How to Solve Business Problems

What are common business roadblocks?

While every business faces unique challenges, common roadblocks that affect many organizations include:

• changing customer and market needs;
• lack of internal collaboration and alignment; and
• ineffective decision making.

Underpinning each of these challenges is a failure to proactively identify and solve business problems, leading to inefficient internal processes, sluggish product innovation and diminished employee engagement.

Creating a bottom-up system for finding and solving business problems — a process also known as discovery — is essential to tackling any roadblock that may arise.

Why does having a system for solving business problems matter?

To solve problems effectively, businesses must maintain a scalable and repeatable system to explore problems and implement high-impact solutions. A complete problem-solving system is comprised of your culture, processes and technology, which work together to empower employees to discover problems and drive solutions forward.

Culture

If you want innovative solutions that solve meaningful problems and tackle promising opportunities, you need a culture that promotes creativity and supports individuals in exploring problems and testing solutions. Your culture should empower everyone in the process of identifying, prioritizing and solving challenges, driving meaningful change and buy-in from the bottom up.

Processes

The processes that enable your problem-solving system are crucial. For example, standardized processes for exploring a problem set the groundwork for better, more consistent solutions, while processes for running experiments and gathering data will help you make faster, smarter and more confident decisions. Your problem-solving processes should be efficient, eliminating any unnecessary bottlenecks or redundancies to maintain momentum.

Technology

It goes without saying that any technology you use in your problem-solving system should make your job easier, not harder. The technology you use should support collaboration, communication and transparency, and it should allow for process-driven workflows and simple administration.

How to foster a problem-solving culture

Building a problem-solving culture requires alignment, trust and long-term strategies that empower employees to engage in meaningful discovery. Here are four steps that will help you get started:

Step 1: Create missionaries

Before you can enable discovery, you must ensure your employees are bought into and understand the high-level objectives that underpin their problem-solving efforts. In other words, what is your organization trying to achieve? How can your employees help you move closer to those goals through discovery? Defining and communicating these guiding principles will motivate employees to solve high-value problems.

Step 2: Make discovery a priority

Once your discovery objectives have been defined, you'll need to make discovery a priority for employees. The key to making discovery a priority is a balance of discipline, permission and action:

1. Discipline means clarity and consistency around purpose, objectives and processes.
2. Permission means providing employees with frequent opportunities to engage in discovery, and continuously supporting, promoting and celebrating that engagement.
3. Action means outcomes; doing something!

Step 3: Balance structure and freedom

As you enable discovery, you'll want to strike a delicate balance between structure and freedom. Too many restrictions or excessive micromanagement will stifle creativity and consequently influence outcomes. On the other hand, too much freedom during the discovery process will lead to scattered efforts that don't align with your company mission and objectives.

Step 4: Reward curiosity

Employees that consistently identify problems worth solving and constructively help solve those problems are critical to your business' success. Organizations should reward curiosity, encouraging successful problem solvers — and others — to keep going.

Tools that enable business problem solving

While discovery is very much a problem-solving mindset, the tools you use along the way are equally important in helping you drive efficient and effective outcomes. During the problem-solving process, you'll want to employ tools that can:

• organize and track problem-solving efforts;
• centralize communications and provide open feedback loops;
• support repeatable, process-driven workflows; and
• document progress toward checkpoints and goals.

These tools can help streamline collaboration, boost accountability and enable best practices — but remember, less is more. Too many tools can create unnecessary silos, inefficiencies and blind spots leading to missed opportunities and lost momentum. Ideally, you want a single source of truth that encompasses all of the functionality above and eliminates extra steps.

Pitfalls of not using a problem-solving solution

Without a dedicated problem-solving solution, you may struggle to coordinate your discovery efforts across a disjointed array of tools. For example, your team might communicate in a messaging platform, organize sprints in a project management tool and accept idea solutions via a form on your website. While this strategy isn't necessarily wrong, it's easy to see how using so many different tools in different locations can exacerbate silos, bottlenecks, redundancies and inefficiencies.

For example, if someone on your sales team recognizes an opportunity to improve the sales-to-service handoff process, they should be able to quickly and easily collaborate with teammates from the services, customer success and operations departments to explore the opportunity further. But without a dedicated problem-solving solution, how would they go about starting that conversation? Should they start a new email thread? Drop their idea into an existing group message full of other ideas? Route it through management and hope it lands in the right place? And what if someone from another department with valuable insights is left out of the thread?

As you can see, failure to use the right tools can stop a valuable idea in its tracks at any point in the discovery journey.

Key features of a business problem solving solution

Any business problem solving solution should contain some key features that will empower your team to work effectively and efficiently. The first of which is open collaboration. This feature is essential because as organizations scale, it becomes harder to facilitate cross-functional problem solving. A platform that allows everyone — regardless of their department, role or experience — to provide and cross pollinate ideas and feedback will eliminate silos and help your team design better solutions.

Additionally, your solution should support ease of administration. With a steady stream of incoming ideas and multiple projects happening simultaneously, it's easy for projects to slip through the cracks, miss deadlines or be abandoned entirely. Your problem-solving solution should enable administrators to easily track and manage projects throughout the innovation lifecycle, ensuring ideas move efficiently from submission to implementation.

What to look for in a solution

As you evaluate potential solutions, keep an eye out for the following attributes:

1. Open, visible communication

Imagine trying to solve a puzzle with a group of friends, but you can only communicate in silos and no one can see the entire puzzle. Unfortunately, this is exactly what happens when your problem solving solution does not support open, visible communication.

When evaluating team collaboration tools on the basis of communication, keep in mind:

• How organized the communication is: is engagement categorized, sorted and searchable? Are communications easy to find and preserved within the tool?
• How visible the communication is: does the tool break down communication silos and increase visibility for everyone? Are feedback loops clear and consistent?

2. Repeatable, process-driven workflows

The true value of a collaboration tool lies in its ability to support repeatable, process-driven workflows. Some key criteria to look out for include:

• the ability to break down projects into repeatable, clear, deadline-driven sprints;
• the ability to easily understand project status and progression;
• the ability to manage engagement and project life cycles, and
• the ability to measure success and continuously improve the workflows over time.

3. Simple, efficient management

Your team collaboration tools should also make it easy to administer collaboration projects. This includes the ability to:

• design and modify projects efficiently;
• coordinate and view participants;
• outline and update clear deliverables and expectations;
• respond to and incorporate changes with agility;
• manage communications and feedback loops;
• administer and conduct evaluations; and
• view, sort and export data for reporting and analytics.

These features save administrators countless hours on manual tasks and project management, allowing them to spend more time evaluating the success of their projects and workflows. Moreover, these features allow administrators to see which projects and contributors are out-performing the rest, helping them improve collaboration over time.

Business Problem Solving Solution Providers

Output is a leading provider of business problem solving and engagement software. Our platform is scalable, agile and optimized for both end-users and administrators. While some solution providers function as little more than an idea submission box or project management platform, Output provides tools to support the full lifecycle of innovation — from communicating objectives and organizing ideas, to process-driven workflows that bring your best ideas over the finish line.

Key Benefits of Output

• create purpose-driven Challenges that organize employee discovery around your objectives and goals;
• consolidate communication across your entire organization with clear feedback loops and streamlined collaboration;
• advance ideas efficiently with repeatable workflows and clearly defined project lifecycles;
• simplify administration with agile tools to organize and evaluate engagement; and
• track engagement metrics and export data in a click.

Output Business Problem Solving Features

Output is designed to take your innovation to the next level by engaging employees across your entire organization in mission-driven discovery. Administrators can design Challenges that address high-value problems or opportunities, setting clear criteria for idea submissions with supporting tools such as images, videos, data sheets and more.

Output also ensures projects move forward efficiently by empowering administrators to manage end-user permissions, coordinate evaluations and set clear deadlines for each stage of the innovation process. Along the way, the platform enables administrators to view, organize and export idea submissions, manage engagement and improve their repeatable processes.

Perhaps most importantly, Output enables transparency and collaboration, allowing Challenge participants to work cross-functionally on submissions and gather clear feedback on why their ideas were selected to advance or not. Over time, Output helps your organization innovate smarter, providing the flexibility to improve your problem-solving workflows using historical data and analytics.

See Output in Action

Output helps organizations of all types to drive better, more effective problem solving. Recently, we helped Entuitive, a leading engineering firm, transform their problem-solving process and uncover innovative solutions to business problems they may have otherwise missed.

In this case study, you'll learn how the platform helped Entuitive engage employees from across the organization in the problem-solving process, leading to data-backed, forward-thinking solutions.