E-tip No. 76 – Quickly getting to the bottom of a problem

Have you ever been stuck on a problem not knowing where to start or what to do and seemingly going round in circles?

Well often the sticking point can be the tiniest thing that once you are aware of you know what to do to move forward. And this can happen very quickly by asking just a few incisive questions.

And here are the questions to do just that…

Today’s experiment
· Ask yourself what do I want? (if you don’t know how to answer this, go here for help).
· Then, ask yourself: what stops me? And go with the first response that immediately springs to mind, whatever it is.
· Then ask yourself: What do I want instead? And go with the first response that comes up
· Then ask yourself: What stops me having/getting [insert here what you want instead from the response above]?
· And then keep repeating the two questions above until you come up with the same response, or you have an Ah-ha! moment as you discover the thing that stops you.
· If that doesn’t come up with the answer, replace what stops me? With How do I stop myself?
· You can also use this to coach your staff, co-workers, or even friends and partners to get to the bottom of a problem to enable them to move forward. Having good rapport here helps greatly. If you do it yourself, it may help the process to write down your responses.
· You could even use these questions in a team to solve problems:
o What do we want? (the outcome)
o What’s stopping us from being/having…? (e.g. a great product that people love to buy; new customers)
o What do we want instead?
o And repeat the last two questions until you get to the bottom of it – your starting point to move on.

Anthony
©Anthony Davis 2007. All Rights Reserved