Have you ever attended a meeting that was called to solve a problem and exited the meeting feeling that the meeting was a catastrophic waste of everyone’s time.
You’re not alone. Most of us have been in that room. And most of us, if we’re honest, have also led that room.
Here’s what I’ve come to believe after years of working with leaders and teams: the quality of a problem-solving meeting is not primarily a function of the people in the room. It’s a function of the level at which the leader chooses to operate.
In my experience, when done right, meetings can be both high value and a high leverage activity. For this to happen, the leaders need to be intentional in the design, structure and the running of the meeting.
Today, let’s look at meetings that are convened to solve problems and explore how we can run them to avoid them from failing catastrophically.
Leaders could be working at four different levels, depending on the ability, experience and the amount of time that leaders have and the severity of the problem being solved.
I call this the Ladder of Problem-Solving Expertise.
Level 1 – Beginner:
At this level, a leader brings a problem to a meeting and get started with the brainstorming process to solve the problem. The leader spends the entire time on discussing the different ideas generated in the meeting, mostly making the decision in their minds.
If they are lucky, they get a few people participate and generate some ideas that could potentially solve the problem partially. Many people participate in the process in a performative way rather than in a contributive way.
Level 2 – Competent:
At this level, a leader understands that some of the most outgoing and outspoken people on the team usually tend to dominate any discussion in the team and the more gentle, introverted and contemplative people on the team never get to share their ideas or perspectives, if we don’t create a structure that enables it as a process in the meeting itself.
So, they run the brainstorming as a two-step process:
First step is run as a brain dump where everyone spends some time to think and come up with ideas that could potentially solve the problem.
Second step is for individuals to share their ideas and everyone else is responsible for building on these ideas to come up with those that can solve the problem.
This process usually helps leaders to come up with slightly better ideas than those that the leaders who operate at a beginner level.
Level 3 – Expert:
At this level, leaders first spend time in defining the problem in more detail and nuance. They identify the constraints that the solutions need to adhere for them to be useful.
So, they add another step to the process as run by competent leaders:
Define the problem in more nuance and details including the constraints that the solutions need to work under while solving the problem.
They then run an individual brain dump to enable everyone’s ideas to be heard. Every idea thus generated needs to be worked on, edited or modified until it can solve the problem in a unique way, under the constraints identified.
The leaders end up with multiple options to solve the same problem and can then decide to pick the best option from them and move ahead to try and solve the problem.
Level 4 – Master:
At this level, leaders spend as much time in exploring the problem as much as they spend in solving them.
The first thing that the team does is a problem audit – try to understand why we are trying to solve this specific problem. Is this really the problem or is this a symptom of an underlying problem. If this is a symptom, what is the real problem. This is done until the real problem has been identified.
They run question bursts (as defined by Hal Gregerson) individually as a brain dump, where each person in the meeting comes up with as many questions as they can about the problem that they are trying to solve.
Then each individual member shares their questions, and they build on each other’s questions to see if they can come up with additional questions that individuals missed out in the earlier phase. They then pick the most interesting questions and dig deeper to understand the question and how it impacts the problem that they are trying to solve. They do this with as many interesting questions as the time permits or as needed.
They then reframe the problem based on the new understanding of the original problem through the exploration in the problem space. They then identify the constraints that the solution of this newly defined problem needs to adhere for it to be useful. They also list down the criteria that the solution needs to meet so that they can be adopted and tried.
Once the problem is thus redefined, they do the regular process of brain dump individually. Then they build on each idea until each one of them solves the problem within the constraints identified. Then they pick the ideas that fulfill the criteria developed in the problem space. Next they do a quick pretotype to check if the idea will indeed solve the problem.
They also do pre-mortem to check if the idea will create any problem elsewhere that needs to be addressed. If yes, they rework on the idea. If no, then they do a prototype or a proof of concept. Only once this works, do they implement the idea on a full scale to solve the problem identified.
Leaders who operate at this level also invite someone from their team to run the entire show, from start to finish. They rotate this role among their team with each iteration, so that they are developing this capability of running effective brainstorming meetings within their teams, which by itself is a high leverage activity.
Being Intentional
This doesn’t necessary mean that we need to operate at the master level to solve every problem.
As leaders, we need to make a judgement call based on the seriousness of the problem, which level we need to operate at. For some, it is enough to operate at the beginner level, for some, we need to step up to competent or expert level. There are very few problems that require a master level intervention.
Each level requires a different level of time, energy, attention and commitment from the leader and the team. So, we need to make an informed decision on what level we want to engage at to solve any given problem.
Conclusion:
Meetings need not be a colossal waste of everyone’s time. They can be fun, engaging, intellectually and creatively stimulating and at the same time help us solve tough problems. We just need to be intentional about which level of the ladder we want to operate at.
Try It This Week
Pick one challenge that has been sitting on your desk too long — the one you’ve been trying to solve the same way for weeks.
Try solving it at each one of the four levels and compare the solutions that each level at the end of the experiment.
