Tuesday, October 27, 2009 at 4:43PM IDEO CEO Agrees - Questions Not Answers
A NY Times interview with Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, a silicon valley design firm reinforces a critical point of six sigma problem-solving, discussed in a blog post in August 2009. In the post, I talked about the importance of good questions that provoke critical thinking. In the interview, Tim Brown espouses much the same philosophy and predilection for questions rather than answers. That’s not to suggest that answers are not important. Quite the contrary. But when the emphasis and focus are on coming up with quick answers, they’re often not the right ones because they do not address the right questions (root causes). Brown makes the case for questions over answers from a leadership perspective. The same argument, though, can be made for tactical and strategic decision-making in an organization. If there is pressure to make a decision; i.e. come up with ‘the solution’, then the tendency will be to short circuit the analytical path or worse, jump right to a solution. The pitfall with this approach to decision-making is that solutions are not sustainable because they’re not founded on solid analytics.
Good questions provoke critical thinking and inform your analytical path. Without them, you will meander down an inappropriate analytical path that will lead you to solutions that are sub-optimal or just plain wrong. Questions based on unfounded assumptions about what is at the root of a problem will lead to solutions that address symptoms rather than causes. Consider an insurance company whose customer service is consistently poor. Asking ‘how can we improve customer satisfaction ratings’ will lead to implementing better call center technology to reduce wait time and abandon rates, more training for customer service agents to ensure consistency and courtesy, and process improvements to solve problems more quickly.
Asking ‘why customer satisfaction levels are poor’, however, will provoke deeper thinking and analysis underlying the poor ratings. Such analysis might point to product complexity, inconsistent procedures for processing claims, delays in processing claims, variation in claims adjudication, and confusion among beneficiaries about their coverage. All these problems come to a head in the customer service center, but their origins lie elsewhere in the organization. So improving call center effectiveness will do little to systemically address the problems.
The importance of asking the right questions is fundamental to 6sigma problem-solving. The real benefit of implementing six sigma is the analytical rigour that is applied to answer these questions. Without good questions, though, 6sigma becomes little more than a disparate collection of tools. Lean sigma training and black belt candidate selection must therefore emphasize the importance of formulating the right questions. DMAIC is therefore much more than a methodology and set of tools.
Reader Comments (2)
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This is one of the best articles I ever read. Good questions that provoke critical thinking, are important even in our day-to-day thinking. It may help a true leader, who is looking for meaningful changes, to discover some issues that are not visible at her/his level.