How does your company learn, when things go wrong?
Do you scramble to figure out what to do?
Do you leave it to your best and brightest to step in and fix things?
Once the immediate problem is fixed, do you you move on and pretend it never happened?
Or do you have a set of steps you follow every time?
Whether it’s simple, complex, formal, or informal — you need to involve more than one person, have shared ownership of the problem-solving steps, and clear communication around the followup and responsibilities.
You want to make sure that not only in the problem solved but also that you have taken actions to prevent it from happening again, and grow the awareness and learning of your whole organization.
No sense in wasting a good crisis, right?
Especially in times of change and growth and increase complexity, things WILL go off track occasionally — that’s a given. What’s less common is a robust process for problem-solving that will protect the performance and the morale of your team.
I’ve seen it way too often that the pressure to fix things is left on the shoulders of the most capable people — understandable (as in the case of the friend I describe in this video!) though it may not give you consistent results in the long term.
What problem-solving processes or steps do you have in place to make the most of it when things go wrong?