calls. So it just gives that depth to the way, again, that we're articulating the problem statement to move forward. Okay, that was a lot. Define is the biggest section. I want to pause for a moment and just ask if anyone has questions or takeaways from that section specifically. Everything makes so much sense and you guys got it and it's perfect and it's changing your life as we speak.

Participant

It was a lot, admittedly, Sarah. I've got a lot of takeaways. I think that with any problem, I think there's going to be a varying degrees of how much of this we would use. There's immediate problem-solving, there's intermediate, and then there's advanced. That's where my head goes on this. This great information, by the way, is really helpful.

Sarah Tilkens

Thank you. It is a lot. I will offer that if this is... I'm trying to break it down in a way where you can have this presentation, you can have the templates, again, build the muscles. But if this isn't landing, again, this is complicated stuff. How I teach problem-solving, whether it's in organization or typically outside of organization, this could take four hours or a day. Really, this is meant to be that high-level, here's what's possible within this space. Again, if you want to go deeper, I'm happy to help, but even if you take one thing out of this, which is, Oh, my God, this is bigger than I ever imagined possible, I would offer let that be okay for now, because as you come back to it, you'll get a little bit deeper and deeper.

Participant

Yeah, I was just going to say, I think this feels to me like probably the most challenging part and the part that is probably often skipped. It's just saying, here's what I think the problem is, but doing all that work to actually define the problem to make sure you're solving for the right things, I know is a spot that I regularly fall down on.

Sarah Tilkens

And, Sarah, if you don't mind, what could having a little bit of a framework, like even that section that I dedicated on that report to defining, what could that offer you in your journey?

Participant

I think it forces you to actually put your thoughts down into writing and to actually try to create a problem statement that is more accurate. I think in the end, people brought up in the beginning, I think though it feels like this would take a lot of time, in the end, it's going to make your problem solving a lot more efficient to make sure that you're solving the right thing. I think having the framework for me would be important because it makes me ask the right questions and think through the right things.

Sarah Tilkens

Thanks, Michelle.

Isabel McDonough

I think that this is great because it really helps you get clear on what the problem is. I find that sometimes I might think that this is where the problem is and go in this direction when I really should have gone in a completely other direction. This is great just for getting clear about where to start. Thanks.

Participant

For me, one of the biggest takeaways I had is something that I'm going through right now where I could have saved a lot of time burning my daylight on something if I just would have asked enough whys of why is this important, what's the main takeaway, then it's frustrating, in retrospect, that I spend so much time because I'm like, Gosh, dang, if I just asked a couple more whys to understand why this is important so that the individual can answer back to then have actual exhaustive conversation. Conversely, you may be going down the road of trying to solve a problem that doesn't really need to be solved.

Sarah Tilkens

I find that when you can be the person to hold this space to solve the problem through a framework like this again, there's a privilege in being able to bring people back of what you're talking about right now is a solution, and we have yet to define the problem. So again, just having there be a path that you have to travel. Until one thing is done, you really don't want to play in the next space, I think it just creates some ability to help people and be that person that again, hold the space, hold the fort, don't let them forward because everything that happens if you don't set the foundation up correctly, maybe you take a shot in the dark and it helps. But there's beauty in just, again, following the path. I think with anything else as well, you can decide that your goal is to solve the problem, or you can decide that your goal is to become an exceptional problem solver. I tell my team all of the time, I would rather have you be amazing at problem-solving and be able to be really adaptable in this space than solve every single problem.

Sarah Tilkens

The goal isn't to solve every problem, because if you are great at problem-solving and if the objective is to build problem-solving capability, you will solve the problems. If you focus too much on getting the outcome and less about how you, again, build your capability and your strength to get there, you might get it right one time, but it's that growth mindset versus the goal mindset. So yeah, again, it's hard, but every little time you pick up something like this, you're building your capability to solve problems down the road. Awesome. Okay, well, let's move forward again. Define is the biggest part. Hopefully, we read through the rest of this. Again, if you have questions I can provide clarity on, just let me know. But with that, we will hop into Analyze. There's a couple of main tools I'll talk about in Analyze. Again, this can be really bulky. There's a lot of tools that I know how to use, but I wanted to give you guys just a couple to consider. But the intention here is really to narrow the focus of your problem and to get to root cause. My little quote here, if you're unable to understand the cause, it is impossible to solve it.

Sarah Tilkens

We've alluded to some of this of where we get stuck at the beginning as well as we implement solutions before we really understand the difference between a symptom versus a cause. And if that language is unique to anybody, symptoms of problems tend to show up and tend to be what we first respond to. So think of symptoms as a fever. And so you can treat a fever with Advil and you might be able to get rid of it. But what's actually creating that symptom is maybe an infection. And so as long as you're treating the symptoms with Advil, you're just really masking getting to the root cause and getting rid of the problem. So the couple tools I will show you here, Pareto's, a Fishbone, and then something that I call Five Y, which is a root cause tool. So Pareto's Simply Put are a way of categorizing information. So again, this could be a whole, Pareto's could be a whole lesson, but very high level. If I say that my target profit is a thousand dollars or no, what did I do? Okay, spending. So my goal is to spend a thousand dollars a week on expenses.

Sarah Tilkens

That's a great goal. That's a lot of money. And if I'm actually spending $1300 a week, I need to figure out what I'm spending that extra $300 on. A Pareto is a way to collect information. And again, we are narrowing the focus of what our biggest opportunities are so that we can really impactfully solve the problem that we need to solve. So typically I do two levels of Pareto's. The first one, when possible, I'm trying to answer the question where? What broad area is my biggest opportunity? And then typically you're going a little bit deeper into the what. So if I'm spending in excess of $300, you always just want to Pareto the gap. If you add up everything here, it would be equal to $300. I'm asking on average this $300, what did I spend the money on? Well, the first big bucket is groceries. $190 out of my 300 excess I spent on groceries. That's 63% of my gap. The % of the gap means if I decrease all of that spending, I've solved 63% of my problem. So you're usually looking to get to about 80%, but really it's just a different way of articulating what the opportunity is there.

Sarah Tilkens

So level one, Oh, my goodness, I'm really overspending, and I can see pretty clearly from looking at my budget that my biggest opportunity is within my groceries. Okay, so what specifically in groceries am I spending a ton of money on? Holy crap, I'm spending $114 in excess of my budget a week on cheese. Well, we're from Wisconsin. Not a huge surprise. But again, you're just taking this $190 and you're breaking it down further to see what it offers you and how narrow you could get. So if I were to problem-solve this, and I see that I'm spending a ton of money on cheese, and I really love cheese so much, and I can't possibly give it up, what you might consider doing is, how can I make my own cheese? So how can I eliminate this cause of spending specifically? And it puts you in the path of a solution that's going to really have a direct step back to solving the problem that you set out to solve. So Pareto's are a convergent tool that allows you to narrow your focus to figure out where you need to go to solve the problem. Okay, FishBones are another tool, very high level.

Sarah Tilkens

Again, FishBones are a divergent tool, and really it's a brainstorm opportunity. So you have, again, cause and effect, which is symptom and cause adjacent, and you're looking for different categories. So I don't use FishBones too often outside of organization, but think about a machine is breaking down in our manufacturing plant. What are all of the different things that could be leading to this breakdown? Maybe I don't have the data to create that Pareto because it happens pretty sporadically, so I need to think of everything possible that could be creating the problem. Then I'm going to down-select and I'm going to choose one to see if I can verify the impact that it actually has. Your categories could be maybe people. People are doing something that's causing a machine breakdown. The machine itself is doing something. Within machine, you might say motor burning out. You might not enough electrical power. Again, this gets complicated, but essentially when you're analyzing your problem, it's just that same thing. You can do it without the fancy tools, but it's do you need to narrow your focus so that you can be effective? Or do you need to understand all of the possible solutions so that you can start playing in that space?

Sarah Tilkens

And that's what a Fishbone provides. Five Y. This is a root cause tool. This is really going to take you deep into root causing. My favorite example of Five Y is talking about the Jefferson Monument. To give you a little taste of what this tool offers. The Jefferson Monument was degrading. The rock formation was degrading. They realized that was happening because they were using a ton of corrosive chemicals to clean the rock. And it was having the impact that, again, the rock was just falling apart. How did we know that it was the chemicals causing the degradation? Well, when they eliminated using them, the rock retained a lot of its original form. They were using corrosive chemicals because there was bird poop all over the monument all of the time. They inspected it. They realized, yes, we're using all of these chemicals. So if we just keep the birds off of the monument, we are going to eliminate poop being on the monument, and we won't have to clean anymore. They spent a tremendous amount of money, and they put up these massive nets all over the Jefferson Monument with the intention of keeping the birds away.

Sarah Tilkens

Tada, problem solved. Except it wasn't. Let's keep going on the five whys. Why were there birds all around the monument? Well, it turns out the birds were attracted to spiders that were living in the crevices of the monument. Cool. Why were there spiders all over the place? Well, the spiders were attracted to these little knats that were all over. Okay, and where were the little knats coming from? Well, as it turns out, they were attracted to the specific type of light that was used to illuminate the monument. So what they did was they changed out the light bulbs, number one, and they turned the lights off at some points of the day. And that was it. And the knot stopped coming, the spider stopped coming, the bird stopped coming, and they eliminated the use of those corrosive chemicals for cleaning. They put a ton of money into a solution of casting nuts all over the place because they thought that that was the reason that the problem was occurring, when in fact, they just had to change a light bulb. And so it's just really the power of, again, someone mentioned it when we were talking about how do we keep asking whys?

Sarah Tilkens

But this is just a way to really be certain that we're getting to a place where once we implement the solution, we're sure that the solution is going to have the intended impact. And something I often encourage people to do when possible is turn it on and off. So if you think that you got to the root cause, the light bulbs, right? Turn it off, switch the light bulbs. Oh, it actually decreased the level of the bugs and the spiders and the birds. Okay, great. Turn the light bulbs back on. Did it return to its previous state? So it's just this extra confirmation that you actually have identified the right solution and it's going to make things go away. Okay, pausing again for any takeaways or questions in the Analyze section. I promise the next two are a breeze, so we only have a couple more minutes.

Participant

I have a question. On your Pareto chart, when.You have the values across the bottom, is that based off your actual budget for that example? You had to have a budget for groceries and then a budget for cheese, and then what's the Delta for each of those?

Sarah Tilkens

Yeah. Remember in Define, you're identifying the KPI. In that instance, my indicator was my budget. I had a target and a gap and I was looking how to get rid of that extra $300. The first Pareto, the values added up to that 300, and that was I Paretoed the gap. Then my second Pareto, once I realized that my biggest spend was in groceries and it was $191, I took just that $191 and I Paretoed that gap. You continue to fold it in on itself, but that's what those values are looking at. They're in the same language that you would articulate your original problem statement. If I'm talking about delivery in my organization, I need to deliver 150 widgets and I'm only delivering 100, I would be looking to Pareto the reasons why 50 of them weren't making it out my door. So where are they getting stuck in my process? Where are my opportunities? Again, I want those X marks on the Pareto to tally the 50, which is the gap that I've identified. Thanks. Okay. Again, this will be quick, but the next part is improve. Once you've gotten through to root cause, you're so close, but you have to actually follow through and implement the countermeasure.

Sarah Tilkens

That's really what this section is all about. This is just a snip of what I have in the problem-solving report, but essentially you've identified your root cause, and I want you to think in terms of temporary versus permanent countermeasures. If you can go right to permanent, amazing. But sometimes a permanent solution takes a little while to implement or is maybe expensive. So it's always just good to ask like, Is this a permanent solution or is this a Band-Aid while I work on my permanent solution? And so something that we talk about, it's lean language, but PDCA is just Plan Do, Check Act. I don't know where study came from, but Plan Do, Check Act. Whenever you're implementing something, remember back to science class and you have a hypothesis. So my hypothesis is that if I change out the light bulbs, I am going to decrease the amount of bugs on the monument. The countermeasure is change out the light bulbs. I'm going to do that by Friday. I will do it. Again, the expected impact is decrease the amount of bugs that I find. Then what I want you to always make sure that you do is verify that.

Sarah Tilkens

Did that actually happen? That's where I talk a little bit about turning it off and on. And if the answer is no, again, keep that streak of curiosity and just wonder why. Did something else change? Did those light bulbs not happen? And come back to I acted, it didn't have the result I thought, okay, so I'm going to plan do, check, act again. So you stay in that circle until the action has the intended outcome. All right. And then lastly, control. And this is just all about stabilizing the changes that you've made. So a couple of things that I use in this space. So this is called a bowling chart. I've heard it called a bowler, but essentially it's just like a measurement system. So again, I'll use weight because it's easy to envision. But if my plan is to get to 150 pounds, just like how we built that trend graph on the front to understand the history of the problem, the bowling chart allows you to project forward and measure, is the stuff that I'm doing to solve this actually closing the gap? My plan might be 160, 158, 156. Every week I'm measuring myself against what I expected to happen.

Sarah Tilkens

And it's just another opportunity to say, Is it doing what I thought it was doing? So that if the answer is no, you can make a change. I would offer as well, when possible, create an auditing process for sustainment. There's another thing in Lean we call leader standard work. Leader standard work is all about auditing a standard to make sure that it's followed. The example that I give here is especially when you're making big changes, ask yourself, how do you make sure that the changes stick? I taught my daughter how to brush her teeth. And you can say, okay, you know now, brush your teeth well every single night, and I expect that you're going to do it. And the intended result is that you're going to have great dental hygiene. However, as anyone with children knows, it doesn't matter if you teach them once, you need to be present to help them really build the habit. So for her, that looked like every day I had to be present and I had to watch. Maybe if I was downstairs and I heard the water running, I could assume she's brushing her teeth, but she's not.

Sarah Tilkens

Maybe I hear the toothbrush going and I can assume she's brushing her teeth and she's not. It's really that rigor of how do you confirm that what you just put in place is sustaining. How often do you have to monitor that habit to make sure that it's having the intended impact? That's just something to consider in the control space. Okay, so circling back to the problem-solving report as a whole, again, we talked through all of the different parts of define and measure. Each one of those components is laid out right in this section for you to succinctly specify what the problem statement is. You've got an opportunity to do some analysis, whether it's through Pareto's or Fishbone. This is a space where you can do that 5Y analysis, an implementation area where you talk about the countermeasures and expected and actual impact, and then a little space where you can monitor and understand how to control the solution that you put in place. So a one-stop shop to see the progress of the problem that you're looking to solve. And with that being said, are there any other questions that I can answer for you guys about problem-solving?

Jess Kent-Johnson

No questions for me. But I did want to say thank you because this really generates… It makes me want to sit down and start to structure this in a way that I have not before. So thank you for that. Of course. I'm really glad to hear it.

Participant

Yeah, it's just one of those things like you said, I need to do some reps with a document and work in real-time with things that I need to flush out to get those neurons connected in a way that they're not currently, if you will.

Sarah Tilkens

Amazing. I think we'll have some more time for questions, but I guess I will leave you guys just with a question of curiosity. Again, for you personally, for your company, for your life, if you were to make the investment in building the muscles to become a great problem solver, what do you think would open up for you in a year or five years or ten years? If anyone wants to share, you can, but it's just one of those lingering things of what would it be like to really dedicate to this space? With that, again, thank you so much for the time. I will come back just on camera away from the screen. But the offer stands that if you want to reach out to me, I would be happy to share this presentation. I would be happy to share my templates for problem-solving. Just shoot me an email, message me on LinkedIn, tell me you were here, and I will gladly give you access to some of this framework so that you can have it as you continue on your journey. Thank you, guys.

Emily Smit

Amazing. Thank you so much, Sarah. I put this in the chat, but we'll be sending out Sarah's contact information in the follow-up email as well. If you didn't have a chance to jot it down quick, you can still have that in your inbox. We do have the space for about 10 more minutes, so if anybody has any questions, feel free. This is a space to collaborate and get Sarah's expertise on problem-solving.

Participant

I have a question for you, Sarah so what are your suggestions on how to... If you're in the end, it's not the problem solver. So if you're working with a manager and you're trying to help coach, what are some things you use to help them slow down and actually use this process? I have the same problem. I just want to jump to the solution and move on to the next problem. How do you suggest we sell this to people that when we're not the problem solver, but we can see that they're skipping those steps? Yeah.

Sarah Tilkens

Something that works a lot for me is just, I would say, holding the space and being the person to ask the hard questions. I have a lot of leaders that I work with who do this, and I just constantly say, What problem are we trying to solve? Often I just had this. We're doing some big, new, really challenging strategy around maintenance. One of my senior leaders, it was all over the place. And what problem are we trying to solve? And list them all. There was six problems that came out of this person's mouth. And again, it's just an offering of maybe we can find a solution that will touch all of these, but what is the most important problem? I get that you want to do all of this, but I need you to choose one thing. Again, we don't have to commit that this is the problem, but let's narrow and see if that offers us some traction. So it is really challenging because again, you're just rewiring a way of thinking. But I find that the best thing that I can do is just refuse to give. And I know, again, that's hard as a coach as well, but it's just coming back to that place of I don't want you to waste your time.

Sarah Tilkens

This is really important. Let's just try. If we don't get where you want to go, we can do something else. And what I'll offer is also helpful is at the beginning, I talked about the mindset, but if you can lead into sessions like that and find a way to start by opening them up, because we come into a meeting and we've already decided the solution is this, and here's what I want to do, throw them off their locker, ask them something super weird, have them solve a puzzle, have them do anything that is just going to shift them a little bit out of solutioning and into a different mindset. And if you can do that one thing, usually everything else is going to roll a little bit better. I don't know that that's a foolproof thing, but those are some of the things that have worked for me.

Participant

That's helpful. Thank you.

Participant

I'd like to echo what you just said too, Sarah. There's a lot of folks on this call that are from the company that I work at. We've got a lot of team members on your presentation. A lot of times I get to work and our two owners have provided solutions to problems I didn't even know existed. John Mackie was just referring to that earlier. This morning we had a half hour talk about a very innocuous issue and we've got a solution that we didn't even know was that was a problem for it. That's our biggest struggle. We're a fast growing entity with two owners that are very energetic and sometimes don't relay or convey the plan for lack of a better way of saying it. We struggle a lot with just pumping the brakes, pull flaps, whatever, cliché or thing you want to say about that.

Sarah Tilkens

Yeah. That's good context, Zach. The other thing that could be helpful too, which I think people breeze through in that defined state, is how will we know? Even if they want to toss a solution out there, people can do that, and sometimes you have to let people play before they're going to realize, Okay, that thing I thought was going to work wasn't going to actually work. So all right, Zach, you've got this really great solution. Go try it. How will we know if it actually solves the problem that we have to solve? So what way do you want to measure that? So if you believe that you've found a solution that's going to increase our revenue, amazing. How will I know? How will I actually see the impact to my KPI? And when will I know by? And if you go and you do that thing, great. And if you don't, if it inherently comes back to like, Oh, yeah, it didn't do what we thought it was going to do, okay, what if we try a little bit different of approach? What if we focus more on some of that front end alignment and then we get into talking about solutions.

Sarah Tilkens

So especially with people who are in charge, I have this with my executive leaders or the CEOs I work with, but again, what problem are you trying to solve? Sometimes you can't convince them of something different, but you can let them go bang their head against a wall and come back to you. So it's like creating yourself as an advocate for the process. And then great, let's try that. What did it do? I wonder if that could serve you as well as just getting really clear on how are you going to measure success and let them figure that out?

Participant

Yeah. I've started to push back a little bit on some of those things. That number 1, how are we going to measure it? What are you trying to fix? And perhaps most importantly, do we have the resources here that can manage the process, manage the technology you want to bring on board? Who's going to do this? That's usually my first question.

Sarah Tilkens

Yeah. Very, very common spot to be. I'll offer you that empathy. That is a lot of how this goes.

Participant

Yeah. I think that's not unique to us, I don't think that's any fast growing company. It seems like we're always behind. Speaking for myself, I see a lot of my fellow team members on this call nodding their heads. I think I'm not alone.

Sarah Tilkens

Yeah. You can always ask yourself too. You sometimes can't change the circumstances, but you can change what that means to you, and that can be the problem that you're solving. How do you keep yourself and your team motivated to do this work when there's this other thing out there. So even using that process of, okay, here's what's out of my control, what's in my control, what can I create? So it's just always coming back to I feel frustrated all the time. There's a hundred things I can't do, and that doesn't really serve me. It'll serve me for a minute and I can gripe and whatever. But then if I come back to like, okay, what problem am I wanting to solve? I want to feel good about coming to work every day. I want to feel good about helping my staff and solving problems and thinking nothing's in my control, not the mindset that's going to take me there and have the impact that I want. So even the problem-solving process, if you can shift that to who do you want to be, because sometimes just showing up with a smile on your face, even when it's hard, that is solving a problem and creating possibility.

Participant

I was hoping that was next month's culture community topic. Emily.

Emily Smit

I should have put it in the suggestion box, Zach.

Participant

Sorry, I've been yapping over here. I'll shut up.

Sarah Tilkens

No, thank you. Appreciate it.

Emily Smit

I'm sure it resonates with a lot of people on the call. I saw a lot of head nods. I think it's a great conversation. Any last questions in the last three minutes that we have? Wonderful, Sarah, for you.

Sarah Tilkens

I'll say I'm really excited for some of you guys to get your hands on the templates and then give me a call in a couple of months and be like, All right, we've mastered this. Give me the big tools, and then we'll go from there.

Emily Smit

I wasn't even the big tool?

Sarah Tilkens

There is a deep well of possibility in this space, and that's for... I don't know if you guys are very familiar with Lean, and there's lots of definitions of what Lean is and it should be, but it's just this beautiful toolkit and this mindset that enables crazy problem-solving. So depending on what problem you have to solve, a lot of people do lean wrong where you might have heard of 5S and these initiatives that come down and everybody get on board. But what lean is, again, is tell me your problem, and I will offer you the tool from my toolkit that's going to take you from point A to point B. There are many, many tools in the toolkit. There's always something accessible that's going to help you get a different amount of clarity on exactly what it is that you're looking to solve. Thanks.

Emily Smit

Very cool. Amazing. Well, Sarah, thank you so much. This was so incredibly helpful. We will be sending out, like I said, Sarah is contact information, so you can get that template and start implementing it into your own organization. But we so appreciate you all joining us this morning. It was so great to see you all. Hope to see you next month. I hope you have a fabulous rest of your Thursday and a very happy holidays.

Sarah Tilkens

Thanks, everyone. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Take care. Thank you. Bye. Bye.