Creating good decisions
By Gary Cohen
The best litmus test for whether a problem is simple or complex comes from the book Making Things Happen. If the problem takes a long time to describe, it's complex. If not, it's simple.
For simple problems, chances are you can find the root cause easily and derive a solution. For complex problems, the root cause is often hard to identify and just as hard, if not harder, to solve. In my experience, complex problems are usually best resolved by moving the decision-making down to the level that is experiencing the problem. Consequently, knowing the nature of the problem (simple or complicated) can prevent you from trying a quick solution that will simply be attending to a symptom of the underlying problem.
Tom Pritzker, CEO and Chairman of Hyatt Corporation, shared with me a story about how one complex workplace problem was solved. One of the companies he's invested in had an opportunity to take on a big order from the military. The CEO asked the plant manager if he could cut the assembly time from six-and-a-half hours to four to accommodate the new order. The plant manager said the plant was at capacity and wouldn't be able to produce the order in the timeline required; he had engineered the line himself and assured the CEO that it didn't have any more through-put. The problem was tricky: The company sorely needed the order, but how could they take it without adding a new production line? Rather than giving up, the CEO decided to put the question to the assembly team. They shut down the line and in came these guys with rolled-up t-shirts, clean-shaven heads, and huge biceps. The first assembly-line worker said, "I don't know how we can speed up the entire line, but I could shave considerable time from my area if I could get shelves installed to stock inventory by my machine." After all the workers were given a chance to show how they might accelerate the process, they had shaved the production time down not to four hours, but to three! As a result, the CEO not only took the big new order, but also saw a huge reduction in labor-cost per item for all their business.
Sometimes, even simple problems benefit from complex solutions. At the Science Museum in St. Paul, I watched as two 4th-grade classes from my daughter's school matched up with their pen pals from another school. One teacher took students individually and paired them with their pen pals, since they had never met in person before. Another teacher asked students to just go and find their buddies. Which solution do you think worked faster for this coordination problem? The latter. Allowing those closest to the problem solve it proved to be twice as fast as the command-and-control approach.
Later in the day, there was another opportunity to test these two approaches. The teachers needed to ensure that all students were present and accounted for before they left the museum. One teacher took his class list and checked students off as he spotted them. The other teacher asked her class to count off from 1 to 20 (the numbers had been previously assigned to the kids). With their consent, I timed the two teachers using a stopwatch. The count-off process won, hands down. Again, the complex solution (requiring the involvement of many students) proved much faster than the simple solution.
Before you go on the hunt for a solution by yourself, ask, "Is the problem complex or simple?" If it's complex, take the problem to its source; move it down the organization. Complex problems require complex solutions. Sometimes even simple problems benefit from complex solutions, so be open to new methods. In general, trust those who are most familiar with the problem to make the right decisions.
