This article is adapted from my published book, “Five Questions”)
I love having simple, powerful, repeatable frameworks for thinking through complicated situations. For example, Thomas Sowell recommend 3 questions for considering a political or economic decision:
- Compared to what?
- At what cost?
- Where is your hard evidence?
Simple questions help you get to the heart of issues. The answers can help you avoid painful or unexpected consequences. They’re portable, sensible, and wise. You can use them to teach others to think carefully and wisely about complicated situations. They help you get “outside” typical perspectives and review options with less emotions. The answers are automatically useful in persuading others or building a case for your recommendation.
Let’s dive right into the five questions so you see how simple they are – and how rich the answers will be:
- What problem am I trying to solve?
- What am I optimizing for?
- What premium am I willing to pay for ________?
- How does this help my organization?
- How does this help my customers?
I recommend you work through the questions in this order to get the best results. Too many leaders become convinced about the “right” answer for their organization before they’ve considered what problem they’re trying to solve, or what they’re optimizing for. Far too many people go into buying decisions and contract negotiations without understanding affordability. Business magazines are replete with stories about leaders who ruined their organization or their relationship with customers.
All five questions matter. Work through these five questions, in this order, and reap the rewards.
Let’s examine each question in more detail.
What problem am I trying to solve?
Albert Einstein supposedly said (though there is some dispute about it) “If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.”
We far too often spend sixty minutes finding solutions to problems that don’t matter.
Assuming you have a significant problem which does matter, your first step is to do everything necessary to make your problem statement crystal-clear.
Go through the Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How dimensions. Quantify the problem statement as much as you can. Add time elements. Add financial elements.
When choosing between multiple options, it’s a mistake to think that you’re choosing between “Problem” and “No Problem.” It’s about what problem(s) you prefer to have. We must remember this fundamental fact: Every solution generates new problems and challenges.
We tend to fool ourselves because what looks like “No problem!” to us is probably creating problems for someone else! Also, we tend to become frustrated upon discovering that our chosen solution generated problems we hadn’t anticipated.
Important: Define the problem in an emotionless fashion. Emotion is critically important to who we are and how we make decisions. But emotional factors don’t belong in the problem definition itself. You can say “We’ll be happy and my boss will be overjoyed when the problem is solved,” but don’t make “My boss is unhappy” into a problem statement. What’s the root cause of her unhappiness?
Everything begins with first asking, “What problem am I trying to solve?”
Sidebar: Why You Should be Grateful for Problems
“Good grief, stop with the victim worldview!”
That’s what I wanted to say to my colleague who busted out a long litany of problems heaped on him.
I probably should have been that blunt, but I wasn’t. I did encourage him to consider the problems from a different perspective.
“No problem, no pay.” My dad taught me this. You get paid in this world for solving problems. Even people paid by the hour are compensated for what they can do during that time.
Problems create environments where we have to learn, improve, grow. The fact that problems exist which need to be solved becomes part of what drives our larger purpose.
We should value problems because they remind us that this is not utopia (which means “no where”).
Problems create opportunities for relationships. Problems we can’t solve on our own draw us into fellowship with one another and greater recognition of our true dependence on God.
Problems showcase how much we should be grateful.
Wallowing in our problems never helps us. “Oh poor, pitiful me.” Excuses. Flee into distraction. Change the subject. Self-medicate your “pain” with food, alcohol, bad TV. Choose to “kick the can down the road” and deal with it another day. (Hard truth — That “can” is more like a grizzly bear cub; it grows up and gets nastier.) I’ve never seen a problem solved by whining about it.
Our true
challenge is not that we have problems to solve, but we become overwhelmed
trying to solve them all simultaneously. The key behavior is to focus your
energy on solving one problem at a time. Pick one. Then follow-through with
some persistence to make genuine progress towards solving it.
What am I optimizing for?
[Alternatively, “For what am I optimizing?” for the grammarians in the audience.]
Fact: You can’t optimize for everything simultaneously. There will be no significant progress until you decide what to optimize for and accept some compromises elsewhere.
For example, you might optimize for minimum cost. You will then accept lower quality, delays, inconveniences, lack of variation, temporary break-fix problems, etc.
You might optimize for process efficiency and repeatability. You won’t please those who want exceptions and variation for their convenience. You won’t retain some team members who aren’t sold on the process-first mindset.
You might optimize for time — speed of execution, or delivery by a certain deadline. You’ll accept reduced scope, or the costs of more resources.
You might optimize for customer or client experience. You will accept inefficiencies in your processes, possibly higher costs and return rates, higher wages for better customer service people, less standardization, inconveniences for your team, etc.
You might be thinking, “But I need to deliver a good customer experience, sharpen my processes, and reduce my operating costs!” These can be interrelated. It is possible to optimize for one primary objective, and then moderate that with a secondary effort to partially optimize another deliverable. For example, you can optimize for customer experience, and then work to optimize certain process flows which support a good customer experience, or reduce costs to deliver the same customer experience. But you must first select one objective to be primary and accept compromises elsewhere.
Here is another way to think about what to optimize: Which stakeholder do you want to please the most? Which stakeholder would you prefer to have disappointed, or even angry with the results?
It’s much easier to lead when you’re clear on your optimization framework. Once it’s clear to you, then relentless communicate in words and actions to all the stakeholders. You’ll find it makes it eases the burden of decision-making, as well. Decide in favor of those things which contribute to optimization in your chosen direction.
Optimization isn’t confined to the workplace. It applies to relationships, fitness, hobbies, etc. We don’t aim for procedurally-efficient conversations with our loved ones. The act of walking our beloved dog is optimized for his need to “express” himself and happily inhale half the state of Iowa. Any exercise we get is a bonus. Certain holiday meals take about the same amount of time to eat as a regular dinner but we gladly put in the special effort to prepare traditional favorites.
Try it out: “What am I optimizing for?”
What premium am I willing to pay for ________?
Nothing is free – there are always tradeoffs in time, quality, and cost. There are many kinds of costs – direct, indirect, obvious, hidden, immediate, and longer-term. There are multiple ways to get things done. You can do something yourself, delegate, or buy a service, and within those you can choose different levels of quality and timing.
People tend to become myopic when they think only about direct financial costs. This is why I prefer to use the term “premium,” because the increase in one option may have nothing to do with figures recorded in the balance sheet.
Consciously evaluate options by asking “What premium am I willing to pay for _____________?” How much am I willing to pay extra – in time, effort, or funds – in order to get X result?
If I could free up more time by paying someone else to work on a project, I could use my limited time on more valuable things. If I could live with the premium of slightly lower quality I could use my limited funds in different ways. I might enjoy a more desirable outcome later if I can delay my gratification longer. If I would be willing to pay more I would get a higher-quality product that I could never make myself, or a superior quality input to my business process to deliver something better for my customer.
To make this analysis work it helps to have this information available:
- What you value as an outcome
- Cost of your time
- Costs of inputs and processing
- Alternative costs
- Costs of risks associated with different quality, longer time, different scope
Try it out: “What premium am I willing to pay for____?”
How does this help my organization?
Ideally you can focus your team on the highest-value, most satisfying work, and deliver superior results for your customers, employees, and business owners. Whatever options you’re exploring, whatever choices you make impacts your organization.
Be sure to consider:
- The perspectives of employees/members
- Short-term and long-term ability to attract and retain talent – your organization is primarily limited by time and human ingenuity, so having the right people is critical
- Teamwork and the identity people associate with your organization
- Process dynamics: speed, output, quality, waste
- COGS questions – including input sources & costs, inventory turns, delivery costs, etc.
- Cash flow
- Debt and ability to service debt
- Contractual duration – upside and downside risks
- Focus on essentials for organization success, rather than distractions.
- Brand and image
Try it out: “How does this help my organization?”
How does this help my customers?
No customer, no business. No person to serve, no need for your non-profit.
Eventually, individually and collectively, the choices we make affect our ability to help our customers. They shape our products and services. They affect our pricing. They influence our ability to delight our customers. They affect our ability to gain new customers, referral business, and repeat business.
Reminder: Don’t be fooled by a time gap between decision and consequence for your customer. Don’t be lulled into a false sense of security because there was no immediate effect for your customer.
Try it out: “How does this help my customers?”
Wrapping Up and Going Forward
The five questions are tools that become better with use and experience. Easy to remember, profitable to work through:
- What problem am I trying to solve?
- What am I optimizing for?
- What premium am I willing to pay for ________?
- How does this help my organization?
- How does this help my customers?
Share them with others and let’s help the people in our spheres of influence make better decisions.
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Glenn Brooke is the author of the soon-coming book, “Bold and Gentle: Living Wisely in an Age of Exponential Change.” This article is adapted from one of the chapters.
Learn more at https://encouragingpress.com
