What’s Stopping You? Four Boilers from Eight

At Procter & Gamble, my team in the Management Systems division routinely conducted creative problem solving (later defined as Simplexity) workshops to help manufacturing engineers increase efficiency, improve quality, and accelerate plant productivity. To ensure the training would stick and be applied back at their home plant, the engineers had to bring an important plant problem to solve during the workshop. I remember one workshop in particular. We organized the attendees into teams of five to help each other work through each of their problems by applying the problem solving process. One team was stalled and was having difficulty moving through the problem definition step. One of their members insisted that he already had an answer to his problem, “How might I enable my plant to go to four boilers from eight?” Upon arrival at the hotel, he had met a fellow participant from another plant who told him they had already gone from eight boilers to four. So now he thought his problem was already solved because he could apply the same solution at his own plant. 

Now I knew that his plant manager would not have sent him with a problem that had already been solved so I listened in. The group was struggling valiantly to help him, but because he kept insisting he didn’t have a problem, they couldn’t finish the problem definition step. Suddenly out of my mouth came, “If you already know the answer, then what’s stopping you from going from eight boilers down to four?” He said, “nothing’s stopping me. I already know how.” I asked what’s stopping you? four more times and got the same answer, which was “nothing.” Finally, it came to me to be more specific and ask, “What’s stopping you from getting on an airplane today and going back to the plant to go from eight boilers down to four?” He replied, “What’s really stopping me is that none of the department managers are interested in energy conservation.” In hearing this, his team experienced a major AHA! moment. They quickly defined his problem as, “How might I interest my department managers in energy conservation?” enabling the team to move on to the next step.

This experience led to a breakthrough discovery about the nature of problem solving for him. The real reason his manager had sent him to the workshop was to learn how to spend more time defining problems rather than jumping immediately into solutions.