One story. 3 valuable lessons for solving your business problems

The following story teaches us three valuable lessons about creative problem solving

An Ups and Downs story

New York, New York. 1950’s. There is a manager of a large office building. He had been receiving a growing number of complaints. Tenants didn’t like the building’s elevator service, particularly during rush hours.

They didn’t like how long they had to wait. Several of the larger tenants threatened to move out unless this service improved. At this point the manager decided to look into the problem.

The manager called on a group of consultant engineers. They were experts in the design of elevator systems. After examining the situation, they decided, they identified three possible courses of action:

1. Add elevators
2. Replace some or all of the exiting elevators with faster ones
3. Add a central computerized control system. This would “route” the elevators yielding a faster service.

The engineers then conducted cost-benefit analyses of these 3 alternatives. They discovered that only adding or replacing elevators would significantly reduce waiting times.

But the cost of doing either was not justified by the earnings of the building. In effect none of the alternatives were acceptable. This left the manager with this dilemma.

The manager then did what a manager seldom does. but desperate times call for desperate measures. He consulted his subordinates.

He called a meeting of his staff and presented the problem. The meeting was to be a “brain-storming session”.

Many suggestions were made but all were dismissed. The discussion soon slowed. During the lull the new young assistant in the personnel department raised his hand. Up until this point he had been quiet. But timidly, he put forth his suggestion.

Everyone at the meeting immediately embraced the suggestion. A few weeks later, after a relatively small expenditure, the problem had disappeared. But what was the suggestion?

Well, the young assistant was a psychology graduate. He reasoned that the complaints originated from the boredom of waiting for elevators.

The actual waiting time was quite small. The waiting seemed long because of the lack of anything else to do while waiting. He gave people something to do. They could now look at themselves and others (particularly of the opposite sex) without appearing to do so. This kept the tenneants pleasantly distracted from the waiting time.

What’s the moral of the story? There are 3 lessons to learn from this story:

1. The value of interdisciplinary teams
2. Don’t try to remove what you don’t want
3. Don’t “cut a problem down to size”

1. The value of interdisciplinary teams

The more varied the backgrounds of people who examine a problem. The more perspectives from which we can view the problem. Thus, more possible solutions are available. This is the power of teams.

Interdisciplinary teams have an incredible problem solving ability.

This concept is well practiced in the military. They put together teams with soldiers of with different training skills. inter-diciplinery teams have the ability to unleash the power of the group.

Homogenous teams are not nearly as effective.

2. Don’t try to remove what you don’t want

When proble solving, we often commit the mistake made by the consultant engineers. I would suggest this mistake is so common that it is a cognitive bias.

We try to solve problems by finding the cause of deficiency. Then we try to remove or suppress the cause. This is what the USA tried to do with prohibition and what it is still doing with the war on drugs. Both of which have failed terribly.

Since President Nixon the USA has spent over $1,000,000,000,000 (trillion) on the war on drugs. It has accomplished none of its goals. Read more here.

Unfortunately, if we get rid of what we do not want, we do not necessarily obtain what we do want.

If I change a television channel by pressing up on the remote to remove a boring program. I seldom get a channel that is satisfactory.

3. Don’t “cut a problem down to size”

We often try to reduce complex situations to what appear to be one or more simple solvable problems. This is often referred to as “cutting a problem down to size”. This is what the elevator engineers tried to do. By doing so we simplify problems. This reduces our chances of finding a creative solution to an original problem.

The following method is superior:

It is much more effective to question to the self-imposed constraints we place on a problem. For example, in the elevator story the managers and engineers made a flawed assumption (a self-imposed constraint).

They assumed the problem was of waiting times. But in fact the problem was of boredom. Solving the boredom was key to effectively solving the problem. By re-examining assumptions and self-imposed constraints we can find creative solutions to problems.

The elevator allegory is taken from The Art of Problem Solving by Russell L Ackoff.