The Purposes of Problem-Solving
I’ve used this definition of ‘problem’: a problem is a gap between what you need or want and what you have right now.
Problem-solving is the act of closing or eliminating a gap.
For example, teams in our current oral health collaborative are wrestling with how to increase oral health care for patients with diabetes. Focused on one physician’s panel of patients with diabetes, one team has set a goal of doubling the number of patients with up-to-date oral health care in the next seven months. The gap is 25 patients: last month, 25 patients in the focus panel had up-to-date oral health care; they aim for a minimum of 50 patients with up-to-date oral health care by June 30, 2022.
A simpler problem from the same collaborative involves a new workflow: the dental team needs to know whether a) a patient on today’s schedule is in the focus panel and b) if the patient is in the focus panel, whether the patient is over-due for a test of hemoglobin A1c.
Currently, the dental team doesn’t have a means to know the answers to a) and b) and so are now building a new workflow. Their gap is the lack of a reliable method to know the answers to questions a) and b).
Spear’s View of Problem-solving
In The High-Velocity Edge, Steve Spear summarizes three purposes of problem-solving:
Solve the immediate problem.
Build knowledge for others, to give them a head start when facing the same or similar problems.
Build skill in problem-solving.
The three purposes in Spear’s presentation are nested, with the second purpose more general than the first and the third more general than the second.
Building Knowledge for Others
When you solve a problem in a way that builds knowledge for other people, you will need to communicate your solution. Typically, you will state what you know and how you closed or eliminated the gap. When you make your solution explicit, backed up by data and easy to follow, it’s harder to fool yourself into settling for a work-around or patch that only covers up symptoms.
Building knowledge for others includes building knowledge for the ‘future you’, too.
Building Skill in Problem-Solving
When you solve a problem in a way that builds skill in problem-solving, you will pay attention to where you stumbled, the techniques or tools that helped or hurt, and habits of mind. You gain skills that you can apply to situations that differ in content or scope from the specific problem that was your immediate problem.
You will be more confident, efficient, and effective in addressing new problems. And there will always be new problems.
Implications for Coaching
Chapters 6-9 summarize Spear’s experience and analysis of organizations that have done a great job in building knowledge for others and building skill in problem-solving.
As we design coaching calls and conversations in the oral-health collaborative, Spear reminds me we need to address all three purposes of problem-solving. Our teams will benefit not just from solving problems but also from building knowledge and improving their problem-solving skills.
We’ve introduced the teams to a simple open-ended questioning method, Plus-Delta, that can help.
Plus: ‘What worked well with X that we should continue to do?’ Delta: ‘What do we need to change to do better with X?’ If we let X be ‘building knowledge’ or ‘improving problem-solving’ in our faculty design sessions and in direct coaching conversations, we’ll do a better job of helping our teams increase their velocity of improvement.
