problem solving meaning for business

To Solve a Tough Problem, Reframe It

Five steps to ensure that you don’t jump to solutions by Julia Binder and Michael D. Watkins

Summary .   

When business leaders confront complex problems, there’s a powerful impulse to dive right into “solving” mode: You gather a team and then identify potential solutions. That’s fine for challenges you’ve faced before or when proven methods yield good results. But what happens when a new type of problem arises or aspects of a familiar one shift substantially? Or if you’re not exactly sure what the problem is?

Research conducted by us and others shows that leaders and their teams devote too little effort to examining and defining problems before trying to solve them. A study by Paul Nutt of Ohio State University, for example, looked at 350 decision-making processes at medium to large companies and found that more than half failed to achieve desired results, often because perceived time pressure caused people to pay insufficient attention to examining problems from all angles and exploring their complexities. By jumping immediately into problem-solving, teams limit their ability to design innovative and durable solutions.

When we work with organizations and teams, we encourage them to spend more time up front on problem-framing, a process for understanding and defining a problem. Exploring frames is like looking at a scene through various camera lenses while adjusting your angle, aperture, and focus. A wide-angle lens will give you a very different photo from that taken with a telephoto lens, and shifting your angle and depth of focus yields distinct images. Effective problem-framing is similar: Looking at a problem from a variety of perspectives lets you uncover new insights and generate fresh ideas.

As with all essential processes, it helps to have a methodology and a road map. This article introduces the E5 approach to problem-framing—expand, examine, empathize, elevate, and envision—and offers tools that enable leaders to fully explore the problem space.

Phase 1: Expand

In the first phase, set aside preconceptions and open your mind. We recommend using a tool called frame-storming, which encourages a comprehensive exploration of an issue and its nuances. It is a neglected precursor to brainstorming, which typically focuses on generating many different answers for an already framed challenge. Frame-storming helps teams identify assumptions and blind spots, mitigating the risk of pursuing inadequate or biased solutions. The goal is to spark innovation and creativity as people dig into—or as Tina Seelig from Stanford puts it, “fall in love with”—the problem.

Begin by assembling a diverse team, encompassing a variety of types of expertise and perspectives. Involving outsiders can be helpful, since they’re often coming to the issue cold. A good way to prompt the team to consider alternative scenarios is by asking “What if…?” and “How might we…?” questions. For example, ask your team, “What if we had access to unlimited resources to tackle this issue?” or “How might better collaboration between departments or teams help us tackle this issue?” The primary objective is to generate many alternative problem frames, allowing for a more holistic understanding of the issue. Within an open, nonjudgmental atmosphere, you deliberately challenge established thinking—what we call “breaking” the frame.

It may be easy to eliminate some possibilities, and that’s exactly what you should do. Rather than make assumptions, generate alternative hypotheses and then test them.

Consider the problem-framing process at a company we’ll call Omega Soundscapes, a midsize producer of high-end headphones. (Omega is a composite of several firms we’ve worked with.) Omega’s sales had declined substantially over the past two quarters, and the leadership team’s initial diagnosis, or reference frame, was that recent price hikes to its flagship product made it too expensive for its target market. Before acting on this assumption, the team convened knowledgeable representatives from sales, marketing, R&D, customer service, and external consultants to do some frame-storming. Team members were asked:

• What if we lowered the price of our flagship product? How would that impact sales and profitability?
• How might we identify customers in new target markets who could afford our headphones at the current price?
• What if we offered financing or a subscription-based model for our headphones? How would that change perceptions of affordability?
• How might we optimize our supply chain and production processes to reduce manufacturing costs without compromising quality?

In playing out each of those scenarios, the Omega team generated several problem frames:

• The target market’s preferences have evolved.
• New competitors have entered the market.
• Product quality has decreased.
• Something has damaged perceptions of the brand.
• Something has changed in the priorities of our key distributors.

Each of the frames presented a unique angle from which to approach the problem of declining sales, setting the stage for the development of diverse potential solutions. At this stage, it may be relatively easy to eliminate some possibilities, and that’s exactly what you should do. Rather than make assumptions, generate alternative hypotheses and then test them.

See more HBR charts in Data & Visuals

Phase 2: Examine

If the expand phase is about identifying all the facets of a problem, this one is about diving deep to identify root causes. The team investigates the issue thoroughly, peeling back the layers to understand underlying drivers and systemic contributors.

A useful tool for doing this is the iceberg model, which guides the team through layers of causation: surface-level events, the behavioral patterns that drive them, underlying systematic structures, and established mental models. As you probe ever deeper and document your findings, you begin to home in on the problem’s root causes. As is the case in the expand phase, open discussions and collaborative research are crucial for achieving a comprehensive analysis.

Let’s return to our Omega Soundscapes example and use the iceberg model to delve into the issues surrounding the two quarters of declining sales. Starting with the first layer beneath the surface, the behavioral pattern, the team diligently analyzed customer feedback. It discovered a significant drop in brand loyalty. This finding validated the problem frame of a “shifting brand perception,” prompting further investigation into what might have been causing it.

Phase 3: Empathize

In this phase, the focus is on the stakeholders—employees, customers, clients, investors, supply chain partners, and other parties—who are most central to and affected by the problem under investigation. The core objective is to understand how they perceive the issue: what they think and feel, how they’re acting, and what they want.

First list all the people who are directly or indirectly relevant to the problem. It may be helpful to create a visual representation of the network of relationships in the ecosystem. Prioritize the stakeholders according to their level of influence on and interest in the problem, and focus on understanding the roles, demographics, behavior patterns, motivations, and goals of the most important ones.

Now create empathy maps for those critical stakeholders. Make a template divided into four sections: Say, Think, Feel, and Do. Conduct interviews or surveys to gather authentic data. How do various users explain the problem? How do they think about the issue, and how do their beliefs inform that thinking? What emotions are they feeling and expressing? How are they behaving? Populate each section of the map with notes based on your observations and interactions. Finally, analyze the completed empathy maps. Look for pain points, inconsistencies, and patterns in stakeholder perspectives.

Returning to the Omega case study, the team identified its ecosystem of stakeholders: customers (both current and potential); retail partners and distributors; the R&D, marketing, and sales teams; suppliers of headphone components; investors and shareholders; and new and existing competitors. They narrowed the list to a few key stakeholders related to the declining-sales problem: customers, retail partners, and investors/shareholders; Omega created empathy maps for representatives from each.

Here’s what the empathy maps showed about what the stakeholders were saying, thinking, feeling, and doing:

Sarah, the customer, complained on social media about the high price of her favorite headphones. Dave, the retailer, expressed concerns about unsold inventory and the challenge of convincing customers to buy the expensive headphones. Alex, the shareholder, brought up Omega’s declining financial performance during its annual investor day.

Sarah thought that Omega was losing touch with its loyal customer base. Dave was considering whether to continue carrying Omega’s products in his store or explore other brands. Alex was contemplating diversifying his portfolio into other consumer-tech companies.

As a longtime supporter of the brand, Sarah felt frustrated and slightly betrayed. Dave was feeling anxious about the drop in sales and the impact on his store’s profitability. Alex was unhappy with the declining stock value.

Sarah was looking for alternatives to the headphones, even though she loves the product’s quality. Dave was scheduling a call with Omega to negotiate pricing and terms. Alex was planning to attend Omega’s next shareholder meeting to find out more information from the leadership team.

When Omega leaders analyzed the data in the maps, they realized that pricing wasn’t the only reason for declining sales. A more profound issue was customers’ dissatisfaction with the perceived price-to-quality ratio, especially when compared with competitors’ offerings. That insight prompted the team to consider enhancing the headphones with additional features, offering more-affordable alternatives, and possibly switching to a service model.

Phase 4: Elevate

This phase involves exploring how the problem connects to broader organizational issues. It’s like zooming out on a map to understand where a city lies in relation to the whole country or continent. This bird’s-eye view reveals interconnected issues and their implications.

For this analysis, we recommend the four-frame model developed by Lee Bolman and Terrence Deal, which offers distinct lenses through which to view the problem at a higher level. The structural frame helps you explore formal structures (such as hierarchy and reporting relationships); processes (such as workflow); and systems, rules, and policies. This frame examines efficiency, coordination, and alignment of activities.

The human resources frame focuses on people, relationships, and social dynamics. This includes teamwork, leadership, employee motivation, engagement, professional development, and personal growth. In this frame, the organization is seen as a community or a family that recognizes that talent is its most valuable asset. The political frame delves into power dynamics, competing interests, conflicts, coalitions, and negotiations. From this perspective, organizations are arenas where various stakeholders vie for resources and engage in political struggles to influence decisions. It helps you see how power is distributed, used, and contested.

The symbolic frame highlights the importance of symbols, rituals, stories, and shared values in shaping group identity and culture. In it, organizations are depicted as theaters through which its members make meaning.

Using this model, the Omega team generated the following insights in the four frames:

Structural.

A deeper look into the company’s structure revealed siloing and a lack of coordination between the R&D and marketing departments, which had led to misaligned messaging to customers. It also highlighted a lack of collaboration between the two functions and pointed to the need to communicate with the target market about the product’s features and benefits in a coherent and compelling way.

Human resources.

This frame revealed that the declining sales and price hikes had ramped up pressure on the sales team, damaging morale. The demotivated team was struggling to effectively promote the product, making it harder to recover from declining sales. Omega realized it was lacking adequate support, training, and incentives for the team.

The key insight from this frame was that the finance team’s reluctance to approve promotions in the sales group to maintain margins was exacerbating the morale problem. Omega understood that investing in sales leadership development while still generating profits was crucial for long-term success and that frank discussions about the issue were needed.

This frame highlighted an important misalignment in perception: The company believed that its headphones were of “top quality,” while customers reported in surveys that they were “overpriced.” This divergence raised alarm that branding, marketing, and pricing strategies, which were all predicated on the central corporate value of superior quality, were no longer resonating with customers. Omega realized that it had been paying too little attention to quality assurance and functionality.

Phase 5: Envision

In this phase, you transition from framing the problem to actively imagining and designing solutions. This involves synthesizing the insights gained from earlier phases and crafting a shared vision of the desired future state.

Here we recommend using a technique known as backcasting. First, clearly define your desired goal. For example, a team struggling with missed deadlines and declining productivity might aim to achieve on-time completion rates of 98% for its projects and increase its volume of projects by 5% over the next year. Next, reverse engineer the path to achieving your goal. Outline key milestones required over both the short term and the long term. For each one, pinpoint specific interventions, strategies, and initiatives that will propel you closer to your goal. These may encompass changes in processes, policies, technologies, and behaviors. Synthesize the activities into a sequenced, chronological, prioritized road map or action plan, and allocate the resources, including time, budget, and personnel, necessary to implement your plan. Finally, monitor progress toward your goal and be prepared to adjust the plan in response to outcomes, feedback, or changing circumstances. This approach ensures that the team’s efforts in implementing the insights from the previous phases are strategically and purposefully directed toward a concrete destination.

Applying the Approach

Albert Einstein once said, “If I had one hour to solve a problem, I would spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about the solution.” That philosophy underpins our E5 framework, which provides a structured approach for conscientiously engaging with complex problems before leaping to solutions.

As teams use the methodology, they must understand that problem-framing in today’s intricate business landscape is rarely a linear process. While we’re attempting to provide a structured path, we also recognize the dynamic nature of problems and the need for adaptability. Invariably, as teams begin to implement solutions, new facets of a problem may come to light, unforeseen challenges may arise, or external circumstances may evolve. Your team should be ready to loop back to previous phases—for instance, revisiting the expand phase to reassess the problem’s frame, delving deeper into an overlooked root cause in another examine phase, or gathering fresh insights from stakeholders in a new empathize phase. Ultimately, the E5 framework is intended to foster a culture of continuous improvement and innovation.

Partner Center

What is problem solving and why is it important?

By Wayne Stottler, Kepner-Tregoe

• Problem Solving & Decision Making Over time, developing and refining problem solving skills provides the ability to solve increasingly complex problems Learn More

For over 60 years, Kepner-Tregoe has been helping companies across industries and geographies to develop and mature their problem-solving skills through our industry-leading approach to training and the implementation of best-practice processes. Considering that problem solving is a part of almost every person’s daily life (both at home and in the workplace), it is surprising how often we are asked to explain what problem solving is and why it is important.

Problem solving is at the core of human evolution. It is the methods we use to understand what is happening in our environment, identify things we want to change and then figure out the things that need to be done to create the desired outcome. Problem solving is the source of all new inventions, social and cultural evolution, and the basis for market based economies. It is the basis for continuous improvement, communication and learning.

If this problem-solving thing is so important to daily life, what is it?

Problem-solving is the process of observing what is going on in your environment; identifying things that could be changed or improved; diagnosing why the current state is the way it is and the factors and forces that influence it; developing approaches and alternatives to influence change; making decisions about which alternative to select; taking action to implement the changes; and observing impact of those actions in the environment.

Each step in the problem-solving process employs skills and methods that contribute to the overall effectiveness of influencing change and determine the level of problem complexity that can be addressed. Humans learn how to solve simple problems from a very early age (learning to eat, make coordinated movements and communicate) – and as a person goes through life, problem-solving skills are refined, matured and become more sophisticated (enabling them to solve more difficult problems).

Problem-solving is important both to individuals and organizations because it enables us to exert control over our environment.

Fixing things that are broken

Some things wear out and break over time, others are flawed from day one. Personal and business environments are full of things, activities, interactions and processes that are broken or not operating in the way they are desired to work. Problem-solving gives us a mechanism for identifying these things, figuring out why they are broken and determining a course of action to fix them.

Addressing risk

Humans have learned to identify trends and developed an awareness of cause-and-effect relationships in their environment. These skills not only enable us to fix things when they break but also anticipate what may happen in the future (based on past experience and current events). Problem-solving can be applied to anticipated future events and used to enable action in the present to influence the likelihood of the event occurring and/or alter the impact if the event does occur.

Improving performance

Individuals and organizations do not exist in isolation in the environment. There is a complex and ever-changing web of relationships that exist and as a result, the actions of one person will often have either a direct impact on others or an indirect impact by changing the environment dynamics. These interdependencies enable humans to work together to solve more complex problems but they also create a force that requires everyone to continuously improve performance to adapt to improvements by others. Problem-solving helps us understand relationships and implement the changes and improvements needed to compete and survive in a continually changing environment.

Seizing opportunity

Problem solving isn’t just about responding to (and fixing) the environment that exists today. It is also about innovating, creating new things and changing the environment to be more desirable. Problem-solving enables us to identify and exploit opportunities in the environment and exert (some level of) control over the future.

Problem solving skills and the problem-solving process are a critical part of daily life both as individuals and organizations. Developing and refining these skills through training, practice and learning can provide the ability to solve problems more effectively and over time address problems with a greater degree of complexity and difficulty. View KT’s Problem Solving workshop known to be the gold standard for over 60 years.

We are experts in:

For inquiries, details, or a proposal!

Subscribe to the KT Newsletter

This website uses cookies to enhance the user experience.

Like this content? Sign up to receive more!

Subscribe for tips and guidance to help you grow a better, smarter business.

We care about your privacy. See our Privacy Policy .

🎧 Real entrepreneurs. Real stories.

Subscribe to The Hurdle podcast

You can do this! Tour LivePlan to see how simple business planning can be.

Have an expert write your plan, build your forecast, and so much more.

Integrations

For Small Businesses

For Advisors & Mentors

Running a Business

10-Step Problem Solving Process for Business Owners and Entrepreneurs

13 min. read

Updated September 25, 2024

When you start a small business or launch a startup, the one thing you can count on is the unexpected. No matter how thoroughly you plan, forecast, and test—problems are bound to arise. 

This is why, a key skill you must develop as an entrepreneur, is business problem solving.

What is problem solving?

Problem solving in business relates to establishing processes that mitigate or remove obstacles preventing you from reaching strategic goals. 

These are typically complex issues that create a gap between actual results and your desired outcome. They may be present in a single team, operational process, or throughout your organization, typically without an immediate or obvious solution. 

To find effective solutions, you need to establish consistent problem solving methods that help you: 

• • Explore solutions
• • Prioritize execution
• • Measure success

This should be similar to how you review business performance during a monthly plan review . 

You work through the same documentation, look for gaps, dig deeper to identify the root cause of the problem, and hash out options. 

Without this process, you can’t expect to solve problems efficiently or effectively. 

Why problem solving is important for your business

While some would say problem-solving comes naturally, it’s actually a skill you can grow and refine over time. 

The best business leaders didn’t just find a magic solution to solve their problems, they built processes and leveraged tools to find success. And you can do the same.

I’ll take you through the process, step-by-step, so you can confidently tackle any type of problem. 

1. Define the problem

When a problem arises, it’s all too easy to jump into finding a solution. 

While taking action is admirable, if you don’t correctly identify the source of the problem, you may not solve it. You just treat the symptoms, get short-term relief, and the likely possibility of the issue resurfacing.

For instance, if you realize that your sales from new customers are dropping, your first inclination might be to rush into upping your marketing spend to increase exposure. 

But what if decreasing sales are just a symptom of the real problem ?

You want to be sure you’re not missing the forest for the trees. 

So, whenever you have a large issue, take the time to look at it from multiple angles. While not exhaustive, here are a few places to start with:

Competition 

• • Is a competitor’s promotion or pricing affecting your sales?
• • Are there new entrants in your market ?
• • How are they marketing their product or business?

Business model 

• • Is your business model sustainable?
• • Is it realistic for how fast you want to grow?
• • Should you explore different pricing or cost strategies?

Market factors

• • Are world events, social trends, or your nation’s economy impacting customer spending?
• • Are there supply chain changes impacting your expenses or distribution processes?
• • Are there any issues affecting your team?
• • Do they have the tools and resources they need to succeed?

Goal alignment 

• • Is everyone on your team working toward the same goal ?
• • Have you communicated short-term and long-term business goals clearly and often?

Back to our example: By looking at every facet of your business, you may discover you’re already spending more on advertising than your competitors. Instead, a communication gap within your team is leading to the mishandling of new customers and therefore lost sales. 

If you jumped into fixing your brand exposure with more ads, you would have been dumping more money into an area you’re already winning. Potentially leading to greater losses as more and more new customers are dropped due to poor internal communication.

This is why it’s so vital that you explore your blind spots and track the problem to its source.

2. Conduct a SWOT analysis

All good businesses solve some sort of problem for customers. 

What if your particular business problem is an opportunity? What if it’s a strength if considered from a different angle? 

You’ll want to conduct a SWOT analysis to determine if that is the case. 

SWOT is a great tool to use whenever you’re looking at investing resources to solve a problem. It can help you avoid implementing a solution where the chances of success are low due to your current internal or external positioning.

You may even want to use this analysis when defining your problem—as it immediately frames problems and solutions through the lens of specific strengths and weaknesses of your business. Then use any opportunities or threats you identify to kickstart a solution.

If you’re not a fan of using SWOT as a problem-solving technique, there are plenty of other alternative frameworks to use. All that matters is that it helps you further identify the problem and what potential solutions may require.

3. Identify multiple solutions with design thinking

The worst thing you can do is limit your solutions. If you do, you may miss out on solutions that lead to better, cheaper, or faster results.

That’s why you may want to use the design thinking approach . It’s often used by organizations looking to solve big, community-based problems and emphasizes rapid iteration by opening up the floor to any and all ideas. 

One of the strengths of design thinking is that it brings a wide range of people into the problem-solving process. Allowing multiple perspectives and solutions to arise.

This approach—applying your company’s skills and expertise to a problem in the market—is the basis for design thinking.

It’s not about finding and solving the most complex problems, but common needs within the organization and in the real world. 

When you’re solving business problems, this applies in the sense that you’re looking for solutions that address underlying issues—you’re looking at the big picture.

4. Conduct market research and customer outreach

Market research and customer interviews aren’t meant to be done once and forgotten about. No, customer feedback should be something that you seek out frequently to ensure you’re meeting customer needs. 

Now, market research and the insights you get from customer outreach aren’t a silver bullet. Many companies struggle with what they should do with conflicting data points. But it’s worth gathering information that can help you better understand your target market. 

Plus, your customers can be one of the best sources of criticism. It’s a gift if you can avoid taking the negatives personally.

The worst thing you can do when facing challenges is to isolate yourself from your customers. 

So, if you haven’t been already, survey your customers. Talk to them. Take their feedback to heart and use it to further define the problem and potential solutions. 

5. Seek input from your team and your mentors

Hopefully, you haven’t waited to involve team members until five steps into solving a problem. If you have, it’s still not too late to reap the benefits of collaborating with others.

Ideally, you bring in different contributors throughout to express concerns, opinions, and ideas . Their feedback is going to help you move faster and more efficiently. 

If you have a team in place, bring them into the discussion. You hired them to be experts in their area; use their expertise to navigate and dig deeper into underlying causes of problems and potential solutions.

Quoting Stephen Covey, “strength lies in differences, not in similarities.” The more diverse a team is, the more often innovative solutions to the problems faced by the organization appear.

It has been found that groups that show greater diversity were better at solving problems than groups made up specifically of highly skilled problem solvers. So whoever you bring in to help you problem-solve, resist the urge to surround yourself with people who already agree with you about everything

If you’re running your business solo, bring in a trusted mentor instead. 

SCORE offers a free business mentorship program if you don’t already have one. It can also be helpful to connect with a business advisor , especially if business financials aren’t your strongest suit.

6. Apply growth planning for nimble execution

So you do your SWOT analysis and your design thinking exercise. You come up with a set of strong, data-driven ideas. However, implementing them requires you to adjust your budget, your strategic plan, or even your understanding of your target market.

Are you willing to change course? Can you quickly make adjustments? Well to grow, you can’t be afraid to be nimble. 

By adopting the growth planning method —plan, project, review, and revise—you can shift your strategies more fluidly. 

You don’t want to change course every week, and you don’t want to fall victim to shiny object thinking. But you can strike a balance to reduce your business’s risk while keeping your team heading in the right direction.

Along the way, you’ll make strategic decisions that don’t pan out how you hoped. The best thing you can do is test your ideas and iterate often to avoid wasting money and resources on things that don’t work. 

That’s growth planning in action.

7. Model different financial scenarios

Now, you have a detailed understanding of your problem and one or two solutions in mind. However, even with all of this planning and analysis, things are bound to change. 

Luckily, you can minimze your risk and plan how you’ll react if things go better or worse than expected, by developing a few different financial forecast scenarios. 

You might find that the idea that seemed the strongest will take longer than you thought to reverse a negative financial trend. Or another requires so much up front investment that it risks draining your cash reserves before any gains are realized.

Even if the answers aren’t as obvious as those examples, at the very least you’ll understand the financial impact of moving in a different direction.

The real benefit here is looking at different tactical approaches to the same problem. Maybe instead of increasing sales right now, you’re better off in the long run if you adopt a strategy to reduce churn and retain your best customers. 

You won’t know unless you model a few different scenarios. You can do this work with a customized spreadsheet or a dedicated forecasting tool like LivePlan.

8. Watch your cash flow

While you’re working to solve a challenging business problem, pay particular attention to your cash flow and your cash flow forecast . 

Understanding when your company is at risk of running out of cash in the bank can help you be proactive. It’s a lot easier to get a line of credit while your financials still look good and healthy, than when you’re one pay period away from ruin.

Remember, it’s easy to get tunnel vision. You’ll benefit from maintaining a little breathing room for your business as you figure out what to do next.

9. Use a decision-making framework

Once you’ve gathered all the information you need, generated a number of ideas, and done some financial modeling, you might still feel uncertain. 

It’s natural—you’re not a fortune-teller. You’re trying to make the best decision you can with the information you have. This is why it may be helpful to use a simple decision matrix to put everything you’ve learned on the table.

Whatever format you use to make a final decision—just stick with it. Like all the SWOT analysis alternatives, these decision frameworks all do the same thing. 

The important thing is that it makes it easy to bring everything together, review what each solution requires, and quickly move forward.  

10. Identify key metrics to track

How will you know your problem is solved? And not just the symptom—how will you know when you’ve addressed the underlying issues? 

Well, that requires you to define what success looks like. And it doesn’t have to be as complicated or daunting as that may sound.

Just decide on a few key performance indicators . 

Take a baseline measurement, and set a goal and a timeframe. You’re essentially translating your solution into a plan, complete with milestones and goals. Without these, you’ve simply made a blind decision with no way to track success. 

You need those goals and milestones to make your plan real .

Problem solving skills to improve

As you and your team work through this process, there are specific problem solving skills you should continue to develop.

Emotional intelligence

It can be very easy to make quick, emotional responses during a crisis or when discussing something you’re passionate about. 

You need to avoid making assumptions and letting your emotions get the best of you, by focusing on empathizing with others. This involves understanding your own emotional state and reactions—while also listening carefully to your team. 

The better you listen and keep your emotions in check, the better you’ll be at asking for and taking advice that leads to effective problem solving.

Jumping right into a solution can immediately kill the possibility of solving your problem. 

Just like when you start a business , you need to research what the problem you’re solving is. Luckily, you can embed research into your problem solving by holding active reviews of financial performance and team processes.

Simply asking “What? Where? When? How?” can lead to more in-depth explorations of potential issues.

The best thing you can do to grow your research abilities is to encourage and practice curiosity. Look at every problem as an opportunity. Something that may be trouble now, but is worth exploring and finding the right solution. 

You’ll pick up best practices, useful tools and fine-tune your own research process the more you’re willing to explore.

Brainstorming

Creatively brainstorming with your team is somewhat of an art form.

There needs to be a willingness to throw everything at the wall and act as if nothing is a bad idea at the start. This style of collaboration encourages participation without fear of rejection. It also helps outline potential solutions outside of your current scope, that you can refine and turn into realistic action.

Work on breaking down problems and try to give everyone in the room a voice. The more input you allow, the greater potential for finding the best solution.

Decisiveness

One thing that can drag out acting upon a potential solution, is being indecisive.

If you aren’t willing to state when the final cutoff for deliberation is, you won’t take steps quickly enough. This is when having a process for problem solving comes in handy, as it purposefully outlines when you should start taking action.

Work on choosing decision-makers, identify necessary results, and be prepared to analyze and adjust if necessary. You don’t have to get it right every time, but taking action at the right time, even if it fails, is almost more vital than never taking a step.  

Stemming off failure, you need to learn to be resilient. Again, no one gets it perfect every single time.

There are so many factors to consider and sometimes even the most well-thought-out solution doesn’t stick. Instead of being down on yourself or your team, separate yourself from the problem and continue to think of it as a puzzle worth solving. 

Every failure is a learning opportunity that only helps you further refine and eliminate issues in your strategy.

Problem solving is a process

The key to effective problem-solving in business is the ability to adapt. You can waste a lot of resources by staying on the wrong course for too long. 

So make a plan to reduce your risk now. 

Consider what you’ll do when faced with a problem large enough to sink your business. Be as proactive as you can, develop the necessary skills, and test multiple approaches to problem solving (even outside of the process listed here).

Lastly, explore tools that will help you create plans and track your progress. At a minimum, use performance dashboard software to make critical business information readily available. 

This will make it much easier to identify problems, dig into what’s causing them, and immediately measure the impact of your decisions. 

Just remember, a tool cannot replace your ability to problem solve. Focus on adopting a consistent process first—then look for ways to improve it. 

Like this post? Share with a friend!

Harriet Genever

Harriet Genever is a freelance writer and copyeditor, specializing in blog posts, research articles and customer case studies. As the founder of her Australian-based business, Write Beyond, she works with B2B companies and small business, developing compelling content to attract customers and keep them engaged. With a background in Human Resource Management, Harriet enjoys the personal interaction with clients and their customers when working on writing projects. She is also a true believer that the key to success in any business is its people.

Table of Contents

Related articles.

Noah Parsons

October 10, 2024

How (and Why) to Use a Business Dashboard to Improve Key Results

How to Conduct a Monthly Business Plan Review Meeting

October 17, 2024

17 Key Business Metrics You Need to Track

June 28, 2024

Make Smarter Decisions Faster With LivePlan’s New AI-Driven Monthly Financial Review