What Others Are Saying

I would recommend First Steps to any organization wishing to improve employee interaction and enhance problem solving behavior.

Maureen Hardy, Director Outpatient Rehab, St. Dominic Hospital

Why Teams Need a Common Approach

Between us, we’ve been actively involved in problem solving and decision making as program developers, consultants and delivery resources for more than 50 years.  During that time we’ve worked with thousands of people and hundreds of teams.  Individually, many people are good-to-excellent problem solvers and decision makers.  Yet, team problem solving and decision making is generally fair to horrible.  How can that be?  You’d think that if you put a bunch of people who are good problem solvers and decision makers together, you’d have a stellar problem solving / decision making team.

Team problem solving and decision making doesn’t just happen on its own.  No inherent synergy erupts when you put a bunch of good problem solvers on a team and tell them, “Go fix that.”  Usually, quite the opposite happens: the overall quality of problem solving and decision-making actually deteriorates at the team level. 

There is a simple reason for this. As each individual is faced with problems and decisions in his or her life, he or she develops a problem solving and decision making approach that works for him or her.  They get good at their approach.  Virtually every senior mechanic we’ve ever met that has worked his or her way to the top is an excellent problem solver and decision maker.

But each person’s approach to solving problems or making decisions is different, at least in some respect.  Each person on the team approaches the problem or decision using the problem solving or decision-making method that has worked for him or her in the past.   This being the case, each person is at a different "step" in problem solving: one is trying to gather information, another is jumping to cause, noone is looking at the same thing at the same time. 

Also, although it is never actually stated, we have observed an undercurrent of competition, with each person trying to be the first to come up with the “right answer” and prove that “my way is the best way”.  The result?  Little or no progress.  Little or no cooperation. As a team, this collection of individuals is often unsuccessful.

Complex problems and decisions – those that, when poorly addressed, cost your organization lots of wasted time and lost revenue – require a coordinated, systematic team approach. For complex problems and decisions, one person does not have all the information required to get to a quality solution quickly. So how do you tap into all those good problem solving and decision making skills on the team that has ground to a halt?  You teach them a common approach.

Trouble Shooting Logic (TSL) is one of our Reality Based Technologies.  Reality Based Technology is not based upon an unproven, theoretical model.  Rather it is based upon the observation of successful problem solvers and decision makers doing what works, then quantifying what is observed and putting it into a logical, easy-to-follow sequence.  The common approach of Trouble Shooting Logic (TSL) exploits the fact that success requires the team to pool their information into a single, focused analysis. TSL gets them all working on the same part of the problem or decision at the same time, and when good problem solvers and decision makers are on the same page, synergy does develop, progress is made, costly and incorrect actions are avoided.

Many, many times, either during or after a TSL workshop, we’ve had participants who were already experienced trouble shooters make a comment such as, “Before I came to the workshop I didn’t think I’d get anything out of TSL.  Now that I see what TSL is all about.  TSL makes problem solving visible to all and gets us all working on the same page.”