The Framework to Solve Any Problem | Insights with Roger Kastner

I came across this problem-solving framework 20 years ago and I’ve used it on almost every project I’ve been a part of ever since, and it is incredibly effective.

All appreciation and snaps to Alex Osborn and Dr. Sydney Parns for developing the Creative Problem-Solving Process.
 
True Snacks are bite-sized learning clips that come from an episode of the What Do You Know To Be True? podcast. The podcast conversations explore how ordinary people use their extraordinary talent, or superpower, to make meaningful impact in the world.

I love a good framework that boosts clarity and performance amongst teams. And since teams solve problems all the time – having an effective and repeatable problem-solving model is a such an accelerator for higher productivity.

Drop a comment and let us know if this model helps you and your teams. Or if you have a question about this model, please feel free to ask that too.

If you have your own problem-solving framework that works great for you, I’d love to hear about it!

To celebrate the 2nd anniversary of the What Do You Know To Be True? podcast, I take a turn as a guest to talk about my superpower, Creating and Sharing Simple Frameworks. Friends of the podcast, Liv Olson and April McCormick both suggested the idea a few weeks apart, and I’m pretty good at noticing patterns, so I went with it.

In the full episode I share a handful of frameworks…
1️⃣ Those I’ve created (Like the one I wrote about in my book, “The Project Success Checklist” or the framework that is the foundation for the podcast)
2️⃣ My “go to” framework for helping leaders assess employees’ responses to change
3️⃣ My favorite framework that I’ve used on almost every initiative in the last 20 years

I love to share these frameworks with colleagues. Whether I created them or not, these frameworks help me live into my purpose.

And like most people that I’ve interviewed for the podcast, my superpower didn’t come from a place of strength. Instead, that talent started as a way to attend to an unmet need.

In the full episode, Roger answers the following questions:
➡️ How do I use a framework?
➡️ What frameworks are used in business and problem solving?
➡️ How do I create a framework?
➡️ What does "framework" mean in simple terms?

Resources mentioned in the full episode:
➡️ What Do You Know To Be True? podcast: 
➡️ Roger’s LinkedIn
➡️ Roger’s book “The Project Success Checklist”
➡️ April’s LinkedIn
➡️ April’s Uncomfortable Friend podcast: 

"What Do You Know To Be True?" is a series of conversations where I speak with interesting people about their special talent or superhero power and the meaningful impact it has on others. The intention is to learn more about their experience with their superhero power, so that we can learn something about the special talent in each of us which allows us to connect more deeply with our purpose and achieve our potential.

For more info about the podcast or to check out more episodes, go to: What Do You Know To Be True? Podcast

"What Do You Know To Be True?" is hosted by Roger Kastner, is a production of Three Blue Pens, and is recorded on the ancestral lands of the Duwamish and Suquamish people. To discover the ancestral lands of the indigenous people whose land you may be on, go to: https://native-land.ca/ 

Keywords
#DiscoverYourSuperpower #UnlockYourPotential #UnlockYourPossibilities #MakeMeaningfulImpact

Transcript

TRANSCRIPT The Framework to Solve Any Problem

Keywords
#DiscoverYourSuperpower #UnlockYourPotential #UnlockYourPossibilities #MakeMeaningfulImpact

Roger: So it was about 20 years ago that I came across this problem solving framework, and I've been using it on almost every project I've been a part of since, and it works a hundred percent of the time. This clip is a bite-sized learning snippet that comes from a recent episode of the What Do You Know To Be True Podcast, where I'm normally the host, but in this conversation, my friend April McCormick takes the reins and interviews.

Me my podcast conversations explore how ordinary people use their extraordinary talent or superpower to make meaningful impact in the world. The talent I talk about is finding or creating simple frameworks to boost clarity and performance amongst teams. And since teams solve problems all the time, having an effective and repeatable problem solving model is such an accelerator.

For higher productivity, drop a comment and let us know if you've found this model to be helpful or if you have a question about it, and if you have your own problem solving framework that works really well for you. I'd love to hear about it. Okay, enjoy the episode. But like when I got my project management professional certification, I'd been doing project management enough that I'm sitting there and just calling BS on all the stuff I had to say that I knew, uh, to pass the exam.

April: Mm-hmm. 

Roger: Um, and become certified and then realize, oh no, that's, that's, that's not how you're supposed to do it. Case in point, that's not 

April: how it works in the real world. Yeah. Yeah. So I, I 

Roger: got certified in 2003, which, you know, it's been a minute, but at that point in time, the PMP asked, uh, what do you do when something goes wrong?

And the response is, you document the corrective actions you take. Oh, so you go fix it and you write down what you did. That's not helping me. That's not helping me self solve problems. Just write down what I decide what to do. And so I got really curious about, okay, how do you do problem solving? And at that time I was working for a, a consulting firm with 500 consultants and I thought, oh, you know, all we do every day is solve problems.

There's gotta be someone here that has a framework. Heck, there's probably like three or four people. That have a repeatable framework that they use every time to solve a problem. At that time, I was the project management solution lead for the firm, and I was putting on monthly workshops where we were adding new skills to everyone's toolkit.

So I had put in a newsletter the request for, Hey, you guys are solving problems all the time. What's a framework you use? I'd love to put together a workshop where we like do a survey of two or three of these methodologies and then you can pick which one you want to use. You know, that thing goes out on a Friday afternoon, and when I turned on the laptop on Monday, I was hoping for, you know, a great response rate.

Much better than, um, what I actually did receive, which was zero. I got baked on it. No one responded. So then I thought, okay, I'm gonna ask a dozen consultants that I know who do this really well. I'm gonna send them individual emails. 'cause that's gonna, you know, it's, it's harder to hide when you send the individual email and I got three people to respond back.

So that's a much better response rate. But two people said they make it up as they go every time. And then one person wrote about 5,000 words, and to this day, I never read what they said because if it's 5,000 words. It ain't repeatable. So then I go on the interwebs and I type in problem solving process and I get this creative problem solving process trademarked 1956 by Dr.

Sidney Barnes and Alex Osborne. And Alex Osborne is one of these Madison Avenue Mad Men, who is also, uh, is attributed with creating, brainstorming and this process, this problem solving process. Six steps of, of how do you go about solving a problem? And the first step. Is identifying what does good look like at the end when you've solved this?

What does good look like in their, in their language's? Objective finding. The second step is fact finding. What's all the data we know about this problem? The third step is problem finding, which we also refer to as writing down what's the problem statement. Which, how many times do we start off with what the problem statement is at the very beginning?

April: I think we do that half the time. We're usually trying to solve it before we even understand the problem, 

Roger: for sure. And the pitfalls that we run into when we try to do problem solving. The first one is we jump to conclusions. The second one is, we solve for symptoms and not roots. Then the third is, if you're looking at it from this angle, and I'm looking at it from this angle, we're seeing things differently and we don't share that.

But if we follow just these first three steps of what does good look like, the second of what do we know about this? And we get to share those perspectives. So we have a 360 view of the problem, and then what's the problem we're trying to solve? And we all agree to that. We can't run into those. Those pitfalls.

The fourth one is brainstorming. Thank you, Alex Osborne. The fourth one is picking. Cool. The fifth one is implement and validate. There's six ones, sorry. Yeah, so like six simple steps. To this day when I'm coming up with whether I'm writing proposals for projects or building out schedules, I follow those same six framework, those same six.

Steps. And I love sharing that one because most of us don't have a framework for problem solving. Most of us do jump to conclusions, I think. I think what's really happening is we get a, we get a solution that solves a problem and then we think a lot of other problems fit that same initial problem and they don't, and we haven't spent the time to validate that it will or it won't.