All Life Is Problem Solving

(Co-Authored with Steven A. Cavaleri)

In organizations, there is a continuing tension and trade-off of effort and resources between routine and adaptive behavior. Some few organizations, like Toyota, have been able to break through the trade-off between these divergent needs, to perform well at both, and to achieve sustainable effectiveness. But ineffective companies are in the wrong markets, with the wrong products, built using the wrong processes, and the wrong technologies. They become progressively less adaptive and less innovative over time. Combining programs designed to enhance both routine and adaptive performance can be overwhelming. Unless an organization has significant slack resources and staffing, or, as we shall see in future posts in this series, understands Problem Solving Pattern (PSP) Management, operating as a bi-modal integrated system usually fails.

Adaptation depends on an entirely different set of processes than routine behavior, including action learning, knowledge creation, knowledge sharing, innovation, adaptation, “exception handling,” etc. These are, typically, intensely social processes that require human interaction, and learning more deeply than usual from experience. Consultants cannot do this for employees, and technology is a poor substitute for replacing such social processes, though it can sometimes facilitate them to a greater or lesser degree. But these social processes can be facilitated by management. We see an example of this at Toyota, where the primary role of management is seen as mentoring and supporting those they manage in processes of problem solving.

What is needed for better adaptation is high quality PSPs. The PSP exists in parallel with the Operational Pattern (OP) and employees move between the two linked types of patterns as needed to do their jobs. The OP is the pattern of human interaction that produces routine action based on existing knowledge. It’s about production, logistics, marketing, repetitive sales and marketing activities, accounting, human resources, purchasing, and all the other day-to-day activities that are the target of efficiency initiatives, and that produce effectiveness only when existing knowledge underlying those activities is close enough to the truth that decisions and actions based on that knowledge work as expected.

The PSP is the pattern of human interaction that 1) seeks, recognizes and formulates problems, 2) solves those problems by making new knowledge, 3) communicates that knowledge beyond the local context generating it to people who may need it, and 4) enhances how well these first three processes are performed. The PSP includes both these processes, and also the structures performing them. These structures: individuals, teams, projects, friendship groups, organizational sub-divisions, committees of “experts,” communities of practice, communities of inquiry, and the organization itself, are, in some cases, but not in others, the same ones that perform the processes of the OP.

When the difficulty of problems rises above a minimum threshold, and cannot routinely be solved by ordinary means in the OP, sometimes solutions must be developed in the PSP, or imported from other parts of the PSP. The PSP gives life to companies because it provides learning, innovation, and greater adaptability.

A PSP that can be made to work well gives new life to tired organizations lacking in vitality after their core revitalizing capacities have been drained by intense competition, downsizing, or underinvestment in core capacities. There are many types of PSPs of varying degrees of adaptive capacity and performance, and strategies for enhancing a PSP can be approached incrementally, and with a level of investment which is far less than other investments in one or another aspect of organizational development. My next Blog in this series will discuss four types of PSPs.

To Be Continued