Define Slowly So You Can Solve Fast

We were asked to work with a frustrated team of 15 plant managers and supervisors who had tried a lot of solutions to increase the quality of transmission casings without success. They took the Profile and we discovered a revealing insight. Of the 15 team members, the problem solving styles of eight were heavily oriented toward Implementation. The styles of the other seven members were heavily oriented toward Optimization. None favored Generation or Conceptualization and they admitted that they preferred to jump quickly to solution and action.

Discussion about their Profile style results led the team members to acknowledge many instances when they had mistakenly made assumptions, leading to one failed solution after another. We kept the team in fact finding and problem definition for almost two days. It was painful, but they successfully defined three innovative problems, which they quickly solved the third day.