Are you running into a roadblock, facing a problem you can’t seem to solve, no matter what you do?

A good solution exists – you just know it does – but you can’t see or grasp it yet?

If so, take a step back.

Consider the problem from a fresh perspective.

Good ideas often emerge if you change the way you look at, frame, or approach a problem. Often, trying a new creativity tool can help you consider a problem from a new point of view.

Here are three tools you can use to provide a fresh perspective. One of these, or other similar creativity tools, may lead to the breakthrough you seek:

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Fresh Coat of Paint

1. Think of successes and achievements in your work and life.

2. “Relive” each of these successes for a minute or two. What did each experience look, sound, and feel like?

3. Next, when you think of these successes, what color comes to mind, if one does?

4. Now, think of the problem you’re trying to solve.

5. When you do, what color comes to mind?

6. Imagine taking the color you associated with success and painting or pouring that color on the problem.

7. What does that circumstance look and feel like now, in the new “success” color? Are there ideas, impressions, or new solutions that emerge as you imagine experiencing this transformed circumstance?

8. Complete the exercise by writing down impressions, images or other details that may be helpful as you solve the problem.

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Fast Forward

1. Imagine “fast forwarding” to a time when the problem has been solved. What do you see, hear and feel in that problem-resolved world?

2. Now, look back from that time, to where you are now. As you imagine the path to success, how was that problem solved?

3. Complete the exercise by writing down any ideas, impressions, images or other details that may be helpful as you solve the problem.

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Random Word

1. Think of the problem you’re trying to solve.

2. Describe the situation you expect you’ll experience when the problem has been solved.

3. Now, select a random book that you see nearby.

4. Open to any page.

5. Without looking, point to a word. Now look at it. What’s the word?

6. Answer the question, “What else does this word make me think of? How might these ideas help me see the problem in a new way? How might these ideas help me solve it?”

7. Complete the exercise by writing down any ideas, impressions, images or other details that may be helpful as you solve the problem.

Have you had the experience of feeling unseen, even though someone was talking directly to you?

Perhaps they said something to you like, “I know what you’re thinking!”

And then, as they announced what they were sure was true for you, it turns out they couldn’t have been more wrong?

Or maybe you’ve been guilty of that, yourself.

Projection is often at least part of what’s going on.

Projection is when someone “assigns” feelings they are having to someone else, often because they either do not see, or are unable to accept those thoughts or feelings in themselves.

When you are the one who has been “assigned” an erroneous feeling or thought by others, it can take a bit of time to realize what’s going on, and to try to untangle the stories people have created, or the misinterpretations that have been “cooked up,” somehow.

Projection is fairly common, and causes other problems.

It can lead to miscommunication, at a minimum, and various issues that arise when people are wasting time, effort, and precious resources, trying to solve the wrong problem – or busying themselves with a story but not trying to improve the situation, at all.

Projection can start from some simple observation, followed by assumptions and misinterpretations.

When we may draw these erroneous conclusions, they’re often based on our own past experiences, the way we believe we would have felt in such a circumstance, or any of many reasons why we assign a particular meaning to what we observed.

How can you reduce your own tendency to project, even if you can’t guarantee that it will never happen?

First, simply observe.

- What do you see?
- Would you hear?
- What do you feel?

Next, be aware of what you’re interpreting from what you observe.

- What do you interpret?
- Why are you interpreting it that way?
- Do you need to interpret what you observe?
- How could these assumptions or interpretations be helpful to you in some way?
- Could your observations or interpretation help other people involved, if they are correct? If so, how?
- Instead of interpreting, how can you check with the person, or people, involved to see if your assumptions are correct?
- If need be, how can you help the people involved? How can you check to see if that’s what will be most helpful to them?

Ask, don’t assume.

Be curious about the other person’s experience.

Care about what’s happening to that person, and in their world.

If you don’t care about what’s happening to the other person, what’s the point of taking the time and energy to form an opinion about this particular situation or how they’re handling it?

Free yourself and others of opinions you’ve formed if there’s no role you can play in improving the situation, or supporting those involved.

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Having a great decision-making process increases your odds for success in many aspects of your work and life.

Because it’s so important, stop periodically to review and improve the way you make decisions.

Grow (and grow your appreciation for) your strengths, and eliminate or reduce your decision-making weaknesses.

Start by making review and improvement of your process an annual event, even if you dedicate only an hour to decision-making process improvement.

How can you begin?

Start by reviewing significant decisions you made during the past year.

Divide these decisions into three categories:

- The ones that worked really well
- The ones that worked out okay
- The ones that didn’t work…at all (and hopefully there aren’t many in this category)

Look at the patterns in each group to see what you can learn and improve – and also what you need to stop and appreciate about the things you’re doing very well.

Consider, specifically, your skills in:

- Framing the decision
- Information gathering
- Decision-making
- Implementing decisions

Consider some of these things as you review these recent decisions and how they worked for you:

1. Did you define the problems correctly?

2. Did you have the right decision customers in mind?

3. Were you clear about what these customers needed?

4. Did you gather the right information? Was it timely? Did you use that information well for the decision-making process?

5. Did you evaluate the decision risks correctly?

6. Did you assess and envision implementation circumstances and challenges correctly?

7. Were there any significant issues you didn’t consider as you prepared to make that decision? These may have been favorable or unfavorable issues, ultimately, but they were things you overlooked or didn’t see initially.

8. Are there other things you notice about the way you prepared for, made, and implemented decisions that can help you to improve your decision-making process in the future?

9. If you have decision diaries that you kept as you worked through stressful or high-risk decisions, review those to see what they can tell you about your decision-making preparation, thought process, the way the decision was actually made, and the implementation quality.

10. What pleased you most about your decision process and experience this year?

11. What surprised you most?

12. What was the most difficult lesson?

13. What was the best lesson?

14. If you were teaching someone else how to make great decisions, what would you advise them, based on your recent experience with decision-making?

15. Were there any serendipitous, unplanned but fortuitous experiences in your decision-making and results this year? Are there any lessons you can learn from that to improve your decision-making process and results in the future?

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Do you have decision phobia?

Some people do, and it can be very life- and progress-limiting.

Decision-phobes may not know why they’re fearful of committing to one course of action instead of leaving their options endlessly open.

Perhaps their fear is based on having made big mistakes in the past.

Or perhaps they felt that perfection was expected from them with each and every step they took. And as a result, they began to stay cemented in spot, rather than to take the risk of making one misstep, no matter how recoverable it was.

Decision-making doesn’t have to be scary.

If the decision is one that you’re familiar with and have made successfully before, or if the risks of making a mistake are low, the information gathering can be very quick.

If a decision has large, clear risks, all the preparatory phases will take more time and careful thought.

As you get ready to make a decision, there are ways you can further reduce the risks. Here are a few:

- Rehearse
- Look at the costs and benefits of all options and choose the best one
- Use scenario analysis
- Test your decision with experts you trust
- Create a decision diary for high-risk decisions

Here’s more detail about each of these options:

Rehearse

Imagine the outcomes.

Envision a successful outcome of the decision-making process that meets the requirements of the customers for the decision. If you need more information about this, learn more about creating decision-making frames.

Now imagine yourself being comfortable making the decision, and comfortable with the outcome of the decision.

When you imagine that, what does it tell you about the process, and the decision, itself?

Look at the costs and benefits of all options and choose the best one

List the various decisions you could make.

Now list the costs and benefits of each option. If a more analytical approach will increase your confidence in the decision, use weighted criteria. Evaluate how each possible decision meets each criterion, and see which option “wins,” when viewed analytically.

Use scenario analysis

Create scenarios of most likely circumstances. Then exaggerate these scenarios by imagining far better outcomes and far worse outcomes.

Now, fortified with the wide range of scenarios, consider which ones seem most likely.

Test each possible decision in these most likely scenarios.

See how that affects your decision, if it does.

Test your decision with experts you trust

One additional way to reduce the risk of the decision is to find experts you trust. Test your decision with them.

See if they advise you to consider something you had not seen, or to weight decisions in a different way than you anticipated.

Create a decision diary for high-risk decisions

Just by writing down your decision-making, you may make better decisions. It’s like writing down goals to increase your chances of reaching them. The simple act of writing tightens your focus, and can improve your logic and the completeness of your thinking.

Here’s a simple way to create a decision diary:
1. Write down the decision you have to make.
2. List the customers of the decision and what success would be like for them.
3. Record your assumptions.
4. List the decision you’ve made and what you expect to have happen.
5. Use this information if the decision needs refining, changing, or when you are improving your decision-making process.

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Which answer makes the following statement true for you?

Decision-making is easy:

- Often.
- Always.
- Almost never.

If you find decision-making an ordeal – and many people do – you can make it far easier with a good decision-making process.

A good decision-making process starts by creating a good decision frame.

Creating a good decision frame is almost like describing the missing piece that you’re looking for as you try to solve a jigsaw puzzle.

When you create an effective decision frame, a good decision can almost seem to fall out of the process automatically.

That’s because it will seem familiar, somehow, when you’ve carefully considered what the ideal solution is, what the priorities and options are, and when you’ve done your research to know the costs and benefits of each possibility.

Well-framed and researched, a good decision will become clear, almost naturally.

These are some of the things to consider as you create your decision frame:

- Know what problem you’re solving when you make this decision
- Understand who the decision customers are
- Understand what decision criteria and priorities will be used to make the decision
- Be clear about what’s in and what’s out as this decision is being made
- Understand who will make the decision and how they’ll make it

To frame the decision, answer these questions:

1. What’s the problem you’re solving, specifically?

Be clear about what problem you’re solving with this decision.

Without a well-defined problem statement, or a clear goal, you can go off-track right from the beginning of the decision-making process.

Know what you’re aiming for.

2. Who are the customers of this decision? Do they see the problem the same way?

Many people can be involved in making a decision, but not everyone has to live with the outcome of the decision.

The primary decision customers are the people who are most directly affected by the results of the decision, whatever they are. with these customers want an ideal decision

3. What do these customers want in an ideal decision?

Customers’ needs and wants may be two different things.

What do the decision customers want in the decision that’s made and implemented?

What do they need?

If you don’t know, ask them, or ask a representative sample of people who will be affected by the results.

Understand their priorities, as well.

What is most important to them in the decision and its outcome? What can they live without, if they must?

4. What’s in and what’s out as you make this decision?

When you’re making a decision to take a certain course of action or commit resources in some way, you’re also deciding not to do something else.

And sometimes the real problem with decision-making is not that it’s hard to say “yes” to one course of action, but rather, that it’s harder to say “no” to another one.

Know what you’re choosing not to do when you’re making this decision.

If you’re planning a vacation, for example, and have children who will be on the trip with you, you may put a higher priority on a well-planned series of activities that will keep them busy and happy than you do on luxury accommodations you might choose if you were planning a romantic trip for two.

Consider, also, any constraints you have for the decision that’s being made.

For example, are there cost restrictions or deadlines by which the decision must be made and all actions fully implemented?

Be clear about all the requirements for the decision and a good outcome.

5. Who will make the decision, and how will it be made?

Know how the decision will be made, and who will make it.

For example, will a committee be making the decision and each person in the group has one vote?

Will a committee be advising a final decision-maker?

Is a person making this decision by him or herself?

Understand what a win is to each person involved in making the final decision. Understand what failure is to each person, as well.

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A colleague stopped me the other day after a meeting. She was worried about her son, still in elementary school. He’s competitive, and that has many benefits in the world in which he’s being raised.

Still, she thinks he may be becoming too competitive for his own good.

“He’s starting to be afraid to try new things,” she explained.

“He can’t stand to lose. He thinks that if he doesn’t try something new, but stays with what he knows, he’s far less likely to lose,”  she added.

Are you afraid to try new things because you can’t stand to lose?

Are you afraid of being a learner again? On the way to mastery of any skill, there’s always some uncertainty, experimentation, and failure that goes along with eventual success.

Is it possible that you’re too competitive for your own good?

You may actually be handicapping yourself, if you restrict yourself only to activities you can win.

If so, may be missing a lot of good experiences and great people.

And you may never uncover some of your greatest strengths, talents you never found you had because you chose the safe, known road rather than venturing beyond it.

Is it possible that you create unnecessary stress and competition in situations where it has no real value…to you or anyone else?

If you’re too afraid to try something new, you could soon be frozen in place (or frozen out of it), unable to adapt and change at the same pace as the rest of the workplace and world.

Don’t lose the race you’re trying to win by being afraid to try.

The skill it would be useful to master is learning how to learn well…and then knowing how to turn learning into valued results.

Here are some of the other things I advised my friend, the mother of the little boy who knows how to win, but is quickly becoming afraid to try:

- Applaud initiative, including good attempts and steady progress.

- Reward learning experiments.

- Encourage activities and learning where there is no clear winner.

- Look for ways to take competitiveness out of circumstances where it has no value, or may be a detriment to the desired experience or skill development.

Let the learner plan and dictate his or her learning path.

Reward the learning process.

Skills of the future include having the ability and initiative to direct one’s own learning  effectively, the ability to discern and gather high-quality information, the ability to synthesize much information, high quality decision-making and action taking.

Don’t handicap yourself by putting competition in places where competition doesn’t belong.

Ask yourself the next time you think your competitiveness maybe making things worse:

- What’s the point of competition here?

- Is competitiveness adding to the overall experience or taking away from it? How is it affecting the other people who are involved in the experience, in addition to me?

If you think you may be too competitive for your own good, try this test:

Let someone else be first in line once in a while.

You’ll survive the experience. And believe it or not, you may even find you enjoy it even more from that spot.

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Many companies struggle as they try to keep everyone focused and on the same page.

This is even more of a problem during times of great stress, growth, or other types of major change.

One tool you can use to overcome this not-on-the-same-page problem is to create a brief summary of your company, a Company Overview.

This brief overview of the company can help create a more consistent and higher quality experience for customers as they interact with people at your company.

It can also increase employees’ understanding and pride in the company they work for. The Company Profile can also be an important tool to managers and employees to discuss the value of employees’ work in creating company success.

As you create the Company Overview, you may discover strengths you hadn’t fully recognized or appreciated. You’re also likely to see areas where the company can improve.

If you’re thinking about creating a Company Overview for your organization, plan to gather and include information such as the following:

Who We Are and Why We Exist

- What is your company’s purpose, or the primary reason it exists?
- What is are you trying to accomplish, and for whom?
- What is your company’s vision of the future it is trying to create for itself?
- What is your company culture?
- What are your company values, or guiding principles and behaviors?
- What are your organization’s core competencies, or primary strengths? How do they relate to being able to fulfill your mission?

Our Customers and What They Want From Us

- Who are your primary customer segments? What do they need and expect from you?
- What are the main products and services you offer customers?
- How do you provide your products and services to customers?
- How do you provide customer support to customers who need it?
- How do you use feedback from customers to continually improve your products, services and support?

Our Company and Its Competitors

- What is your competitive position in your market?
- Who are your primary competitors now?
- What are the principal factors that drive success for your company, compared to its competitors?
- What are the major changes that affect your competitive position?

Our Resources and Governance

- What are the primary groups of employees in your company?
- What are the primary motivators that draw each group to your organization, and engage them in supporting your mission?
- Where the key benefits you provide employees?
- What are your main facilities, technologies and equipment?
- What is the regulatory environment under which your company operates?
- Are there any occupational health and safety regulations that govern your company?
- Are there certification or registration requirements, industry standards, environmental, financial, and product regulations with which you must comply?
- What is your organizational structure and governance system? What are the primary reporting relationships between your senior leadership, board, and parent organization, if you have one?

Who We Work With

- What are your key types of suppliers, partners, and other collaborators?
- What role does each of these groups play in your company’s success?
- What are the primary ways you communicate with customers, suppliers, and other key stakeholders?

Our Challenges and Strengths

- What are the primary challenges and advantages your company has now?
- How do you monitor and improve performance at your company?
- What are your key business, operational and human resource challenges and advantages?
- What are the key challenges and advantages for your company with respect to organizational sustainability?
- How do you monitor, manage and improve your company and its products and services?

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Assumptions.

We believe we shouldn’t make them, but we do.

Our assumptions go with us into almost any new situation, relationship, or interaction.

They’re part of any decision we make, and any planning we undertake.

Knowing what your assumptions are is important.

They can work in your favor, if you know how to set and use assumptions well.

Consider a decision you made that turned out not to be a good one.

Now consider when you made the first wrong turn in making that decision.

Often, that first off-track turn occurs when you don’t question and eliminate or correct the initial assumptions on which the decision is based.

Here are ways to work with your assumptions so that they work for you:

1. Record them.

First, acknowledge that you have them.

Then, record them, and note why you believe them to be true.

What facts do you have that back up your belief that these assumptions are true?

Keep a summary of your assumptions in a place where it will be easy to find and use them again. You may need to return to them later, as the decision plays out, for better or worse.

2. Test them.

If there’s a lot riding on whether your assumptions are right or wrong, find a way to test them early in the process of using them.

What research can you do?

Is there something you can observe?

Are there people who will be affected by decisions you make, using these assumptions?

If a relationship or interaction will be affected by the assumptions you make, ask the people involved if what you believe about them or the situation is true.

3. Revisit them.

When you’re using assumptions as the basis for decision-making, return to them periodically to check and see if they’re still valid.

Governments for example, can make decisions about services they’ll be able to provide citizens, based on how much tax revenue they think they’ll collect in the future.

Building and service commitments can be made, and taxpayers’ expectations can be set about the services they will get for the taxes they paid. Then the economy can change, sometimes radically and rapidly.

At that point, changes must be made to adapt to the situation as well as possible. With a solid way to monitor and adapt assumptions based on current facts, the need for change can be eased or prevented.

4. Refine your assumptions if they’re no longer true.

If your assumptions turn out to be false or circumstances change so that your assumptions need to change, too, then change them.

A lot may be riding on your courage in facing facts, rather than plowing ahead with a plan of action that’s going nowhere fast, just because you don’t want to admit that, somehow, you’re wrong.

5. Improve your process of setting assumptions.

Revisit your process of making assumptions.

Check to see if you’re using good data to create and test the assumptions you use. Make sure you’re not basing big decisions on wild guesses or random conjecture.

Ensure that you have and are using a good process to synthesize the information you have to make decisions and take action, using your assumptions.

Communicate the assumptions well to those who may need to use them, such as in making forecasts.

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When customers aren’t happy, companies often wish they’d keep their frustration to themselves.

“What’s a little bit of customer frustration?” they almost seem to say.

And these companies may hope customers will leave their business right where it is, continuing to buy or even increasing their volume of business, despite that “one little glitch.”

To take this scenario even further, perhaps these companies feel it won’t really hurt if customers aren’t heard “just this once,” especially if their products and services are sold at the most competitive price, right?

Just remember this: each and every customer interaction can affect future business. And that is especially true when customers are already unhappy with what they’ve bought from you.

Customers are watching out for far more than just the price they pay.

They also want a hassle-free experience, from the moment they think about buying the product all through the time that they use it.

And if you don’t provide that hassle-free experience, well, they may buy from you once, but they’re very likely to take their business to one of your competitors when they need to buy again.

It’s in your company’s best interests to know what customers actual experiences are with your products and services.

Here are two big reasons valuable information may be getting away about problems your customers wish you would fix:

1. Your customer support staff is paid to get people off the phone quickly.

The good part of this situation is that customers don’t want to be on a customer support call anymore than you do.

They want to get the problem solved quickly, fairly and easily.

Truth be told, they may feel somewhat foolish they bought from you in the first place, given the problems they’re having.

So what’s the bad part of the situation when your customer support staff is moving customers off the line rapidly?

Customers feel they deserve to be fully heard, not “processed,”  and this is even more the case when they’re already frustrated.

2. The customer support team doesn’t capture customer feedback that can improve the product or service.

When you have a customer who is feeling the full frustration of the problem they’ve called you about, they often have very detailed information they could share about what happened.

This could provide valuable information to people in other parts of the company who could troubleshoot problems and prevent them from happening again.

All parts of the company – new product development, design, production, marketing, sales – can make good use of the information, if you have it.

After customers get their problem solved, that detailed feedback is far harder to get, if those details are even still available.

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Just because nothing’s clearly wrong with the way your company works does not mean everything’s going right.

The need for change can creep up on you.

And all too often, a crisis is the first way people realize something has gone too far.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

The need for improvements In your products and services, or the way you get work done in your company can be apparent much faster if you pay attention to subtle signs.

Like the subtle indications of changes in the weather, subtle signals can be leading indicators that something is slipping, sliding, declining…and the loss of customers can’t be far away.

“Why change it if it isn’t broken?” is a common line of thought.

Well, the reason to change something that doesn’t appear to be broken is that it may be heading that way.

If you have a lot riding on one part of your business, or one group of customers you serve very well, protect that valuable asset.

The gulf oil disaster is a dramatic example of the need to pay attention to the basic controls of the business, as well as subtle signs that something might have been going wrong.

It’s very possible the oil spill could have been prevented if the right indicators had been well-monitored, the warnings heeded and acted upon by people who had the responsibility and authority to solve problems when they were far smaller.

The tough thing is that if you’re watching the subtle signs, when you see indications that problems may be taking shape, no one really wants to be the person to say, “I think a bad situation might be happening.”

People don’t really want to be doomsdayers and naysayers (well, most don’t).

However, instead of moving away from troubling trends, build the instinct to move closer in. Look more deeply into what might be happening.

Changes in customer satisfaction, for example, are just one indicator of changes that may be underway.

As you consider this indicator of changes, consider that many companies view complaining customers as a problem they wish would go away.

But complaining customers can be a rich source of information, if you gather and use the information they provide in a substantial way.

Consider this: customers who complain still care enough to try to help you become better. And changes in the types of complaints they make, the frequency of them, and other aspects may be an early indicator of problems that are cropping up that you might not have noticed any other way.

Learn to monitor and use both obvious and subtle signs of change in customer satisfaction, among other possible indicators of problems that may be taking shape.

It can make a big difference in your being able to catch and then prevent significant problems for your business and everyone affected by it.

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