Mind the Gap

I can recall a particular project I was supporting that, during one meeting, I suddenly became very confused about the proposed solutions and direction we would be taking. Interrupting, I asked if we could spend some time working backward from those solutions/countermeasures to where we believed the problem resided.  As it happened, we were going to be doing a lot of "good stuff" but it seemed to have little direct effect on what we believed was the root of the problem.  This next suggestion might be safer to conduct as a thought experiment rather than live, but ...  Imagine you are in a meeting to brainstorm, root cause analyze or problem solve. What if everyone stopped and wrote down the problem they were trying to solving? What are the chances we would arrive at the same statement?

While one of the most basic concepts of continuous improvement, the development of a problem statement is one of the, if not the most, crucial elements to a successful project.  To be able to state the problem we first need to understand the problem and get others to understand the problem the same way.  This requirement to 'clarify the problem' is the first step of tradition eight step problem solving.  One attribute that must be present to illustrate a problem is a gap in performance.  Either the performance has degraded and we desire to return it to it's past glory (or baseline).  Or, we define an objective from benchmarking or strategy to strive for that is a gap between our current state and the desired future state.  In both scenarios, the problem can now be quantified and clearly depicted/communicated as a gap between our current performance and desired performance.  Keeping our mind on that gap allows us stay focused through root cause analysis and countermeasures. 

A defined problem statement seems pretty basic a concept, and it is.  Yet, with many continuous improvement concepts, it is not the concepts that are complex ... it is putting them into practice in the real-world that is.  But that should not dissuade us from best-practice, because as Charles Kettering once said "A problem well stated is a problem half-solved."