Chris Christensen

practice of seeking the root causes of a difficult organizational problem is straightforward and there are some powerful tools that can assist the problem-solving team in finding them. This step involves four parts: first, identifying possible causes with recommended teamwork tools; second, using a team voting process to select the greatest contributing cause; third, identifying additional causes, and fourth, ensuring the statement of the root causes include what will be needed to solve the problem later in the process.

practice of seeking the root causes of a difficult organizational problem is straightforward and there are some powerful tools that can assist the problem-solving team in finding them. This step involves four parts: first, identifying possible causes with recommended teamwork tools; second, using a team voting process to select the greatest contributing cause; third, identifying additional causes, and fourth, ensuring the statement of the root causes include what will be needed to solve the problem later in the process.

it is imperative that we resist the urge to define everything as “equally very important,”

is unnecessary to apply quantitative measures to compare the feasibility and importance of solving every one of the candidate problems, but it is a good idea to develop comparative metrics for those that fall in the Silver Bullet quadrant.

Here is how I interpret each of the quadrants (“window panes”) in the chart:

Here is my logic for this “rule of thumb”:

Consider all of the candidate problems.
Determine the feasibility of solving each candidate problem.
Establish the importance of solving the problem to the organization.
Prioritize the candidate problems using a tool such as the BCG Matrix.
Select the one problem that the team believes to be both feasible and important to solve.
If quantitative metrics were developed to determine the feasibility and the importance of solving the selected problem, provide them for Step Two, Redefine the Problem. These metrics will also be used in Step 6, Persuade Management to Implement the Solutions.

So What? This is merely a technique of asking “So what?” about all possible causes.

The Ishikawa Diagram is used by the problem-solving team to assist them in making a list of possible causes of the main problem.

Suppose that the main issue is that management decisions take too long and we have defined the problem as a gap of five days.

Kepner-Tregoe Problem Analysis and some software tools such as TapRooT.