Reverb Consulting: Better Problem Solving

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Reverb Consulting is a young consultancy interested in helping people and organizations fulfill their missions. Our name is inspired from one of Phil's heroes, Buckminster Fuller. Bucky Fuller said, "I seem to be a verb." We love that because it is all about action, action that we believe is derived from active thinking, re-thinking, re-formulating the pieces of the puzzle that confounds you. In re-directing learning and understanding, we help people see anew, or re-see, so that more is possible. We are Reverb because the need to re-_____ is always there. The process is evolutionary and never ending. Change, therefore, is natural, desired, and celebrated as life.

Contact us:
Jamie@reverbconsulting.com 901-337-0525
Phil@reverbconsulting.com 901-337-0411

Conversational Workshops

Margaret Wheatley's work is truly inspiring. Like ecosystems and biological systems, organizations are dynamic. Their cultures can be healthy or unhealthy, uncooperative, hostile, and disengaged. One of the best ways to re-energize and discover the nature of an organization's culture is to have it expose its thinking through focused and facilitated conversation around questions that count. Our conversation-based workshops actively involve large groups in thinking together. The results are astonishing. Key to the success of such a workshop is having realistic expectations for outcomes, understanding the value of the process which is fluid and not open to explicit control, and determining right questions.

Saturday, February 7, 2009

Better Problem Solving

Problem-solving aptitude is the ability to identify and define problems as well as to generate and implement potentially effective solutions. Problem-solving includes multiple phases. It is a process and takes time. Those of us who cannot hold the tension or manage uncertainty over time have trouble with deep problem-solving because they rush to conclusion. Here is how that sounds just give me the answer or tell me what to do. The end result suffers. Peers who value a deep and expansive process suffer. The discovery of what is quite possibly revolutionary for your organization instead of immediate and easy and habitual suffers.

Problem-solving aptitude includes:

(1) the ability to sense a problem and feeling confident and motivated to deal with it effectively.

(2) the ability to define and formulate the problem as clearly as possible by gathering relevant information. This includes the ability to see connections that are not obvious.

(3) the ability to look for the source of the problem by uncovering habits and assumptions that might have created the problem.

(4) the ability to generate as many solutions as possible through brainstorming and other radiant thinking methods. (If you don't know the methods, this ability is compromised. The least effective, even harmful, method at this stage is deductive reasoning.)

(5) the ability to make a decision to implement one of the solutions. This stage includes weighing the pros and cons of each possible solution and choosing the best course of action. Questions still play an important part here: what if I do this? What if I don't do this?

Problem-solving is associated with being conscientious, disciplined, methodical, and systematic in persevering and approaching problems. This skill is also linked to a desire to do one's best and to confront problems, rather than avoiding them.

People who are inherently conflict averse, binary thinkers, micro-focused, reliant on deductive reasoning, impatient and unable to hold the tension of opposites are not good problem-solvers. In organizations, these people benefit greatly from recognizing this about themselves and finding a good thought partner to enhance their problem-solving effectiveness.