Our client is a large multinational coffee company based out of Seattle, and they sell gallons of coffee an hour from thousands of locations across the globe.
People love the company and their products.
That’s not the problem.
Each year during the holidays they have a rush of people, a surge in business, not unlike most retail businesses. People full of cheer and merriment hit the streets in search of more cheer and merriment. They want pumpkin spice and gingerbread everything, and who can blame them?
That is not the problem either.
This surge in business is great for the bottom line, but it’s not without its downside. The spike in business leads to people problems. Too many customers and not enough employees. It leads to systems problems, too much traffic, not enough bandwidth. It leads to supply problems, too many orders, not enough product.
The company would love to level these sales out, less lumps, spread them across the year, that way they can manage people, systems, and supply.
Okay, so that sounds like a few problems, but what is THE problem? Spikes in customer demand. The dreaded “good problem to have,” is that it?
If your job is to find solutions, the first step is to define the problem. Drill down and keep drilling.
“A problem well stated is half solved.”
Charles Kettering
The opposite is creating solutions first and then hunting down problems to apply them to. That’s a crap shoot you want no part of.
In an earlier post I talked about moving upstream and downstream, but that only works when you’ve found problems or areas for improvement. Otherwise, you’re moving upstream and downstream of what exactly?
You can clarify the problem in several ways. For our coffee client, they need elasticity. Flexibility. For their people, their systems, their supply chain. They need ways to throttle back that holiday rush to better serve customers.
Those are three distinct domains that need their own breakdown to be solved, all stemming from the initial problem, “our stores are too busy.”
This can be hard to see from the inside, when you are caught in the thick of operations, so the technique we use is called Hiro’s New Angle from Disney’s Big Hero 6.
In order to identify and clarify problems, it’s helpful to see them in a new way. As opposed to the angle of an overwhelmed barista who just wants everyone to go away until January, we can channel some new players and see things with a fresh perspective. And you don’t even need to hire McKinsey to do it.
What would an outsider think, what would the 60-year-old “me” think, what would the 10-year-old “me” think?
If a new CEO walked in today, what would they change?
These are all versions of the same question, and they are built to provide perspective. A New Angle.
They provide the angle of somebody younger, somebody greener, maybe they have fresh ideas or will ask “dumb” questions. The older person, or the new CEO provides the angle of somebody who’s been there done that.
You can create the character, you can create the law, the type of person that you need advisement from and gain that perspective quickly and easily on your own.
As you work to solve problems in life, take the time to step back and see things from a new angle, a new perspective, and make sure you have the problem defined before you start in on solving.
It’s slower, but it takes less time, and creates better outcomes.
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