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The 5 steps of the solving problem process

August 17, 2023 by MindManager Blog

Whether you run a business, manage a team, or work in an industry where change is the norm, it may feel like something is always going wrong. Thankfully, becoming proficient in the problem solving process can alleviate a great deal of the stress that business issues can create.

Understanding the right way to solve problems not only takes the guesswork out of how to deal with difficult, unexpected, or complex situations, it can lead to more effective long-term solutions.

In this article, we’ll walk you through the 5 steps of problem solving, and help you explore a few examples of problem solving scenarios where you can see the problem solving process in action before putting it to work.

Understanding the problem solving process

When something isn’t working, it’s important to understand what’s at the root of the problem so you can fix it and prevent it from happening again. That’s why resolving difficult or complex issues works best when you apply proven business problem solving tools and techniques – from soft skills, to software.

The problem solving process typically includes:

• Pinpointing what’s broken by gathering data and consulting with team members.
• Figuring out why it’s not working by mapping out and troubleshooting the problem.
• Deciding on the most effective way to fix it by brainstorming and then implementing a solution.

While skills like active listening, collaboration, and leadership play an important role in problem solving, tools like visual mapping software make it easier to define and share problem solving objectives, play out various solutions, and even put the best fit to work.

Before you can take your first step toward solving a problem, you need to have a clear idea of what the issue is and the outcome you want to achieve by resolving it.

For example, if your company currently manufactures 50 widgets a day, but you’ve started processing orders for 75 widgets a day, you could simply say you have a production deficit.

However, the problem solving process will prove far more valuable if you define the start and end point by clarifying that production is running short by 25 widgets a day, and you need to increase daily production by 50%.

Once you know where you’re at and where you need to end up, these five steps will take you from Point A to Point B:

• Figure out what’s causing the problem . You may need to gather knowledge and evaluate input from different documents, departments, and personnel to isolate the factors that are contributing to your problem. Knowledge visualization software like MindManager can help.
• Come up with a few viable solutions . Since hitting on exactly the right solution – right away – can be tough, brainstorming with your team and mapping out various scenarios is the best way to move forward. If your first strategy doesn’t pan out, you’ll have others on tap you can turn to.
• Choose the best option . Decision-making skills, and software that lets you lay out process relationships, priorities, and criteria, are invaluable for selecting the most promising solution. Whether it’s you or someone higher up making that choice, it should include weighing costs, time commitments, and any implementation hurdles.
• Put your chosen solution to work . Before implementing your fix of choice, you should make key personnel aware of changes that might affect their daily workflow, and set up benchmarks that will make it easy to see if your solution is working.
• Evaluate your outcome . Now comes the moment of truth: did the solution you implemented solve your problem? Do your benchmarks show you achieved the outcome you wanted? If so, congratulations! If not, you’ll need to tweak your solution to meet your problem solving goal.

In practice, you might not hit a home-run with every solution you execute. But the beauty of a repeatable process like problem solving is that you can carry out steps 4 and 5 again by drawing from the brainstorm options you documented during step 2.

Examples of problem solving scenarios

The best way to get a sense of how the problem solving process works before you try it for yourself is to work through some simple scenarios.

Here are three examples of how you can apply business problem solving techniques to common workplace challenges.

Scenario #1: Manufacturing

Building on our original manufacturing example, you determine that your company is consistently short producing 25 widgets a day and needs to increase daily production by 50%.

Since you’d like to gather data and input from both your manufacturing and sales order departments, you schedule a brainstorming session to discover the root cause of the shortage.

After examining four key production areas – machines, materials, methods, and management – you determine the cause of the problem: the material used to manufacture your widgets can only be fed into your equipment once the machinery warms up to a specific temperature for the day.

Your team comes up with three possible solutions.

• Leave your machinery running 24 hours so it’s always at temperature.
• Invest in equipment that heats up faster.
• Find an alternate material for your widgets.

After weighing the expense of the first two solutions, and conducting some online research, you decide that switching to a comparable but less expensive material that can be worked at a lower temperature is your best option.

You implement your plan, monitor your widget quality and output over the following week, and declare your solution a success when daily production increases by 100%.

Scenario #2: Service Delivery

Business training is booming and you’ve had to onboard new staff over the past month. Now you learn that several clients have expressed concern about the quality of your recent training sessions.

After speaking with both clients and staff, you discover there are actually two distinct factors contributing to your quality problem:

• The additional conference room you’ve leased to accommodate your expanding training sessions has terrible acoustics
• The AV equipment you’ve purchased to accommodate your expanding workforce is on back-order – and your new hires have been making do without

You could look for a new conference room or re-schedule upcoming training sessions until after your new equipment arrives. But your team collaboratively determines that the best way to mitigate both issues at once is by temporarily renting the high-quality sound and visual system they need.

Using benchmarks that include several weeks of feedback from session attendees, and random session spot-checks you conduct personally, you conclude the solution has worked.

Scenario #3: Marketing

You’ve invested heavily in product marketing, but still can’t meet your sales goals. Specifically, you missed your revenue target by 30% last year and would like to meet that same target this year.

After collecting and examining reams of information from your sales and accounting departments, you sit down with your marketing team to figure out what’s hindering your success in the marketplace.

Determining that your product isn’t competitively priced, you map out two viable solutions.

• Hire a third-party specialist to conduct a detailed market analysis.
• Drop the price of your product to undercut competitors.

Since you’re in a hurry for results, you decide to immediately reduce the price of your product and market it accordingly.

When revenue figures for the following quarter show sales have declined even further – and marketing surveys show potential customers are doubting the quality of your product – you revert back to your original pricing, revisit your problem solving process, and implement the market analysis solution instead.

With the valuable information you gain, you finally arrive at just the right product price for your target market and sales begin to pick up. Although you miss your revenue target again this year, you meet it by the second quarter of the following year.

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The Five-Step Problem-Solving Process

Sometimes when you’re faced with a complex problem, it’s best to pause and take a step back. A break from…

Sometimes when you’re faced with a complex problem, it’s best to pause and take a step back. A break from routine will help you think creatively and objectively. Doing too much at the same time increases the chances of burnout.

Solving problems is easier when you align your thoughts with your actions. If you’re in multiple places at once mentally, you’re more likely to get overwhelmed under pressure. So, a problem-solving process follows specific steps to make it approachable and straightforward. This includes breaking down complex problems, understanding what you want to achieve, and allocating responsibilities to different people to ease some of the pressure.

The problem-solving process will help you measure your progress against factors like budget, timelines and deliverables. The point is to get the key stakeholders on the same page about the ‘what’, ‘why’ and ‘how’ of the process. ( Xanax ) Let’s discuss the five-step problem-solving process that you can adopt.

Problems at a workplace need not necessarily be situations that have a negative impact, such as a product failure or a change in government policy. Making a decision to alter the way your team works may also be a problem. Launching new products, technological upgrades, customer feedback collection exercises—all of these are also “problems” that need to be “solved”.

Here are the steps of a problem-solving process:

1. Defining the Problem

The first step in the process is often overlooked. To define the problem is to understand what it is that you’re solving for. This is also where you outline and write down your purpose—what you want to achieve and why. Making sure you know what the problem is can make it easier to follow up with the remaining steps. This will also help you identify which part of the problem needs more attention than others.

2. Analyzing the Problem

Analyze why the problem occurred and go deeper to understand the existing situation.  If it’s a product that has malfunctioned, assess factors like raw material, assembly line, and people involved to identify the problem areas. This will help you figure out if the problem will persist or recur. You can measure the solution against existing factors to assess its future viability.

3. Weighing the Options

Once you’ve figured out what the problem is and why it occurred, you can move on to generating multiple options as solutions. You can combine your existing knowledge with research and data to come up with viable and effective solutions. Thinking objectively and getting inputs from those involved in the process will broaden your perspective of the problem. You’ll be able to come up with better options if you’re open to ideas other than your own.

4. Implementing The Best Solution

Implementation will depend on the type of data at hand and other variables. Consider the big picture when you’re selecting the best option. Look at factors like how the solution will impact your budget, how soon you can implement it, and whether it can withstand setbacks or failures. If you need to make any tweaks or upgrades, make them happen in this stage.

5. Monitoring Progress

The problem-solving process doesn’t end at implementation. It requires constant monitoring to watch out for recurrences and relapses. It’s possible that something doesn’t work out as expected on implementation. To ensure the process functions smoothly, you can make changes as soon as you catch a miscalculation. Always stay on top of things by monitoring how far you’ve come and how much farther you have to go.

You can learn to solve any problem—big or small—with experience and patience. Adopt an impartial and analytical approach that has room for multiple perspectives. In the workplace, you’re often faced with situations like an unexpected system failure or a key employee quitting in the middle of a crucial project.

Problem-solving skills will help you face these situations head-on. Harappa Education’s Structuring Problems course will show you how to classify and categorize problems to discover effective solutions. Equipping yourself with the right knowledge will help you navigate work-related problems in a calm and competent manner.

Explore topics such as  Problem Solving , the  PICK Chart ,  How to Solve Problems  & the  Barriers to Problem Solving  from our Harappa Diaries blog section and develop your skills.

What is Problem Solving? (Steps, Techniques, Examples)

By Status.net Editorial Team on May 7, 2023 — 5 minutes to read

What Is Problem Solving?

Definition and importance.

Problem solving is the process of finding solutions to obstacles or challenges you encounter in your life or work. It is a crucial skill that allows you to tackle complex situations, adapt to changes, and overcome difficulties with ease. Mastering this ability will contribute to both your personal and professional growth, leading to more successful outcomes and better decision-making.

Problem-Solving Steps

The problem-solving process typically includes the following steps:

• Identify the issue : Recognize the problem that needs to be solved.
• Analyze the situation : Examine the issue in depth, gather all relevant information, and consider any limitations or constraints that may be present.
• Generate potential solutions : Brainstorm a list of possible solutions to the issue, without immediately judging or evaluating them.
• Evaluate options : Weigh the pros and cons of each potential solution, considering factors such as feasibility, effectiveness, and potential risks.
• Select the best solution : Choose the option that best addresses the problem and aligns with your objectives.
• Implement the solution : Put the selected solution into action and monitor the results to ensure it resolves the issue.
• Review and learn : Reflect on the problem-solving process, identify any improvements or adjustments that can be made, and apply these learnings to future situations.

Defining the Problem

To start tackling a problem, first, identify and understand it. Analyzing the issue thoroughly helps to clarify its scope and nature. Ask questions to gather information and consider the problem from various angles. Some strategies to define the problem include:

• Brainstorming with others
• Asking the 5 Ws and 1 H (Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How)
• Analyzing cause and effect
• Creating a problem statement

Generating Solutions

Once the problem is clearly understood, brainstorm possible solutions. Think creatively and keep an open mind, as well as considering lessons from past experiences. Consider:

• Creating a list of potential ideas to solve the problem
• Grouping and categorizing similar solutions
• Prioritizing potential solutions based on feasibility, cost, and resources required
• Involving others to share diverse opinions and inputs

Evaluating and Selecting Solutions

Evaluate each potential solution, weighing its pros and cons. To facilitate decision-making, use techniques such as:

• SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats)
• Decision-making matrices
• Pros and cons lists
• Risk assessments

After evaluating, choose the most suitable solution based on effectiveness, cost, and time constraints.

Implementing and Monitoring the Solution

Implement the chosen solution and monitor its progress. Key actions include:

• Communicating the solution to relevant parties
• Setting timelines and milestones
• Assigning tasks and responsibilities
• Monitoring the solution and making adjustments as necessary
• Evaluating the effectiveness of the solution after implementation

Utilize feedback from stakeholders and consider potential improvements. Remember that problem-solving is an ongoing process that can always be refined and enhanced.

Problem-Solving Techniques

During each step, you may find it helpful to utilize various problem-solving techniques, such as:

• Brainstorming : A free-flowing, open-minded session where ideas are generated and listed without judgment, to encourage creativity and innovative thinking.
• Root cause analysis : A method that explores the underlying causes of a problem to find the most effective solution rather than addressing superficial symptoms.
• SWOT analysis : A tool used to evaluate the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats related to a problem or decision, providing a comprehensive view of the situation.
• Mind mapping : A visual technique that uses diagrams to organize and connect ideas, helping to identify patterns, relationships, and possible solutions.

Brainstorming

When facing a problem, start by conducting a brainstorming session. Gather your team and encourage an open discussion where everyone contributes ideas, no matter how outlandish they may seem. This helps you:

• Generate a diverse range of solutions
• Encourage all team members to participate
• Foster creative thinking

When brainstorming, remember to:

• Reserve judgment until the session is over
• Encourage wild ideas
• Combine and improve upon ideas

Root Cause Analysis

For effective problem-solving, identifying the root cause of the issue at hand is crucial. Try these methods:

• 5 Whys : Ask “why” five times to get to the underlying cause.
• Fishbone Diagram : Create a diagram representing the problem and break it down into categories of potential causes.
• Pareto Analysis : Determine the few most significant causes underlying the majority of problems.

SWOT Analysis

SWOT analysis helps you examine the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats related to your problem. To perform a SWOT analysis:

• List your problem’s strengths, such as relevant resources or strong partnerships.
• Identify its weaknesses, such as knowledge gaps or limited resources.
• Explore opportunities, like trends or new technologies, that could help solve the problem.
• Recognize potential threats, like competition or regulatory barriers.

SWOT analysis aids in understanding the internal and external factors affecting the problem, which can help guide your solution.

Mind Mapping

A mind map is a visual representation of your problem and potential solutions. It enables you to organize information in a structured and intuitive manner. To create a mind map:

• Write the problem in the center of a blank page.
• Draw branches from the central problem to related sub-problems or contributing factors.
• Add more branches to represent potential solutions or further ideas.

Mind mapping allows you to visually see connections between ideas and promotes creativity in problem-solving.

Examples of Problem Solving in Various Contexts

In the business world, you might encounter problems related to finances, operations, or communication. Applying problem-solving skills in these situations could look like:

• Identifying areas of improvement in your company’s financial performance and implementing cost-saving measures
• Resolving internal conflicts among team members by listening and understanding different perspectives, then proposing and negotiating solutions
• Streamlining a process for better productivity by removing redundancies, automating tasks, or re-allocating resources

In educational contexts, problem-solving can be seen in various aspects, such as:

• Addressing a gap in students’ understanding by employing diverse teaching methods to cater to different learning styles
• Developing a strategy for successful time management to balance academic responsibilities and extracurricular activities
• Seeking resources and support to provide equal opportunities for learners with special needs or disabilities

Everyday life is full of challenges that require problem-solving skills. Some examples include:

• Overcoming a personal obstacle, such as improving your fitness level, by establishing achievable goals, measuring progress, and adjusting your approach accordingly
• Navigating a new environment or city by researching your surroundings, asking for directions, or using technology like GPS to guide you
• Dealing with a sudden change, like a change in your work schedule, by assessing the situation, identifying potential impacts, and adapting your plans to accommodate the change.
• How to Resolve Employee Conflict at Work [Steps, Tips, Examples]
• How to Write Inspiring Core Values? 5 Steps with Examples
• 30 Employee Feedback Examples (Positive & Negative)

The 5 Steps of Problem Solving

Problem solving is a critical skill for success in business – in fact it’s often what you are hired and paid to do. This article explains the five problem solving steps and provides strategies on how to execute each one.

Defining Problem Solving

Before we talk about the stages of problem solving, it’s important to have a definition of what it is. Let’s look at the two roots of problem solving — problems and solutions.

Problem – a state of desire for reaching a definite goal from a present condition [1] Solution – the management of a problem in a way that successfully meets the goals set for treating it

[1] Problem solving on Wikipedia

One important call-out is the importance of having a goal. As defined above, the solution may not completely solve problem, but it does meet the goals you establish for treating it–you may not be able to completely resolve the problem (end world hunger), but you can have a goal to help it (reduce the number of starving children by 10%).

The Five Steps of Problem Solving

With that understanding of problem solving, let’s talk about the steps that can get you there. The five problem solving steps are shown in the chart below:

However this chart as is a little misleading. Not all problems follow these steps linearly, especially for very challenging problems. Instead, you’ll likely move back and forth between the steps as you continue to work on the problem, as shown below:

Let’s explore of these steps in more detail, understanding what it is and the inputs and outputs of each phase.

1. Define the Problem

aka What are you trying to solve? In addition to getting clear on what the problem is, defining the problem also establishes a goal for what you want to achieve.

Input:  something is wrong or something could be improved. Output: a clear definition of the opportunity and a goal for fixing it.

2. Brainstorm Ideas

aka What are some ways to solve the problem? The goal is to create a list of possible solutions to choose from. The harder the problem, the more solutions you may need.

Input: a goal; research of the problem and possible solutions; imagination. Output: pick-list of possible solutions that would achieve the stated goal.

3. Decide on a Solution

aka What are you going to do? The ideal solution is effective (it will meet the goal), efficient (is affordable), and has the fewest side effects (limited consequences from implementation).

Input:  pick-list of possible solutions; decision-making criteria. Output: decision of what solution you will implement.

4. Implement the Solution

aka What are you doing? The implementation of a solution requires planning and execution. It’s often iterative, where the focus should be on short implementation cycles with testing and feedback, not trying to get it “perfect” the first time.

Input:  decision; planning; hard work. Output:  resolution to the problem.

5. Review the Results

aka What did you do? To know you successfully solved the problem, it’s important to review what worked, what didn’t and what impact the solution had. It also helps you improve long-term problem solving skills and keeps you from re-inventing the wheel.

Input:  resolutions; results of the implementation. Output: insights; case-studies; bullets on your resume.

Improving Problem Solving Skills

Once you understand the five steps of problem solving, you can build your skill level in each one. Often we’re naturally good at a couple of the phases and not as naturally good at others. Some people are great at generating ideas but struggle implementing them. Other people have great execution skills but can’t make decisions on which solutions to use. Knowing the different problem solving steps allows you to work on your weak areas, or team-up with someone who’s strengths complement yours.

Want to improve your problem solving skills? Want to perfect the art of problem solving?  Check out our training programs or try these 20 problem solving activities to improve creativity .

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22 thoughts on “The 5 Steps of Problem Solving”

very helpful and informative training

Thank you for the information

YOU ARE AFOOL

I’m writing my 7th edition of Effective Security Management. I would like to use your circular graphic illustration in a new chapter on problem solving. You’re welcome to phone me at — with attribution.

Sure thing, shoot us an email at [email protected] .

i love your presentation. It’s very clear. I think I would use it in teaching my class problem solving procedures. Thank you

It is well defined steps, thank you.

these step can you email them to me so I can print them out these steps are very helpful

I like the content of this article, it is really helpful. I would like to know much on how PAID process (i.e. Problem statement, Analyze the problem, Identify likely causes, and Define the actual causes) works in Problem Solving.

very useful information on problem solving process.Thank you for the update.

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It makes sense that a business would want to have an effective problem solving strategy. Things could get bad if they can’t find solutions! I think one of the most important things about problem solving is communication.

Well in our school teacher teach us –

1) problem ldentification 2) structuring the problem 3) looking for possible solutions 4) lmplementation 5) monitoring or seeking feedback 6) decision making

Pleace write about it …

I teach Professional communication (Speech) and I find the 5 steps to problem solving as described here the best method. Your teacher actually uses 4 steps. The Feedback and decision making are follow up to the actual implementation and solving of the problem.

i know the steps of doing some guideline for problem solving

steps are very useful to solve my problem

The steps given are very effective. Thank you for the wonderful presentation of the cycle/steps/procedure and their connections.

I like the steps for problem solving

It is very useful for solving difficult problem i would reccomend it to a friend

this is very interesting because once u have learned you will always differentiate the right from the wrong.

I like the contents of the problem solving steps. informative.

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Overview of the Problem-Solving Mental Process

Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

Rachel Goldman, PhD FTOS, is a licensed psychologist, clinical assistant professor, speaker, wellness expert specializing in eating behaviors, stress management, and health behavior change.

• Identify the Problem
• Define the Problem
• Form a Strategy
• Organize Information
• Allocate Resources
• Monitor Progress
• Evaluate the Results

Frequently Asked Questions

Problem-solving is a mental process that involves discovering, analyzing, and solving problems. The ultimate goal of problem-solving is to overcome obstacles and find a solution that best resolves the issue.

The best strategy for solving a problem depends largely on the unique situation. In some cases, people are better off learning everything they can about the issue and then using factual knowledge to come up with a solution. In other instances, creativity and insight are the best options.

It is not necessary to follow problem-solving steps sequentially, It is common to skip steps or even go back through steps multiple times until the desired solution is reached.

In order to correctly solve a problem, it is often important to follow a series of steps. Researchers sometimes refer to this as the problem-solving cycle. While this cycle is portrayed sequentially, people rarely follow a rigid series of steps to find a solution.

The following steps include developing strategies and organizing knowledge.

1. Identifying the Problem

While it may seem like an obvious step, identifying the problem is not always as simple as it sounds. In some cases, people might mistakenly identify the wrong source of a problem, which will make attempts to solve it inefficient or even useless.

Some strategies that you might use to figure out the source of a problem include :

• Asking questions about the problem
• Breaking the problem down into smaller pieces
• Looking at the problem from different perspectives
• Conducting research to figure out what relationships exist between different variables

2. Defining the Problem

After the problem has been identified, it is important to fully define the problem so that it can be solved. You can define a problem by operationally defining each aspect of the problem and setting goals for what aspects of the problem you will address

At this point, you should focus on figuring out which aspects of the problems are facts and which are opinions. State the problem clearly and identify the scope of the solution.

3. Forming a Strategy

After the problem has been identified, it is time to start brainstorming potential solutions. This step usually involves generating as many ideas as possible without judging their quality. Once several possibilities have been generated, they can be evaluated and narrowed down.

The next step is to develop a strategy to solve the problem. The approach used will vary depending upon the situation and the individual's unique preferences. Common problem-solving strategies include heuristics and algorithms.

• Heuristics are mental shortcuts that are often based on solutions that have worked in the past. They can work well if the problem is similar to something you have encountered before and are often the best choice if you need a fast solution.
• Algorithms are step-by-step strategies that are guaranteed to produce a correct result. While this approach is great for accuracy, it can also consume time and resources.

Heuristics are often best used when time is of the essence, while algorithms are a better choice when a decision needs to be as accurate as possible.

4. Organizing Information

Before coming up with a solution, you need to first organize the available information. What do you know about the problem? What do you not know? The more information that is available the better prepared you will be to come up with an accurate solution.

When approaching a problem, it is important to make sure that you have all the data you need. Making a decision without adequate information can lead to biased or inaccurate results.

5. Allocating Resources

Of course, we don't always have unlimited money, time, and other resources to solve a problem. Before you begin to solve a problem, you need to determine how high priority it is.

If it is an important problem, it is probably worth allocating more resources to solving it. If, however, it is a fairly unimportant problem, then you do not want to spend too much of your available resources on coming up with a solution.

At this stage, it is important to consider all of the factors that might affect the problem at hand. This includes looking at the available resources, deadlines that need to be met, and any possible risks involved in each solution. After careful evaluation, a decision can be made about which solution to pursue.

6. Monitoring Progress

After selecting a problem-solving strategy, it is time to put the plan into action and see if it works. This step might involve trying out different solutions to see which one is the most effective.

It is also important to monitor the situation after implementing a solution to ensure that the problem has been solved and that no new problems have arisen as a result of the proposed solution.

Effective problem-solvers tend to monitor their progress as they work towards a solution. If they are not making good progress toward reaching their goal, they will reevaluate their approach or look for new strategies .

7. Evaluating the Results

After a solution has been reached, it is important to evaluate the results to determine if it is the best possible solution to the problem. This evaluation might be immediate, such as checking the results of a math problem to ensure the answer is correct, or it can be delayed, such as evaluating the success of a therapy program after several months of treatment.

Once a problem has been solved, it is important to take some time to reflect on the process that was used and evaluate the results. This will help you to improve your problem-solving skills and become more efficient at solving future problems.

A Word From Verywell​

It is important to remember that there are many different problem-solving processes with different steps, and this is just one example. Problem-solving in real-world situations requires a great deal of resourcefulness, flexibility, resilience, and continuous interaction with the environment.

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You can become a better problem solving by:

• Practicing brainstorming and coming up with multiple potential solutions to problems
• Being open-minded and considering all possible options before making a decision
• Breaking down problems into smaller, more manageable pieces
• Asking for help when needed
• Researching different problem-solving techniques and trying out new ones
• Learning from mistakes and using them as opportunities to grow

It's important to communicate openly and honestly with your partner about what's going on. Try to see things from their perspective as well as your own. Work together to find a resolution that works for both of you. Be willing to compromise and accept that there may not be a perfect solution.

Take breaks if things are getting too heated, and come back to the problem when you feel calm and collected. Don't try to fix every problem on your own—consider asking a therapist or counselor for help and insight.

If you've tried everything and there doesn't seem to be a way to fix the problem, you may have to learn to accept it. This can be difficult, but try to focus on the positive aspects of your life and remember that every situation is temporary. Don't dwell on what's going wrong—instead, think about what's going right. Find support by talking to friends or family. Seek professional help if you're having trouble coping.

Davidson JE, Sternberg RJ, editors.  The Psychology of Problem Solving .  Cambridge University Press; 2003. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511615771

Sarathy V. Real world problem-solving .  Front Hum Neurosci . 2018;12:261. Published 2018 Jun 26. doi:10.3389/fnhum.2018.00261

By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

Brain Power

5 steps (and 4 techniques) for effective problem solving.

Problem solving is the process of reviewing every element of an issue so you can get to a solution or fix it. Problem solving steps cover multiple aspects of a problem that you can bring together to find a solution. Whether that’s in a group collaboratively or independently, the process remains the same, but the approach and the steps can differ.

To find a problem solving approach that works for you, your team, or your company, you have to take into consideration the environment you’re in and the personalities around you.

Knowing the characters in the room will help you decide on the best approach to try and ultimately get to the best solution.

Table of Contents

5 problem solving steps, 4 techniques to encourage problem solving, the bottom line.

No matter what the problem is, to solve it, you nearly always have to follow these problem solving steps. Missing any of these steps can cause the problem to either resurface or the solution to not be implemented correctly.

Once you know these steps, you can then get creative with the approach you take to find the solutions you need.

1. Define the Problem

You must define and understand the problem before you start, whether you’re solving it independently or as a group. If you don’t have a single view of what the problem is, you could be fixing something that doesn’t need fixing, or you’ll fix the wrong problem.

Spend time elaborating on the problem, write it down, and discuss everything, so you’re clear on why the problem is occurring and who it is impacting.

Once you have clarity on the problem, you then need to start thinking about every possible solution . This is where you go big and broad, as you want to come up with as many alternative solutions as possible. Don’t just take the first idea; build out as many as you can through active listening, as the more you create, the more likely you’ll find a solution that has the best impact on the team.

3. Decide on a Solution

Whichever solution you pick individually or as a team, make sure you think about the impact on others if you implement this solution. Ask questions like:

• How will they react to this change?
• Will they need to change anything?
• Who do we need to inform of this change?

4. Implement the Solution

At this stage of problem solving, be prepared for feedback, and plan for this. When you roll out the solution, request feedback on the success of the change made.

5. Review, Iterate, and Improve

Making a change shouldn’t be a one time action. Spend time reviewing the results of the change to make sure it’s made the required impact and met the desired outcomes.

Make changes where needed so you can further improve the solution implemented.

Each individual or team is going to have different needs and may need a different technique to encourage each of the problem solving steps. Try one of these to stimulate the process.

1-2-4 All Approach + Voting

The 1-2-4-All is a good problem solving approach that can work no matter how large the group is. Everyone is involved, and you can generate a vast amount of ideas quickly.

Ideas and solutions are discussed and organized rapidly, and what is great about this approach is the attendees own their ideas, so when it comes to implementing the solutions, you don’t have more work to gain buy-in.

As a facilitator, you first need to present the group with a question explaining the problem or situation. For example, “What actions or ideas would you recommend to solve the company’s lack of quiet working areas?”

With the question clear for all to see, the group then spends 5 minutes to reflect on the question individually. They can jot down their thoughts and ideas on Post-Its.

Now ask the participants to find one or two other people to discuss their ideas and thoughts with. Ask the group to move around to find a partner so they can mix with new people.

Ask the pairs to spend 5 minutes discussing their shared ideas and thoughts.

Next, put the group into groups of two or three pairs to make groups of 4-6. Each group shouldn’t be larger than six as the chances of everyone being able to speak reduces.

Ask the group to discuss one interesting idea they’ve heard in previous rounds, and each group member shares one each.

The group then needs to pick their preferred solution to the problem. This doesn’t have to be voted on, just one that resonated most with the group.

Then ask for three actions that could be taken to implement this change.

Bring everyone back together as a group and ask open questions like “What is the one thing you discussed that stood out for you?” or “Is there something you now see differently following these discussions?”

By the end of the session, you’ll have multiple approaches to solve the problem, and the whole group will have contributed to the future solutions and improvements.

The Lightning Decision Jam

The Lightning Decision Jam is a great way to solve problems collaboratively and agree on one solution or experiment you want to try straight away. It encourages team decision making, but at the same time, the individual can get their ideas and feedback across. [1]

If, as a team, you have a particular area you want to improve upon, like the office environment, for example, this approach is perfect to incorporate in the problem solving steps.

The approach follows a simple loop.

Make a Note – Stick It on The Wall – Vote – Prioritize

Using sticky notes, the technique identifies major problems, encourages solutions, and opens the group up for discussion. It allows each team member to play an active role in identifying both problems and ways to solve them.

Mind Mapping

Mind mapping is a fantastic visual thinking tool that allows you to bring problems to life by building out the connections and visualizing the relationships that make up the problem.

You can use a mind map to quickly expand upon the problem and give yourself the full picture of the causes of the problem, as well as solutions [2] .

The goal of a mind map is to simplify the problem and link the causes and solutions to the problem.

To create a mind map, you must first create the central topic (level 1). In this case, that’s the problem.

Next, create the linked topics (level 2) that you place around and connect to the main central topic with a simple line.

If the central topic is “The client is always changing their mind at the last minute,” then you could have linked topics like:

• How often does this happen?
• Why are they doing this?
• What are they asking for?
• How do they ask for it?
• What impact does this have?

Adding these linking topics allows you to start building out the main causes of the problem as you can begin to see the full picture of what you need to fix. Once you’re happy that you’ve covered the breadth of the problem and its issues, you can start to ideate on how you’re going to fix it with the problem solving steps.

Now, start adding subtopics (level 3) linking to each of the level 2 topics. This is where you can start to go big on solutions and ideas to help fix the problem.

For each of the linked topics (level 2), start to think about how you can prevent them, mitigate them, or improve them. As this is just ideas on paper, write down anything that comes to mind, even if you think the client will never agree to it!

The more you write down, the more ideas you’ll have until you find one or two that could solve the main problem.

Once you run out of ideas, take a step back and highlight your favorite solutions to take forward and implement.

The 5 Why’s

The five why’s can sound a little controversial, and you shouldn’t try this without prepping the team beforehand.

Asking “why” is a great way to go deep into the root of the problem to make the individual or team really think about the cause. When a problem arises, we often have preconceived ideas about why this problem has occurred, which is usually based on our experiences or beliefs.

Start with describing the problem, and then the facilitator can ask “Why?” fives time or more until you get to the root of the problem. It’s tough at first to keep being asked why, but it’s also satisfying when you get to the root of the problem [3] .

As a facilitator, although the basic approach is to ask why, you need to be careful not to guide the participant down a single route.

To help with this, you can use a mind map with the problem at the center. Then ask a why question that will result in multiple secondary topics around the central problem. Having this visual representation of the problem helps you build out more useful why questions around it.

Once you get to the root of the problem, don’t forget to be clear in the actions to put a fix in place to resolve it.

Learn more about how to use the five why’s here .

To fix a problem, you must first be in a position where you fully understand it. There are many ways to misinterpret a problem, and the best way to understand them is through conversation with the team or individuals who are experiencing it.

Once you’re aligned, you can then begin to work on the solutions that will have the greatest impact through effective problem solving steps.

For the more significant or difficult problems to solve, it’s often advisable to break the solution up into smaller actions or improvements.

Trial these improvements in short iterations, and then continue the conversations to review and improve the solution. Implementing all of these steps will help you root out the problems and find useful solutions each time.

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Five Steps To Create a Problem-Solving Process (Plus Tips!)

8 min read · Updated on August 31, 2023

Conquering workplace challenges fuses strategy and art

Sometimes, it can seem that obstacles are as prevalent as opportunities. When you're good at solving problems, though, you have the power to navigate issues with relative ease. In fact, problem solving is more than a skill - it's a tool that you can use to fuel career growth and success. 

As an effective problem solver, you use innovative thinking, demonstrate leadership, and build resilience and confidence. Often, the people you work with come to trust that you're the person to go to when there's a challenge. This could be just the stepping stone you need to move into a leadership role . 

Of course, problems range in complexity depending on your industry. But by having a five-step problem-solving process in place, you can enhance both efficiency and effectiveness. In this article, we'll explore tips to help you master the skill, strategy, and art of problem solving.

Identify, analyze, resolve, execute, evaluate

What's the definition of problem solving? It's quite simple. You have to come up with solutions to challenges or issues. 

The first step to fixing any problem is recognizing that there is one. Then the trick is to engage with each step of the problem-solving process to incorporate analytical thinking , adaptability, and collaboration skills to build a framework for addressing challenges and driving positive outcomes. 

Step 1: Identify

Identifying the problem may be simple, or it could be a detailed cognitive process that breaks the issue into manageable components. Either way, what you do during the identify step of the problem-solving process sets the stage for the next steps in problem solving. 

Step 2: Analyze

Consider underlying factors and devise strategies. Here's where the art part of your problem-solving strategy becomes important. As you gather details about the problem, employ critical thinking to uncover the root causes and potential implications. 

Step 3: Resolve

Once you have a thorough understanding of the issue, it's time to get creative. Develop some reasonable solutions that are aligned with the capabilities of your team and the mission, vision, and values of your company. Your problem-solving method could involve any one of the following - or even a combination of several:

Encourage your team to learn new technologies

Reallocate some resources

Restructure organizational elements

Draft new operating procedures

Implement brainstorming sessions

Develop metrics 

Step 4: Execute

After you've outlined the solutions and decided which ones you think will resolve the problem, it's time to put them into place. The execution phase is the bridge between theory and practice. 

Translate the solutions into actionable steps that produce tangible results

Clearly communicate the actionable steps to the relevant stakeholders - your team, colleagues, or managers

Delegate tasks based on team member acumen

Empower those you delegate tasks to by fostering a sense of ownership

Track the progress of your solutions

Overcome challenges, including unforeseen obstacles and stakeholder resistance

Step 5: Evaluate

Just because you think you solved the problem doesn't mean you actually did. It's critical to double-check your work and make sure there are no hiccups. Here's a list of 10 evaluative questions you can work through, to ensure that your problem-solving solutions were impactful:

Did the solutions effectively address the root cause of the problem?

Do you see the desired results? 

What impact can you see on your team or the company?

Has there been a noticeable enhancement in efficiency, productivity, or overall performance?

Have any unintended consequences or new challenges arisen as a result of the implemented solution?

Can the solution be sustained in the long term, or is it a short-term fix?

Have stakeholders, such as team members or customers, reported positive experiences or feedback?

Have the predefined performance metrics and goals been achieved or exceeded?

Are there any new aspects of the problem that emerged after implementing the solution?

Which aspects of the solution would you retain and which would you modify?

When you reflect on the outcome of your problem solving strategies, you not only validate the effectiveness of your approach but you can also find insights for continuous improvement and refinement for future endeavors. 

Problem solving isn't just for leaders

Sometimes, it seems that only managers and senior executives can engage in effective workplace problem solving. That's simply not the case. It doesn't matter if you're a fresher who's just graduated college or someone with decades of experience, you can employ problem-solving techniques and become a master problem solver. 

You've likely heard of hard skills and soft skills ; you may have even seen problem solving lumped in with other soft skills. There are three essential soft skills you'll need to be good at to solve workplace problems:

Analytical thinking

Adaptability, collaboration.

Let's start with a foundational problem-solving skill. Analytical thinking is something you'll use in every step of your five-step problem-solving process, from identifying the problem to coming up with and executing solutions and measuring the success of those solutions. Being able to analyze trends, anticipate shifts, and make informed decisions along the problem-solving path, you'll be assured of success. 

A real-world example: Sally is a new graduate and has secured her first job. After a few days at work, she wants to start making a name for herself by identifying a dip in sales. She dissects the customer engagement data and finds there has been a shift in consumer preferences. She knows that a new targeted marketing strategy could re-engage customers and bring sales back up. 

Toss aside any notions that the plans you set into place to solve a problem are set in stone. They're not! Being able to make course corrections to change outcomes is at the heart of being adaptable . This soft skill becomes more and more important every day because of how quickly things change in business. Technology advances, economic fluctuations come into play, and unforeseen global events can wreak havoc on the best-laid problem-solving solutions. Think about how adaptable people had to be a few years ago when Covid shut the world down – there were tons of never-before-faced problems that ultimately got solved. 

A real-world example : John has been employed in the technology sector for a little over 20 years. He's achieved the coveted role of CTO and found himself overseeing a team that had to transition into remote work. Because he's kept up with emerging technologies and the latest trends, he sets up processes that allow his team to enjoy a seamless shift with minimal impact on productivity.

When you have a problem-solving project in front of you, you'll often have to get people involved to help you to execute the solutions you come up with. Effective communication , organizational synergy, and a harmonious fusion of experiences can lend fresh insights to problem solving. 

A real-world example: Marcus is involved in a complex project involving supply chain optimization. He works with geographically-dispersed stakeholders of all levels and has become an expert at pooling together specialized knowledge to create holistic solutions. 

How do great problem-solving skills affect your career goals?

Challenges in life and at work are inevitable; by aligning your problem-solving skills with your career goals, not only will you be able to overcome immediate challenges, but you'll also cultivate a powerful tool for your job search toolkit. When you're good at solving problems and can show that you're good at it through accomplishment statements on your resume, your career trajectory will likely be positively impacted. In fact, there are several success stories that prove the journey to excellence is marked by innovative problem solving. Here are just a few:

Elon Musk: Musk's SpaceX faced immense challenges in developing reusable rockets. His innovative, problem-solving approach led to breakthrough solutions, revolutionizing space travel.

Indra Nooyi: As the former CEO of PepsiCo, Nooyi tackled the declining demand for sugary beverages by diversifying the product portfolio and focusing on healthier options, showcasing adaptability and strategic problem solving.

Nelson Mandela: Mandela's ability to collaborate across racial divides and negotiate solutions was instrumental in ending apartheid in South Africa.

Grace Hopper: A computer science pioneer, Hopper's analytical thinking led to the development of the first compiler, revolutionizing programming.

An invaluable asset

As you progress in your career, your skill in resolving a problem will set you apart from the rest of the job-seeking crowd as an invaluable asset. Whether you're identifying opportunities for growth, addressing operational inefficiencies, or strategizing through crises, the ability to solve problems creatively and effectively can become one of the key drivers for the advancement of your career. Essentially, strong problem-solving skills empower you to overcome challenges, seize opportunities, and carve a path of consistent achievement in your professional journey.

TopResume can help you to showcase exceptional problem-solving skills on your resume. Why not submit yours for a free resume review today, to make sure that you're giving this skill the prominence it deserves?

Recommended reading:

How to List Problem Solving Skills on a Resume

Divergent Thinking: Should You Include This Skill on Your Resume?

Higher Order Thinking Explained

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Problem Solving Steps

Generally there are five widely accepted steps in the problem solving process:

• Define the problem
• Gather facts
• Generate alternate options
• Evaluate and implement most appropriate option
• Monitor solution and evaluate result

The first step is the most difficult of all and is covered in the next section. After the problem has been sufficiently defined, you gather factual information, who, what, when, and where. Then you generate alternative options bringing in other people who might have a different problem solving style. Next you evaluate the types of solutions presented, weighing the advantages and and disadvantages against the goals you have for what you have defined as the problem. Then you implement. Finally and equally important, monitor the implementation and evaluate your results.

Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License

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The Art of Effective Problem Solving: A Step-by-Step Guide

Author: Daniel Croft

Daniel Croft is an experienced continuous improvement manager with a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt and a Bachelor's degree in Business Management. With more than ten years of experience applying his skills across various industries, Daniel specializes in optimizing processes and improving efficiency. His approach combines practical experience with a deep understanding of business fundamentals to drive meaningful change.

Whether we realise it or not, problem solving skills are an important part of our daily lives. From resolving a minor annoyance at home to tackling complex business challenges at work, our ability to solve problems has a significant impact on our success and happiness. However, not everyone is naturally gifted at problem-solving, and even those who are can always improve their skills. In this blog post, we will go over the art of effective problem-solving step by step.

You will learn how to define a problem, gather information, assess alternatives, and implement a solution, all while honing your critical thinking and creative problem-solving skills. Whether you’re a seasoned problem solver or just getting started, this guide will arm you with the knowledge and tools you need to face any challenge with confidence. So let’s get started!

Problem Solving Methodologies

Individuals and organisations can use a variety of problem-solving methodologies to address complex challenges. 8D and A3 problem solving techniques are two popular methodologies in the Lean Six Sigma framework.

Methodology of 8D (Eight Discipline) Problem Solving:

The 8D problem solving methodology is a systematic, team-based approach to problem solving. It is a method that guides a team through eight distinct steps to solve a problem in a systematic and comprehensive manner.

The 8D process consists of the following steps:

• Form a team: Assemble a group of people who have the necessary expertise to work on the problem.
• Define the issue: Clearly identify and define the problem, including the root cause and the customer impact.
• Create a temporary containment plan: Put in place a plan to lessen the impact of the problem until a permanent solution can be found.
• Identify the root cause: To identify the underlying causes of the problem, use root cause analysis techniques such as Fishbone diagrams and Pareto charts.
• Create and test long-term corrective actions: Create and test a long-term solution to eliminate the root cause of the problem.
• Implement and validate the permanent solution: Implement and validate the permanent solution’s effectiveness.
• Prevent recurrence: Put in place measures to keep the problem from recurring.
• Recognize and reward the team: Recognize and reward the team for its efforts.

Download the 8D Problem Solving Template

A3 Problem Solving Method:

The A3 problem solving technique is a visual, team-based problem-solving approach that is frequently used in Lean Six Sigma projects. The A3 report is a one-page document that clearly and concisely outlines the problem, root cause analysis, and proposed solution.

The A3 problem-solving procedure consists of the following steps:

• Determine the issue: Define the issue clearly, including its impact on the customer.
• Perform root cause analysis: Identify the underlying causes of the problem using root cause analysis techniques.
• Create and implement a solution: Create and implement a solution that addresses the problem’s root cause.
• Monitor and improve the solution: Keep an eye on the solution’s effectiveness and make any necessary changes.

Subsequently, in the Lean Six Sigma framework, the 8D and A3 problem solving methodologies are two popular approaches to problem solving. Both methodologies provide a structured, team-based problem-solving approach that guides individuals through a comprehensive and systematic process of identifying, analysing, and resolving problems in an effective and efficient manner.

Step 1 – Define the Problem

The definition of the problem is the first step in effective problem solving. This may appear to be a simple task, but it is actually quite difficult. This is because problems are frequently complex and multi-layered, making it easy to confuse symptoms with the underlying cause. To avoid this pitfall, it is critical to thoroughly understand the problem.

To begin, ask yourself some clarifying questions:

• What exactly is the issue?
• What are the problem’s symptoms or consequences?
• Who or what is impacted by the issue?
• When and where does the issue arise?

Answering these questions will assist you in determining the scope of the problem. However, simply describing the problem is not always sufficient; you must also identify the root cause. The root cause is the underlying cause of the problem and is usually the key to resolving it permanently.

Try asking “why” questions to find the root cause:

• What causes the problem?
• Why does it continue?
• Why does it have the effects that it does?

By repeatedly asking “ why ,” you’ll eventually get to the bottom of the problem. This is an important step in the problem-solving process because it ensures that you’re dealing with the root cause rather than just the symptoms.

Once you have a firm grasp on the issue, it is time to divide it into smaller, more manageable chunks. This makes tackling the problem easier and reduces the risk of becoming overwhelmed. For example, if you’re attempting to solve a complex business problem, you might divide it into smaller components like market research, product development, and sales strategies.

To summarise step 1, defining the problem is an important first step in effective problem-solving. You will be able to identify the root cause and break it down into manageable parts if you take the time to thoroughly understand the problem. This will prepare you for the next step in the problem-solving process, which is gathering information and brainstorming ideas.

Step 2 – Gather Information and Brainstorm Ideas

Gathering information and brainstorming ideas is the next step in effective problem solving. This entails researching the problem and relevant information, collaborating with others, and coming up with a variety of potential solutions. This increases your chances of finding the best solution to the problem.

Begin by researching the problem and relevant information. This could include reading articles, conducting surveys, or consulting with experts. The goal is to collect as much information as possible in order to better understand the problem and possible solutions.

Next, work with others to gather a variety of perspectives. Brainstorming with others can be an excellent way to come up with new and creative ideas. Encourage everyone to share their thoughts and ideas when working in a group, and make an effort to actively listen to what others have to say. Be open to new and unconventional ideas and resist the urge to dismiss them too quickly.

Finally, use brainstorming to generate a wide range of potential solutions. This is the place where you can let your imagination run wild. At this stage, don’t worry about the feasibility or practicality of the solutions; instead, focus on generating as many ideas as possible. Write down everything that comes to mind, no matter how ridiculous or unusual it may appear. This can be done individually or in groups.

Once you’ve compiled a list of potential solutions, it’s time to assess them and select the best one. This is the next step in the problem-solving process, which we’ll go over in greater detail in the following section.

Step 3 – Evaluate Options and Choose the Best Solution

Once you’ve compiled a list of potential solutions, it’s time to assess them and select the best one. This is the third step in effective problem solving, and it entails weighing the advantages and disadvantages of each solution, considering their feasibility and practicability, and selecting the solution that is most likely to solve the problem effectively.

To begin, weigh the advantages and disadvantages of each solution. This will assist you in determining the potential outcomes of each solution and deciding which is the best option. For example, a quick and easy solution may not be the most effective in the long run, whereas a more complex and time-consuming solution may be more effective in solving the problem in the long run.

Consider each solution’s feasibility and practicability. Consider the following:

• Can the solution be implemented within the available resources, time, and budget?
• What are the possible barriers to implementing the solution?
• Is the solution feasible in today’s political, economic, and social environment?

You’ll be able to tell which solutions are likely to succeed and which aren’t by assessing their feasibility and practicability.

Finally, choose the solution that is most likely to effectively solve the problem. This solution should be based on the criteria you’ve established, such as the advantages and disadvantages of each solution, their feasibility and practicability, and your overall goals.

It is critical to remember that there is no one-size-fits-all solution to problems. What is effective for one person or situation may not be effective for another. This is why it is critical to consider a wide range of solutions and evaluate each one based on its ability to effectively solve the problem.

Step 4 – Implement and Monitor the Solution

When you’ve decided on the best solution, it’s time to put it into action. The fourth and final step in effective problem solving is to put the solution into action, monitor its progress, and make any necessary adjustments.

To begin, implement the solution. This may entail delegating tasks, developing a strategy, and allocating resources. Ascertain that everyone involved understands their role and responsibilities in the solution’s implementation.

Next, keep an eye on the solution’s progress. This may entail scheduling regular check-ins, tracking metrics, and soliciting feedback from others. You will be able to identify any potential roadblocks and make any necessary adjustments in a timely manner if you monitor the progress of the solution.

Finally, make any necessary modifications to the solution. This could entail changing the solution, altering the plan of action, or delegating different tasks. Be willing to make changes if they will improve the solution or help it solve the problem more effectively.

It’s important to remember that problem solving is an iterative process, and there may be times when you need to start from scratch. This is especially true if the initial solution does not effectively solve the problem. In these situations, it’s critical to be adaptable and flexible and to keep trying new solutions until you find the one that works best.

To summarise, effective problem solving is a critical skill that can assist individuals and organisations in overcoming challenges and achieving their objectives. Effective problem solving consists of four key steps: defining the problem, generating potential solutions, evaluating alternatives and selecting the best solution, and implementing the solution.

You can increase your chances of success in problem solving by following these steps and considering factors such as the pros and cons of each solution, their feasibility and practicability, and making any necessary adjustments. Furthermore, keep in mind that problem solving is an iterative process, and there may be times when you need to go back to the beginning and restart. Maintain your adaptability and try new solutions until you find the one that works best for you.

• Novick, L.R. and Bassok, M., 2005.  Problem Solving . Cambridge University Press.

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Daniel Croft

Daniel Croft is a seasoned continuous improvement manager with a Black Belt in Lean Six Sigma. With over 10 years of real-world application experience across diverse sectors, Daniel has a passion for optimizing processes and fostering a culture of efficiency. He's not just a practitioner but also an avid learner, constantly seeking to expand his knowledge. Outside of his professional life, Daniel has a keen Investing, statistics and knowledge-sharing, which led him to create the website www.learnleansigma.com, a platform dedicated to Lean Six Sigma and process improvement insights.

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The better your problem-solving skills are, the better (and easier!) your life will be. Organized problem-solving is a killer career skill - learn all about it here.

Whether we’re trying to solve a technical problem at work, or trying to navigate around a roadblock that Google Maps doesn’t see – most people are problem-solving every single day . 

But how effective are you at tackling the challenges in your life? Do you have a bullet-proof process you follow that ensures solid outcomes, or... Do you act on a whim of inspiration (or lack thereof) to resolve your pressing problems?

Here’s the thing: the better your problem-solving skills are - the better (and easier!) your life will be (both professionally and personally). Organized problem-solving is a killer career (and life!) skill, so if you want to learn how to do it in the most efficient way possible, you’ve come to the right place.  

Read along to learn more about the steps, techniques and exercises of the problem-solving process.

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What is Problem-Solving?

We’re faced with the reality of having to solve problems every day, both in our private and professional lives. So why do we even need to learn about problem-solving? Aren’t we versed in it well enough already?

Well, what separates problem-solving from dealing with the usual day-to-day issues is that it’s a distinct process that allows you to go beyond the standard approaches to solving a problem and allows you to come up with more effective and efficient solutions. Or in other words, problem-solving allows you to knock out those problems with less effort. 

Just like with any other skill, there’s an efficient way to solve problems, and a non-efficient one. While it might be tempting to go for the quickest fix for your challenge without giving it much thought, it will only end up costing you more time down the road. Quick fixes are rarely (if ever!) effective and end up being massive time wasters. 

What separates problem-solving from dealing with the usual day-to-day issues is that it’s a distinct process that allows you to go beyond the standard approaches to solving a problem and allows you to come up with more effective and efficient solutions.

On the other hand, following a systemized clear process for problem-solving allows you to shortcut inefficiencies and time-wasters, turn your challenges into opportunities, and tackle problems of any scope without the usual stress and hassle. 

What is the process that you need to follow, then? We’re glad you asked...

The Five Stages of Problem-Solving

So what’s the best way to move through the problem-solving process? There’s a 5-step process that you can follow that will allow you to solve your challenges more efficiently and effectively. In short, you need to move through these 5 steps: 

• Defining a problem
• Ideating on a solution
• Committing to a course of action
• Implementing your solution
• And finally – analyzing the results. 

Let’s look at each of those stages in detail.

Step 1: Defining The Problem

The first step might sound obvious, but trust us, you don’t want to skip it! Clearly defining and framing your challenge will help you guide your efforts and make sure you’re focussing on the things that matter, instead of being distracted by a myriad of other options, problems and issues that come up. 

For once, you have to make sure you’re trying to solve the root cause, and not trying to mend the symptoms of it. For instance, if you keep losing users during your app onboarding process, you might jump to the conclusion that you need to tweak the process itself: change the copy, the screens, or the sequence of steps.

But unless you have clear evidence that confirms your hypothesis, your challenge might have an entirely different root cause, e.g. in confusing marketing communication prior to the app download. 

Clearly defining and framing your challenge will help you guide your efforts and make sure you’re focussing on the things that matter, all the while ensuring that you’re trying to solve the root cause, and not trying to mend the symptoms of it

That’s why it’s essential you take a close look at the entire problem, not just at a fraction of it.

There are several exercises that can help you get a broader, more holistic view of the problem, some of our all-time favorites include Expert Interviews, How Might We, or The Map. Check out the step-by-step instructions on how to run them (along with 5 more exercises for framing your challenge!) here. 

When in doubt, map out your challenge, and always try to tackle the bottlenecks that are more upstream - it’s likely that solving them will solve a couple of other challenges down the flow.

You also have to be mindful of how you frame the challenge: resist the urge to include a pre-defined solution into your problem statement. Priming your solutions to a predestined outcome destroys the purpose of following a step-by-step process in the first place!  

Steer clear of formulations like:

We need to change the onboarding process... or We need to improve ad copy to increase conversions. 

Instead, opt for more neutral, problem-oriented statements that don’t include a solution suggestion in them:

The drop off rate during the onboarding process is too high or Our ad conversion rates are below the norm.

Pro tip: Reframing your challenge as a ‘How Might We’ statement is a great way to spark up new ideas, opening your problem to a broader set of solutions, and is just a great way to reframe your problem into a more positive statement (without implying the possible solution!)

For example, following the onboarding drop-off rate problem we mentioned earlier, instead of framing it as a problem, you could opt for:

How Might We decrease the drop-off rate during the onboarding process? 

Find out more about the best exercises for problem framing here!

Now that you have a clear idea of what you’re trying to solve, it’s move on to the next phase of the problem-solving process.

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Step 2: ideating a solution.

Get ready to roll up your sleeves and challenge the status quo! This step of the problem-solving process is all about thinking outside of the box, challenging old assumptions, and thinking laterally. 

This stage is the one that tends to cause the most overwhelm in teams because it requires just the right balance of creativity and critical thinking, which tends to cause a lot of friction.

Our best advice?

Let go of the pressure to produce a polished, thought-through solution at this stage. You can hash out the details at a later point. Our goal right now is to come up with a direction, a prototype if you may, of where we want to move towards. 

Embrace the “quantity over quality” motto, and let your creative juices flow! Now, we’re not saying you should roll with sub-par ideas. But you shouldn’t get too fixated on feasibility and viability just yet . 

Your main goal during this step is to spark ideas, kick off your thinking process in the right direction, venture out of the familiar territories and think outside the box. 

For the ideation to be the most effective your team will have to feel safe to challenge the norm and wide-spread assumptions. So lay judgment by side, there is no space for “that’s the way it’s always been done” in this step.

For your ideation sessions to be as efficient as possible, we highly recommend to run them in a workshop setting: this helps reduce the usual drawbacks of open discussions in teams (i.e. groupthink & team politics!)

Our favorite exercises to run during this phase include Lightning Demos, Sketching, and variations of Brainstorming.  We crafted an entire article on how to run and facilitate these exercises in a separate article, so check it out of you’re going to be running an ideation session anytime soon!

Step 3: Choosing the Best Strategy & Committing

It’s time to decide which of the ideas that you generated in the last step will be the one you’ll implement. 

This step is arguably the hardest one to complete smoothly: groupthink, team politics, differences in opinions and communication styles all make it very hard to align a team on a common course of action. 

If you want to avoid the usual pitfalls of team decision-making, we recommend you steer clear of open unstructured discussion. While it’s useful in some scenarios, it’s a poor choice for when you need to make a decision, because it tends to reward the loudest people in the room, rather than give way to the best ideas. 

It’s crucial you not only commit to a course of action but get full buy-in from the team. If your team members don’t understand the reasons for a decision, or are not fully onboard, the implementation of your decision will be half-hearted, and that’s definitely not what you want! 

To achieve that, opt for anonymized, multi-layered voting, and include guided exercises like Storyboarding to prioritize your ideas. 

We’ve gathered the list of our top-rated decision-making exercises, along with step-by-step instructions on how to run them in this article!

As a bonus tip, we recommend you involve a facilitator throughout the entire process. They will help align the team, and guide them through prioritizing and de-prioritizing solutions, as well as defining the next steps. 

Pro tip : If you’re not the ultimate decision maker on the issue you’re trying to solve, make sure they’re in the room when the call is being made! Having a Decider in the room ensures that the decisions you come to will actually get executed on after, instead of getting shut down by your superiors after. 

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Step 4: implementing your solution.

Here’s a truth that might be hard to swallow: it doesn’t matter how innovative, creative, or original your idea is, if your execution is weak. 

One of our favourite illustrations of how this works in practice comes from the book “ Anything you want ” by Derek Sivers. He reveals that ideas should be treated as multipliers of execution. What this means is that a mediocre, “so-so” idea could be worth millions if executed well, while a “brilliant” idea can completely flop with bad execution. 

That’s why this step is crucial if you want to really master the problem-solving process. 

What do we mean by execution? Everything that happens after the whiteboards are wiped clean and your team starts to action the outcomes of your sessions, be it prototyping, development, or promotion. 

But don’t just take our word for it, look at the example of how execution affected Nintendo’s sales:

In the past few years, Nintendo has come up with 3 products: the Wii, the Wii U and the Switch. Check out their sales figures on the graph below - Wii is the clear-cut leader, followed by Switch, and finally Wii U lagging behind.

The Wii was unbelievably successful - it was a genuinely unique, “brilliant”-level idea and it had a “brilliant” execution (20x $10 million = $200 million). It is  one of the fastest selling game consoles of all time and it completely took over the market.

The next product was called Wii U and it was a “great” concept but the execution was absolutely terrible. So even though this product was very interesting and innovative, the end result was 15x $1,000 = $15,000. 

Finally, Nintendo took the Wii U concept and tried it again with the Switch. The idea was “so so” as it was already done before, but the execution was “brilliant”. So, 5x $10 million = $50 million! Much better.

Bottom line?  

The same idea can either make no dent in the market and damage your share price OR become a market hit and increase your share price dramatically. The only difference between the two scenarios – execution.

So shift your focus from coming up with crazy, innovative, outlandish ideas that will disrupt the market, and concentrate on really nailing down your execution instead. 

This is likely the least “workshoppy” step out of the entire problem-solving process because it requires less alignment and decision-making and more..well.. Execution!

But hey, we wouldn’t be called “Workshopper” if we didn't offer you at least one way to optimize and workshopify (yup, we’re making it a thing) your execution process. 

Cue in….prototyping. 

We’re huge fans of prototyping all big solutions (and testing them!) The main reason?

This saves us time AND money! Prototyping and testing your solutions (especially if they’re time and investment-demanding) is a great way to make sure you’re creating something that is actually needed. 

The key with prototyping the right way is to keep it simple. Don’t invest too much time, or resources into it. The goal is to gather data for your future decisions, not to create a near-to-perfect mockup of your solution.  

There are LOADS of prototyping forms and techniques, and if you’d like to learn more on the subject you should definitely check out our extensive prototyping guide.  

Step 5: Analyzing the Results

You’re nearly done, woo! Now that you have defined the right problem to tackle, brainstormed the solutions, aligned your team on the course of action, and put your plan into action it’s time to take stock of your efforts. 

Seek feedback from all involved parties, analyze the data you’ve gathered, look at the bottom line of your efforts, and  take a hard look at your problem: did it get solved? And even more than that, did the process feel smoother, easier, and more efficient than it normally is?

Running a retrospective is a great way to highlight things that went well and that you should keep for your next round of problem.solving, as well as pinpoint inefficiencies that you can eliminate.

‍ But which kind of retrospective should you run? There are loads of options, and it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by them all, so we gathered our favorite retrospective variations in this article.

And there you have it, you just completed the cycle of  problem-solving. We highly recommend you follow through with all the steps, without leaving any out. They all complement and build on each other, and it’s the combination of all 5 of them that makes the process effective. 

Now that you have the problem solving process down, you might be wondering…

Do I need any special skills in order to be able to move through that process?

And the answer is… sort of! More in this in the next section.

Problem-Solving Skills 

While your skill set will need to adapt and change based on the challenges you’ll be working on, most efficient problem-solvers have a solid foundation of these key skills:   

• Active listening. While you might be the expert in the area of your challenge, there’s not a single person on Earth that knows it all! Being open to others’ perspectives and practicing active listening will come in very handy during step 1 of the process, as you’re trying to define the scope and the exact angle of the problem you’re working on.
• Analytical approach. Your analytical skills will help you understand problems and effectively develop solutions. You will also need analytical skills during research to help distinguish between effective and ineffective solutions.
• Communication. Is there a single area of expertise that DOESN’T require strong communication skills? We honestly don’t think so! Just like with any other life area, clear communication can make or break your problem-solving process. Being able to clearly communicate why you need to solve this challenge to your team, as well as align your team on the course of action are crucial for the success of the process. 
• Decision-making. Ultimately, you will need to make a decision about how to solve problems that arise. A process without outcomes–regardless of how well thought-out and elaborate–is useless! If you want your problem-solving huddles to be effective, you have to come to grips with prioritization techniques and decision-making frameworks. 
• Facilitation. Problem-solving revolves around being able to guide a group or a team to a common decision, and facilitation skills are essential in making that happen. Knowing how to facilitate will make it easy to keep the group focussed on the challenge, shortcut circular discussions, and make sure you’re moving along to solving the problem instead of just treading waters with fruitless discussions. 

Not checking every single skill of your list just yet? Not to worry, the next section will give you practical tools on how to level up and improve your problem-solving skills.

How to Improve Your Problem-Solving Skills

Just like with any other skill, problem-solving is not an innate talent that you either have or you don’t.  There are concrete steps you can take to improve your skills. 

Here are some things that will get you closer to mastering the problem-solving process:

• Practice, Practice, Practice

Practice makes perfect, and problem-solving skills are no exception! Seek opportunities to utilize and develop these skills any time you can. 

If you don’t know where or how to start just yet, here’s a suggestion that will get you up and running in no time: run a quick problem-solving session on a challenge that has been bothering your team for a while now. 

It doesn’t need to be the big strategic decision or the issue defining the future of the company. Something easy and manageable (like optimizing office space or improving team communication) will do. 

As you start feeling more comfortable with the problem-solving techniques, you can start tackling bigger challenges. Before you know it, you’ll master the art of creative problem-solving!

• Use a tried and tested problem-solving workshop

Facilitation is one of the essential skills for problem-solving. But here’s the thing… Facilitation skills on their own won’t lead you to a solved challenge.

While being able to shortcut aimless discussions is a great skill, you have to make sure your problem-solving session has tangible outcomes. Using a tried and tested method, a workshop, is one of the easiest ways to do that. 

Our best advice is to get started with a tried and tested problem-solving workshop like the Lightning Decision Jam . The LDJ has all the right ingredients for quick, effective problem solving that leads to tangible outcomes. Give it a go!

• Learn from your peers

You may have colleagues who are skilled problem solvers. Observing how those colleagues solve problems can help you improve your own skills. 

If possible, ask one of your more experienced colleagues if you can observe their techniques. Ask them relevant questions and try to apply as many of the new found skills i your career as possible. 

• Learn & Practice the best problem-solving exercises

Having a toolbox of problem-solving exercises to pull from that can fit any type of challenge will make you a more versatile problem-solver and will make solving challenges that much easier for you! 

Once you get used to the groove of learning how to combine them into effective sessions or workshops, there’ll be no stopping you. What are some of the most effective problem-solving exercises? Glad you asked! We’ve gathered our favorite ones here, check it out! 

And there you have it, you’re now fully equipped for running creative problem-sessions with confidence and ease! Whichever method or exercise you choose, remember to keep track of your wins, and learn as much as you can from your losses! 

Anastasia Ushakova

Brand Strategist, Digital Marketer, and a Workshopper.

When Do You Need a Facilitator?

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The Ultimate Facilitation Glossary: 50 Facilitation Terms You Should Know (From A-Z)

How To Improve Team Collaboration

How to master the seven-step problem-solving process

In this episode of the McKinsey Podcast , Simon London speaks with Charles Conn, CEO of venture-capital firm Oxford Sciences Innovation, and McKinsey senior partner Hugo Sarrazin about the complexities of different problem-solving strategies.

Podcast transcript

Simon London: Hello, and welcome to this episode of the McKinsey Podcast , with me, Simon London. What’s the number-one skill you need to succeed professionally? Salesmanship, perhaps? Or a facility with statistics? Or maybe the ability to communicate crisply and clearly? Many would argue that at the very top of the list comes problem solving: that is, the ability to think through and come up with an optimal course of action to address any complex challenge—in business, in public policy, or indeed in life.

Looked at this way, it’s no surprise that McKinsey takes problem solving very seriously, testing for it during the recruiting process and then honing it, in McKinsey consultants, through immersion in a structured seven-step method. To discuss the art of problem solving, I sat down in California with McKinsey senior partner Hugo Sarrazin and also with Charles Conn. Charles is a former McKinsey partner, entrepreneur, executive, and coauthor of the book Bulletproof Problem Solving: The One Skill That Changes Everything [John Wiley & Sons, 2018].

Charles and Hugo, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for being here.

Hugo Sarrazin: Our pleasure.

Charles Conn: It’s terrific to be here.

Simon London: Problem solving is a really interesting piece of terminology. It could mean so many different things. I have a son who’s a teenage climber. They talk about solving problems. Climbing is problem solving. Charles, when you talk about problem solving, what are you talking about?

Charles Conn: For me, problem solving is the answer to the question “What should I do?” It’s interesting when there’s uncertainty and complexity, and when it’s meaningful because there are consequences. Your son’s climbing is a perfect example. There are consequences, and it’s complicated, and there’s uncertainty—can he make that grab? I think we can apply that same frame almost at any level. You can think about questions like “What town would I like to live in?” or “Should I put solar panels on my roof?”

You might think that’s a funny thing to apply problem solving to, but in my mind it’s not fundamentally different from business problem solving, which answers the question “What should my strategy be?” Or problem solving at the policy level: “How do we combat climate change?” “Should I support the local school bond?” I think these are all part and parcel of the same type of question, “What should I do?”

I’m a big fan of structured problem solving. By following steps, we can more clearly understand what problem it is we’re solving, what are the components of the problem that we’re solving, which components are the most important ones for us to pay attention to, which analytic techniques we should apply to those, and how we can synthesize what we’ve learned back into a compelling story. That’s all it is, at its heart.

I think sometimes when people think about seven steps, they assume that there’s a rigidity to this. That’s not it at all. It’s actually to give you the scope for creativity, which often doesn’t exist when your problem solving is muddled.

Simon London: You were just talking about the seven-step process. That’s what’s written down in the book, but it’s a very McKinsey process as well. Without getting too deep into the weeds, let’s go through the steps, one by one. You were just talking about problem definition as being a particularly important thing to get right first. That’s the first step. Hugo, tell us about that.

Hugo Sarrazin: It is surprising how often people jump past this step and make a bunch of assumptions. The most powerful thing is to step back and ask the basic questions—“What are we trying to solve? What are the constraints that exist? What are the dependencies?” Let’s make those explicit and really push the thinking and defining. At McKinsey, we spend an enormous amount of time in writing that little statement, and the statement, if you’re a logic purist, is great. You debate. “Is it an ‘or’? Is it an ‘and’? What’s the action verb?” Because all these specific words help you get to the heart of what matters.

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Simon London: So this is a concise problem statement.

Hugo Sarrazin: Yeah. It’s not like “Can we grow in Japan?” That’s interesting, but it is “What, specifically, are we trying to uncover in the growth of a product in Japan? Or a segment in Japan? Or a channel in Japan?” When you spend an enormous amount of time, in the first meeting of the different stakeholders, debating this and having different people put forward what they think the problem definition is, you realize that people have completely different views of why they’re here. That, to me, is the most important step.

Charles Conn: I would agree with that. For me, the problem context is critical. When we understand “What are the forces acting upon your decision maker? How quickly is the answer needed? With what precision is the answer needed? Are there areas that are off limits or areas where we would particularly like to find our solution? Is the decision maker open to exploring other areas?” then you not only become more efficient, and move toward what we call the critical path in problem solving, but you also make it so much more likely that you’re not going to waste your time or your decision maker’s time.

How often do especially bright young people run off with half of the idea about what the problem is and start collecting data and start building models—only to discover that they’ve really gone off half-cocked.

Hugo Sarrazin: Yeah.

Charles Conn: And in the wrong direction.

Simon London: OK. So step one—and there is a real art and a structure to it—is define the problem. Step two, Charles?

Charles Conn: My favorite step is step two, which is to use logic trees to disaggregate the problem. Every problem we’re solving has some complexity and some uncertainty in it. The only way that we can really get our team working on the problem is to take the problem apart into logical pieces.

What we find, of course, is that the way to disaggregate the problem often gives you an insight into the answer to the problem quite quickly. I love to do two or three different cuts at it, each one giving a bit of a different insight into what might be going wrong. By doing sensible disaggregations, using logic trees, we can figure out which parts of the problem we should be looking at, and we can assign those different parts to team members.

Simon London: What’s a good example of a logic tree on a sort of ratable problem?

Charles Conn: Maybe the easiest one is the classic profit tree. Almost in every business that I would take a look at, I would start with a profit or return-on-assets tree. In its simplest form, you have the components of revenue, which are price and quantity, and the components of cost, which are cost and quantity. Each of those can be broken out. Cost can be broken into variable cost and fixed cost. The components of price can be broken into what your pricing scheme is. That simple tree often provides insight into what’s going on in a business or what the difference is between that business and the competitors.

If we add the leg, which is “What’s the asset base or investment element?”—so profit divided by assets—then we can ask the question “Is the business using its investments sensibly?” whether that’s in stores or in manufacturing or in transportation assets. I hope we can see just how simple this is, even though we’re describing it in words.

When I went to work with Gordon Moore at the Moore Foundation, the problem that he asked us to look at was “How can we save Pacific salmon?” Now, that sounds like an impossible question, but it was amenable to precisely the same type of disaggregation and allowed us to organize what became a 15-year effort to improve the likelihood of good outcomes for Pacific salmon.

Simon London: Now, is there a danger that your logic tree can be impossibly large? This, I think, brings us onto the third step in the process, which is that you have to prioritize.

Charles Conn: Absolutely. The third step, which we also emphasize, along with good problem definition, is rigorous prioritization—we ask the questions “How important is this lever or this branch of the tree in the overall outcome that we seek to achieve? How much can I move that lever?” Obviously, we try and focus our efforts on ones that have a big impact on the problem and the ones that we have the ability to change. With salmon, ocean conditions turned out to be a big lever, but not one that we could adjust. We focused our attention on fish habitats and fish-harvesting practices, which were big levers that we could affect.

People spend a lot of time arguing about branches that are either not important or that none of us can change. We see it in the public square. When we deal with questions at the policy level—“Should you support the death penalty?” “How do we affect climate change?” “How can we uncover the causes and address homelessness?”—it’s even more important that we’re focusing on levers that are big and movable.

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Simon London: Let’s move swiftly on to step four. You’ve defined your problem, you disaggregate it, you prioritize where you want to analyze—what you want to really look at hard. Then you got to the work plan. Now, what does that mean in practice?

Hugo Sarrazin: Depending on what you’ve prioritized, there are many things you could do. It could be breaking the work among the team members so that people have a clear piece of the work to do. It could be defining the specific analyses that need to get done and executed, and being clear on time lines. There’s always a level-one answer, there’s a level-two answer, there’s a level-three answer. Without being too flippant, I can solve any problem during a good dinner with wine. It won’t have a whole lot of backing.

Simon London: Not going to have a lot of depth to it.

Hugo Sarrazin: No, but it may be useful as a starting point. If the stakes are not that high, that could be OK. If it’s really high stakes, you may need level three and have the whole model validated in three different ways. You need to find a work plan that reflects the level of precision, the time frame you have, and the stakeholders you need to bring along in the exercise.

Charles Conn: I love the way you’ve described that, because, again, some people think of problem solving as a linear thing, but of course what’s critical is that it’s iterative. As you say, you can solve the problem in one day or even one hour.

Charles Conn: We encourage our teams everywhere to do that. We call it the one-day answer or the one-hour answer. In work planning, we’re always iterating. Every time you see a 50-page work plan that stretches out to three months, you know it’s wrong. It will be outmoded very quickly by that learning process that you described. Iterative problem solving is a critical part of this. Sometimes, people think work planning sounds dull, but it isn’t. It’s how we know what’s expected of us and when we need to deliver it and how we’re progressing toward the answer. It’s also the place where we can deal with biases. Bias is a feature of every human decision-making process. If we design our team interactions intelligently, we can avoid the worst sort of biases.

Simon London: Here we’re talking about cognitive biases primarily, right? It’s not that I’m biased against you because of your accent or something. These are the cognitive biases that behavioral sciences have shown we all carry around, things like anchoring, overoptimism—these kinds of things.

Both: Yeah.

Charles Conn: Availability bias is the one that I’m always alert to. You think you’ve seen the problem before, and therefore what’s available is your previous conception of it—and we have to be most careful about that. In any human setting, we also have to be careful about biases that are based on hierarchies, sometimes called sunflower bias. I’m sure, Hugo, with your teams, you make sure that the youngest team members speak first. Not the oldest team members, because it’s easy for people to look at who’s senior and alter their own creative approaches.

Hugo Sarrazin: It’s helpful, at that moment—if someone is asserting a point of view—to ask the question “This was true in what context?” You’re trying to apply something that worked in one context to a different one. That can be deadly if the context has changed, and that’s why organizations struggle to change. You promote all these people because they did something that worked well in the past, and then there’s a disruption in the industry, and they keep doing what got them promoted even though the context has changed.

Simon London: Right. Right.

Hugo Sarrazin: So it’s the same thing in problem solving.

Charles Conn: And it’s why diversity in our teams is so important. It’s one of the best things about the world that we’re in now. We’re likely to have people from different socioeconomic, ethnic, and national backgrounds, each of whom sees problems from a slightly different perspective. It is therefore much more likely that the team will uncover a truly creative and clever approach to problem solving.

Simon London: Let’s move on to step five. You’ve done your work plan. Now you’ve actually got to do the analysis. The thing that strikes me here is that the range of tools that we have at our disposal now, of course, is just huge, particularly with advances in computation, advanced analytics. There’s so many things that you can apply here. Just talk about the analysis stage. How do you pick the right tools?

Charles Conn: For me, the most important thing is that we start with simple heuristics and explanatory statistics before we go off and use the big-gun tools. We need to understand the shape and scope of our problem before we start applying these massive and complex analytical approaches.

Simon London: Would you agree with that?

Hugo Sarrazin: I agree. I think there are so many wonderful heuristics. You need to start there before you go deep into the modeling exercise. There’s an interesting dynamic that’s happening, though. In some cases, for some types of problems, it is even better to set yourself up to maximize your learning. Your problem-solving methodology is test and learn, test and learn, test and learn, and iterate. That is a heuristic in itself, the A/B testing that is used in many parts of the world. So that’s a problem-solving methodology. It’s nothing different. It just uses technology and feedback loops in a fast way. The other one is exploratory data analysis. When you’re dealing with a large-scale problem, and there’s so much data, I can get to the heuristics that Charles was talking about through very clever visualization of data.

You test with your data. You need to set up an environment to do so, but don’t get caught up in neural-network modeling immediately. You’re testing, you’re checking—“Is the data right? Is it sound? Does it make sense?”—before you launch too far.

Simon London: You do hear these ideas—that if you have a big enough data set and enough algorithms, they’re going to find things that you just wouldn’t have spotted, find solutions that maybe you wouldn’t have thought of. Does machine learning sort of revolutionize the problem-solving process? Or are these actually just other tools in the toolbox for structured problem solving?

Charles Conn: It can be revolutionary. There are some areas in which the pattern recognition of large data sets and good algorithms can help us see things that we otherwise couldn’t see. But I do think it’s terribly important we don’t think that this particular technique is a substitute for superb problem solving, starting with good problem definition. Many people use machine learning without understanding algorithms that themselves can have biases built into them. Just as 20 years ago, when we were doing statistical analysis, we knew that we needed good model definition, we still need a good understanding of our algorithms and really good problem definition before we launch off into big data sets and unknown algorithms.

Simon London: Step six. You’ve done your analysis.

Charles Conn: I take six and seven together, and this is the place where young problem solvers often make a mistake. They’ve got their analysis, and they assume that’s the answer, and of course it isn’t the answer. The ability to synthesize the pieces that came out of the analysis and begin to weave those into a story that helps people answer the question “What should I do?” This is back to where we started. If we can’t synthesize, and we can’t tell a story, then our decision maker can’t find the answer to “What should I do?”

Simon London: But, again, these final steps are about motivating people to action, right?

Charles Conn: Yeah.

Simon London: I am slightly torn about the nomenclature of problem solving because it’s on paper, right? Until you motivate people to action, you actually haven’t solved anything.

Charles Conn: I love this question because I think decision-making theory, without a bias to action, is a waste of time. Everything in how I approach this is to help people take action that makes the world better.

Simon London: Hence, these are absolutely critical steps. If you don’t do this well, you’ve just got a bunch of analysis.

Charles Conn: We end up in exactly the same place where we started, which is people speaking across each other, past each other in the public square, rather than actually working together, shoulder to shoulder, to crack these important problems.

Simon London: In the real world, we have a lot of uncertainty—arguably, increasing uncertainty. How do good problem solvers deal with that?

Hugo Sarrazin: At every step of the process. In the problem definition, when you’re defining the context, you need to understand those sources of uncertainty and whether they’re important or not important. It becomes important in the definition of the tree.

You need to think carefully about the branches of the tree that are more certain and less certain as you define them. They don’t have equal weight just because they’ve got equal space on the page. Then, when you’re prioritizing, your prioritization approach may put more emphasis on things that have low probability but huge impact—or, vice versa, may put a lot of priority on things that are very likely and, hopefully, have a reasonable impact. You can introduce that along the way. When you come back to the synthesis, you just need to be nuanced about what you’re understanding, the likelihood.

Often, people lack humility in the way they make their recommendations: “This is the answer.” They’re very precise, and I think we would all be well-served to say, “This is a likely answer under the following sets of conditions” and then make the level of uncertainty clearer, if that is appropriate. It doesn’t mean you’re always in the gray zone; it doesn’t mean you don’t have a point of view. It just means that you can be explicit about the certainty of your answer when you make that recommendation.

Simon London: So it sounds like there is an underlying principle: “Acknowledge and embrace the uncertainty. Don’t pretend that it isn’t there. Be very clear about what the uncertainties are up front, and then build that into every step of the process.”

Hugo Sarrazin: Every step of the process.

Simon London: Yeah. We have just walked through a particular structured methodology for problem solving. But, of course, this is not the only structured methodology for problem solving. One that is also very well-known is design thinking, which comes at things very differently. So, Hugo, I know you have worked with a lot of designers. Just give us a very quick summary. Design thinking—what is it, and how does it relate?

Hugo Sarrazin: It starts with an incredible amount of empathy for the user and uses that to define the problem. It does pause and go out in the wild and spend an enormous amount of time seeing how people interact with objects, seeing the experience they’re getting, seeing the pain points or joy—and uses that to infer and define the problem.

Simon London: Problem definition, but out in the world.

Hugo Sarrazin: With an enormous amount of empathy. There’s a huge emphasis on empathy. Traditional, more classic problem solving is you define the problem based on an understanding of the situation. This one almost presupposes that we don’t know the problem until we go see it. The second thing is you need to come up with multiple scenarios or answers or ideas or concepts, and there’s a lot of divergent thinking initially. That’s slightly different, versus the prioritization, but not for long. Eventually, you need to kind of say, “OK, I’m going to converge again.” Then you go and you bring things back to the customer and get feedback and iterate. Then you rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat. There’s a lot of tactile building, along the way, of prototypes and things like that. It’s very iterative.

Simon London: So, Charles, are these complements or are these alternatives?

Charles Conn: I think they’re entirely complementary, and I think Hugo’s description is perfect. When we do problem definition well in classic problem solving, we are demonstrating the kind of empathy, at the very beginning of our problem, that design thinking asks us to approach. When we ideate—and that’s very similar to the disaggregation, prioritization, and work-planning steps—we do precisely the same thing, and often we use contrasting teams, so that we do have divergent thinking. The best teams allow divergent thinking to bump them off whatever their initial biases in problem solving are. For me, design thinking gives us a constant reminder of creativity, empathy, and the tactile nature of problem solving, but it’s absolutely complementary, not alternative.

Simon London: I think, in a world of cross-functional teams, an interesting question is do people with design-thinking backgrounds really work well together with classical problem solvers? How do you make that chemistry happen?

Hugo Sarrazin: Yeah, it is not easy when people have spent an enormous amount of time seeped in design thinking or user-centric design, whichever word you want to use. If the person who’s applying classic problem-solving methodology is very rigid and mechanical in the way they’re doing it, there could be an enormous amount of tension. If there’s not clarity in the role and not clarity in the process, I think having the two together can be, sometimes, problematic.

The second thing that happens often is that the artifacts the two methodologies try to gravitate toward can be different. Classic problem solving often gravitates toward a model; design thinking migrates toward a prototype. Rather than writing a big deck with all my supporting evidence, they’ll bring an example, a thing, and that feels different. Then you spend your time differently to achieve those two end products, so that’s another source of friction.

Now, I still think it can be an incredibly powerful thing to have the two—if there are the right people with the right mind-set, if there is a team that is explicit about the roles, if we’re clear about the kind of outcomes we are attempting to bring forward. There’s an enormous amount of collaborativeness and respect.

Simon London: But they have to respect each other’s methodology and be prepared to flex, maybe, a little bit, in how this process is going to work.

Hugo Sarrazin: Absolutely.

Simon London: The other area where, it strikes me, there could be a little bit of a different sort of friction is this whole concept of the day-one answer, which is what we were just talking about in classical problem solving. Now, you know that this is probably not going to be your final answer, but that’s how you begin to structure the problem. Whereas I would imagine your design thinkers—no, they’re going off to do their ethnographic research and get out into the field, potentially for a long time, before they come back with at least an initial hypothesis.

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Hugo Sarrazin: That is a great callout, and that’s another difference. Designers typically will like to soak into the situation and avoid converging too quickly. There’s optionality and exploring different options. There’s a strong belief that keeps the solution space wide enough that you can come up with more radical ideas. If there’s a large design team or many designers on the team, and you come on Friday and say, “What’s our week-one answer?” they’re going to struggle. They’re not going to be comfortable, naturally, to give that answer. It doesn’t mean they don’t have an answer; it’s just not where they are in their thinking process.

Simon London: I think we are, sadly, out of time for today. But Charles and Hugo, thank you so much.

Charles Conn: It was a pleasure to be here, Simon.

Hugo Sarrazin: It was a pleasure. Thank you.

Simon London: And thanks, as always, to you, our listeners, for tuning into this episode of the McKinsey Podcast . If you want to learn more about problem solving, you can find the book, Bulletproof Problem Solving: The One Skill That Changes Everything , online or order it through your local bookstore. To learn more about McKinsey, you can of course find us at McKinsey.com.

Charles Conn is CEO of Oxford Sciences Innovation and an alumnus of McKinsey’s Sydney office. Hugo Sarrazin is a senior partner in the Silicon Valley office, where Simon London, a member of McKinsey Publishing, is also based.

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Five routes to more innovative problem solving

• Miles Anthony Smith
• Sep 12, 2022
• 12 min read

The Ultimate Problem-Solving Process Guide: 31 Steps and Resources

Updated: Jan 24, 2023

GOT CHALLENGES WITH YOUR PROBLEM-SOLVING PROCESS? ARE YOU FRUSTRATED?

prob·lem-solv·ing noun -the process of finding solutions to difficult or complex issues. It sounds so simple, doesn’t it? But in reality problem-solving is hard. It's almost always more complex than it seems. That's why problem-solving can be so frustrating sometimes. You can feel like you’re spinning your wheels, arguing in circles, or just failing to find answers that actually work. And when you've got a group working on a problem, it can get even muddier …differences of opinions, viewpoints colored by different backgrounds, history, life experiences, you name it. We’re all looking at life and work from different angles, and that often means disagreement. Sometimes sharp disagreement. That human element, figuring out how to take ourselves out of the equation and make solid, fact-based decisions , is precisely why there’s been so much written on problem-solving. Which creates its own set of problems. Whose method is best? How can you possibly sift through them all? Are we to have one person complete the entire problem-solving process by themselves or rely on a larger team to find answers to our most vexing challenges in the workplace ? Today, we’re going to make sense of it all. We’ll take a close look at nine top problem-solving methods. Then we’ll grab the best elements of all of them to give you a process that will have your team solving problems faster, with better results , and maybe with less sharp disagreement. Ready to dive in? Let’s go!

9 PROFITABLE PROBLEM-SOLVING TECHNIQUES AND METHODS

While there are loads of methods to choose from, we are going to focus on nine of the more common ones. You can use some of these problem-solving techniques reactively to solve a known issue or proactively to find more efficient or effective ways of performing tasks. If you want to explore other methods, check out this resource here . A helpful bit of advice here is to reassure people that you aren’t here to identify the person that caused the problem . You’re working to surface the issue, solve it and make sure it doesn’t happen again, regardless of the person working on the process. It can’t be understated how important it is to continually reassure people of this so that you get unfiltered access to information. Without this, people will often hide things to protect themselves . After all, nobody wants to look bad, do they? With that said, let’s get started...

1. CREATIVE PROBLEM SOLVING (CPS)

Alex Osborn coined the term “Creative Problem Solving” in the 1940s with this simple four-step process:

Clarify : Explore the vision, gather data, and formulate questions.

Ideate : This stage should use brainstorming to generate divergent thinking and ideas rather than the random ideas normally associated with brainstorming.

Develop : Formulate solutions as part of an overall plan.

Implement : Put the plan into practice and communicate it to all parties.

2. APPRECIATIVE INQUIRY

Source: http://www.davidcooperrider.com/ai-process/ This method seeks, first and foremost, to identify the strengths in people and organizations and play to that “positive core” rather than focus our energies on improving weaknesses . It starts with an “affirmative topic,” followed by the “positive core (strengths).” Then this method delves into the following stages:

Discovery (fact-finding)

Dream (visioning the future)

Design (strategic purpose)

Destiny (continuous improvement)

3. “FIVE WHYS” METHOD

This method simply suggests that we ask “Why” at least five times during our review of the problem and in search of a fix. This helps us dig deeper to find the the true reason for the problem, or the root cause. Now, this doesn’t mean we just keeping asking the same question five times. Once we get an answer to our first “why”, we ask why to that answer until we get to five “whys”.

Using the “five whys” is part of the “Analyze” phase of Six Sigma but can be used with or without the full Six Sigma process.

Review this simple Wikipedia example of the 5 Whys in action:

The vehicle will not start. (the problem)

Why? - The battery is dead. (First why)

Why? - The alternator is not functioning. (Second why)

Why? - The alternator belt has broken. (Third why)

Why? - The alternator belt was well beyond its useful service life and not replaced. (Fourth why)

Why? - The vehicle was not maintained according to the recommended service schedule. (Fifth why, a root cause)

4. LEAN SIX SIGMA (DMAIC METHOD)

While many people have at least heard of Lean or Six Sigma, do we know what it is? Like many problem-solving processes, it has five main steps to follow.

Define : Clearly laying out the problem and soliciting feedback from those who are customers of the process is necessary to starting off on the right foot.

Measure : Quantifying the current state of the problem is a key to measuring how well the fix performed once it was implemented.

Analyze : Finding out the root cause of the problem (see number 5 “Root Cause Analysis” below) is one of the hardest and least explored steps of Six Sigma.

Improve : Crafting, executing, and testing the solution for measureable improvement is key. What doesn’t get implemented and measured really won’t make a difference.

Control : Sustaining the fix through a monitoring plan will ensure things continue to stay on track rather than being a short-lived solution.

5. ROOT CAUSE ANALYSIS

Compared to other methods, you’ll more often find this technique in a reactive problem-solving mode, but it is helpful nonetheless. Put simply, it requires a persistent approach to finding the highest-level cause, since most reasons you’ll uncover for a problem don’t tell the whole story.

Most of the time, there are many factors that contributed to an issue. The main reason is often shrouded in either intentional or unintentional secrecy. Taking the time to drill down to the root of the issue is key to truly solving the problem.

6. DEMING-SHEWHART CYCLE: PLAN-DO-CHECK-ACT (PDCA)

Named for W. Edwards Deming and Walter A. Shewhart, this model follows a four-step process:

Plan: Establish goals and objectives at the outset to gain agreement. It’s best to start on a small scale in order to test results and get a quick win.

Do: This step is all about the implementation and execution of the solution.

Check: Study and compare actual to expected results. Chart this data to identify trends.

Act/Adjust: If the check phase showed different results, then adjust accordingly. If worse than expected, then try another fix. If the same or better than expected, then use that as the new baseline for future improvements.

7. 8D PROBLEM-SOLVING

While this is named “8D” for eight disciplines, there are actually nine , because the first is listed as step zero. Each of the disciplines represents a phase of this process. Its aim is to implement a quick fix in the short term while working on a more permanent solution with no recurring issues.

Prepare and Plan : Collecting initial information from the team and preparing your approach to the process is a necessary first step.

Form a Team : Select a cross-functional team of people, one leader to run meetings and the process, and one champion/sponsor who will be the final decision-maker.

Describe the Problem : Using inductive and deductive reasoning approaches, lay out the precise issue to be corrected.

Interim Containment Action : Determine if an interim solution needs to be implemented or if it can wait until the final fix is firmed up. If necessary, the interim action is usually removed once the permanent solution is ready for implementation.

Root Cause Analysis and Escape Point : Finding the root of the issue and where in the process it could’ve been found but was not will help identify where and why the issue happened.

Permanent Corrective Action : Incorporating key criteria into the solution, including requirements and wants, will help ensure buy-in from the team and your champion.

Implement and Validate the Permanent Corrective Action : Measuring results from the fix implemented validates it or sends the team back to the drawing board to identity a more robust solution.

Prevent Recurrence : Updating work procedure documents and regular communication about the changes are important to keep old habits in check.

Closure and Team Celebration : Taking time to praise the team for their efforts in resolving the problem acknowledges the part each person played and offers a way to move forward.

8. ARMY PROBLEM SOLVING PROCESS

The US Army has been solving problems for more than a couple of centuries , so why not take a look at the problem-solving process they’ve refined over many years? They recommend this five step process:

Identify the Problem : Take time to understand the situation and define a scope and limitations before moving forward.

Gather Information : Uncover facts, assumptions, and opinions about the problem, and challenge them to get to the truth.

Develop Screening and Evaluation Criteria :

Five screening items should be questioned. Is it feasible, acceptable, distinguishable, and complete?

Evaluation criteria should have these 5 elements: short title, definition, unit of measure, benchmark, and formula.

Generate, Analyze, and Compare Possible Solutions : Most fixes are analyzed, but do you compare yours to one another as a final vetting method?

Choose a Solution and Implement : Put the fix into practice and follow up to ensure it is being followed consistently and having the desired effect.

9. HURSON'S PRODUCTIVE THINKING MODEL

Tim Hurson introduced this model in 2007 with his book, Think Better. It consists of the following six actions.

Ask "What is going on?" : Define the impact of the problem and the aim of its solution.

Ask "What is success?" : Spell out the expected outcome, what should not be in fix, values to be considered, and how things will be evaluated.

Ask "What is the question?" : Tailor questions to the problem type. Valuable resources can be wasted asking questions that aren’t truly relevant to the issue.

Generate answers : Prioritize answers that are the most relevant to solutions, without excluding any suggestion to present to the decision-makers.

Forge the solution : Refine the raw list of prioritized fixes, looking for ways to combine them for a more powerful solution or eliminate fixes that don’t fit the evaluation criteria.

Align resources: Identify resources, team, and stakeholders needed to implement and maintain the solution.

STEAL THIS THOROUGH 8-STEP PROBLEM-SOLVING PROCESS

Now that we’ve reviewed a number of problem-solving methods, we’ve compiled the various steps into a straightforward, yet in-depth, s tep-by-step process to use the best of all methods.

1. DIG DEEP: IDENTIFY, DEFINE, AND CLARIFY THE ISSUE

“Elementary, my dear Watson,” you might say.

This is true, but we often forget the fundamentals before trying to solve a problem. So take some time to gain understanding of critical stakeholder’s viewpoints to clarify the problem and cement consensus behind what the issue really is.

Sometimes it feels like you’re on the same page, but minor misunderstandings mean you’re not really in full agreement.. It’s better to take the time to drill down on an issue before you get too far into solving a problem that may not be the exact problem . Which leads us to…

2. DIG DEEPER: ROOT CAUSE ANALYSIS

This part of the process involves identifying these three items :

What happened?

Why did it happen?

What process do we need to employ to significantly reduce the chances of it happening again ?

You’ll usually need to sort through a series of situations to find the primary cause. So be careful not to stop at the first cause you uncover . Dig further into the situation to expose the root of the issue. We don’t want to install a solution that only fixes a surface-level issue and not the root. T here are typically three types of causes :

Physical: Perhaps a part failed due to poor design or manufacturing.

Human error: A person either did something wrong or didn’t do what needed to be done.

Organizational: This one is mostly about a system, process, or policy that contributed to the error .

When searching for the root cause, it is important to ensure people that you aren’t there to assign blame to a person but rather identify the problem so a fix can prevent future issues.

3. PRODUCE A VARIETY OF SOLUTION OPTIONS

So far, you’ve approached the problem as a data scientist, searching for clues to the real issue. Now, it’s important to keep your eyes and ears open, in case you run across a fix suggested by one of those involved in the process failure. Because they are closest to the problem, they will often have an idea of how to fix things. In other cases, they may be too close, and unable to see how the process could change.

The bottom line is to solicit solution ideas from a variety of sources , both close to and far away from the process you’re trying to improve.

You just never know where the top fix might come from!

4. FULLY EVALUATE AND SELECT PLANNED FIX(ES)

Evaluating solutions to a defined problem can be tricky since each one will have cost, political, or other factors associated with it. Running each fix through a filter of cost and impact is a vital step toward identifying a solid solution and hopefully settling on the one with the highest impact and low or acceptable cost.

Categorizing each solution in one of these four categoriescan help teams sift through them:

High Cost/Low Impact: Implement these last, if at all, since t hey are expensive and won’t move the needle much .

Low Cost/Low Impact: These are cheap, but you won’t get much impact.

High Cost/High Impact: These can be used but should be second to the next category.

Low Cost/High Impact: Getting a solid “bang for your buck” is what these fixes are all about. Start with these first .

5. DOCUMENT THE FINAL SOLUTION AND WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE

Formalize a document that all interested parties (front-line staff, supervisors, leadership, etc.) agree to follow. This will go a long way towards making sure everyone fully understands what the new process looks like, as well as what success will look like .

While it might seem tedious, try to be overly descriptive in the explanation of the solution and how success will be achieved. This is usually necessary to gain full buy-in and commitment to continually following the solution. We often assume certain things that others may not know unless we are more explicit with our communications.

6. SUCCESSFULLY SELL AND EXECUTE THE FIX

Arriving at this stage in the process only to forget to consistently apply the solution would be a waste of time, yet many organizations fall down in the execution phase . Part of making sure that doesn’t happen is to communicate the fix and ask for questions multiple times until all parties have a solid grasp on what is now required of them.

One often-overlooked element of this is the politics involved in gaining approval for your solution. Knowing and anticipating objections of those in senior or key leadership positions is central to gaining buy-in before fix implementation.

7. RINSE AND REPEAT: EVALUATE, MONITOR, AND FOLLOW UP

Next, doing check-ins with the new process will ensure that the solution is working (or identity if further reforms are necessary) . You’ll also see if the measure of predefined success has been attained (or is making progress in that regard).

Without regularly monitoring the fix, you can only gauge the success or failure of the solution by speculation and hearsay. And without hard data to review, most people will tell their own version of the story.

8. COLLABORATIVE CONTINGENCIES, ITERATION, AND COURSE CORRECTION

Going into any problem-solving process, we should take note that we will not be done once the solution is implemented (or even if it seems to be working better at the moment). Any part of any process will always be subject to the need for future iterations and course corrections . To think otherwise would be either foolish or naive.

There might need to be slight, moderate, or wholesale changes to the solution previously implemented as new information is gained, new technologies are discovered, etc.

14 FRUITFUL RESOURCES AND EXERCISES FOR YOUR PROBLEM-SOLVING JOURNEY

Want to test your problem-solving skills?

Take a look at these twenty case study scenario exercises to see how well you can come up with solutions to these problems.

Still have a desire to discover more about solving problems?

Check out these 14 articles and books...

1. THE LEAN SIX SIGMA POCKET TOOLBOOK: A QUICK REFERENCE GUIDE TO NEARLY 100 TOOLS FOR IMPROVING QUALITY AND SPEED

This book is like a Bible for Lean Six Sigma , all in a pocket-sized package.

2. SOME SAGE PROBLEM SOLVING ADVICE

The American Society for Quality has a short article on how it’s important to focus on the problem before searching for a solution.

3. THE SECRET TO BETTER PROBLEM SOLVING: HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW

Wondering if you are solving the right problems? Check out this Harvard Business Review article.

4. PROBLEM SOLVING 101 : A SIMPLE BOOK FOR SMART PEOPLE

Looking for a fun and easy problem-solving book that was written by a McKinsey consultant? Take a look!

5. THE BASICS OF CREATIVE PROBLEM SOLVING – CPS

If you want a deeper dive into the seven steps of Creative Problem Solving , see this article.

6. APPRECIATIVE INQUIRY : A POSITIVE REVOLUTION IN CHANGE

Appreciative Inquiry has been proven effective in organizations ranging from Roadway Express and British Airways to the United Nations and the United States Navy. Review this book to join the positive revolution.

7. PROBLEM SOLVING: NINE CASE STUDIES AND LESSONS LEARNED

The Seattle Police Department has put together nine case studies that you can practice solving . While they are about police work, they have practical application in the sleuthing of work-related problems.

8. ROOT CAUSE ANALYSIS : THE CORE OF PROBLEM SOLVING AND CORRECTIVE ACTION

Need a resource to delve further into Root Cause Analysis? Look no further than this book for answers to your most vexing questions .

9. SOLVING BUSINESS PROBLEMS : THE CASE OF POOR FRANK

This solid case study illustrates the complexities of solving problems in business.

10. THE 8-DISCIPLINES PROBLEM SOLVING METHODOLOGY

Learn all about the “8Ds” with this concise primer.

11. THE PROBLEM-SOLVING PROCESS THAT PREVENTS GROUPTHINK HBR

Need to reduce groupthink in your organization’s problem-solving process ? Check out this article from the Harvard Business Review.

12. THINK BETTER : AN INNOVATOR'S GUIDE TO PRODUCTIVE THINKING

Tim Hurson details his own Productive Thinking Model at great length in this book from the author.

13. 5 STEPS TO SOLVING THE PROBLEMS WITH YOUR PROBLEM SOLVING INC MAGAZINE

This simple five-step process will help you break down the problem, analyze it, prioritize solutions, and sell them internally.

14. CRITICAL THINKING : A BEGINNER'S GUIDE TO CRITICAL THINKING, BETTER DECISION MAKING, AND PROBLEM SOLVING!

LOOKING FOR ASSISTANCE WITH YOUR PROBLEM-SOLVING PROCESS?

There's a lot to take in here, but following some of these methods are sure to improve your problem-solving process. However, if you really want to take problem-solving to the next level, InitiativeOne can come alongside your team to help you solve problems much faster than you ever have before.

There are several parts to this leadership transformation process provided by InitiativeOne, including a personal profile assessment, cognitive learning, group sessions with real-world challenges, personal discovery, and a toolkit to empower leaders to perform at their best.

There are really only two things stopping good teams from being great. One is how they make decisions and two is how they solve problems. Contact us today to grow your team’s leadership performance by making decisions and solving problems more swiftly than ever before!

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Problem solving techniques (a 5 step process)

Problem-solving techniques (a 5 step process).

How do you go about solving a problem effectively?

There are five key steps in solving a problem

Defining the problem

You need to define the problem clearly BEFORE you jump into solution mode. One of the biggest obstacles to problem-solving is not getting clear on what exactly problem is. What are the boundaries of that problem? How did it arise? Which brings us to our next point

Understanding the context of the problem

What caused the problem to arise? When did it arise? What situation or event triggered the problem? Is it likely to happen again? What’s likely to trigger it next time?

Answering these questions gives you an important perspective and context. It helps you understand the problem in it’s wider context and how it impacts the business.

Generating alternatives

Having defined the problem and understood its context, you can now embark on creating a solution. But before you jump into solution mode you need to put all the solutions on the table. So you can assess which solution is likely to work best.

One common mistake is not to list the option of “Do nothing” as an alternative. You might not always decide to do nothing but it’s important to have that option on the table. In some cases doing nothing might be the best decision.

Evaluating and selecting alternatives

So now that you have all the options on the table, you can spend some time evaluating the options.  If I chose option A how would that play out over the next few weeks? What’s likely to happen next? And then after that?

If I chose option B how would that play out?

It’s useful to ‘wander’ down the path of each alternative and follow it to its natural conclusion.

Implementing solutions

After having gone through all the previous steps (and only then) do you pick the best alternative and go about implementing that alternative.

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5 Simple Steps to Effective Problem Solving

The ability to solve problems is a crucial skill in the modern workplace. It can make the difference between success and failure, and it can help you navigate the complexities of a fast-paced environment. But what exactly is effective problem solving? And how can you develop the skills needed to solve problems efficiently and effectively?

Effective problem solving involves several key steps that can help you identify the root cause of a problem, develop a plan of action, and implement that plan to achieve a successful outcome . Here are five simple steps you can take to develop your problem-solving skills and tackle any challenge that comes your way in the workplace.

Introduction

Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you’re faced with a workplace problem, and you’re not sure where to start? Whether it’s a customer complaint, a team conflict, or a project delay, it’s essential to address it promptly to maintain productivity and morale. In this article, we’ll provide practical steps that can help you effectively solve problems at your workplace.

Step 1: Define the Problem

The first step in effective problem solving is to define the problem clearly. Take the time to analyze the issue and gather as much information as possible. It’s crucial to identify the cause of the problem and its impact on your team or organization. For example, if a team member is underperforming, it’s essential to understand the root cause of the issue and how it’s affecting the team’s productivity. Is it a lack of training, motivation, or resources? Are there external factors, such as personal issues or workload, that are affecting their performance?

Once you have a clear understanding of the problem, you can begin to develop a plan of action to address it. It’s important to involve all stakeholders in this process, including those who are directly affected by the problem, to ensure that you have a complete picture of the situation. Involving others in the process can also help you gain different perspectives and insights, which can be valuable in developing an effective solution.

Step 2: Brainstorm Possible Solutions

After identifying the problem, the next step is to brainstorm possible solutions. It’s important to be creative and come up with as many solutions as possible, even if they seem unrealistic or impractical. Brainstorming can be done individually or in a group setting, where team members can bounce ideas off each other. In a group setting, it’s important to create an open and safe environment where everyone feels comfortable sharing their ideas. Remember to focus on generating ideas, without evaluating or criticizing them during the brainstorming session.

Once you have a list of possible solutions, evaluate each one based on their feasibility, potential impact, and costs. It’s important to consider the pros and cons of each solution before selecting the most appropriate one. Keep in mind that the solution may not be perfect, but it should be the best one available given the resources and constraints. By considering different options, you can increase the chances of finding an effective solution that addresses the problem.

Step 3: Evaluate the Solutions

When evaluating the solutions, it’s important to keep an open mind and consider different perspectives. Seek feedback from other team members or colleagues who may have a different point of view. It’s also important to consider the long-term effects of each solution, rather than just the immediate impact. For instance, while changing the project scope may seem like a quick fix to a delayed project, it could cause further delays or even impact the project’s success in the long run.

During the evaluation process, it’s essential to prioritize solutions based on their impact on the problem and their feasibility. Consider the resources, time, and effort required to implement each solution. Some solutions may be quick fixes that can be implemented immediately, while others may require more planning and preparation. It’s important to choose a solution that addresses the problem effectively while also being feasible to implement within the given resources and timeframe.

It’s also important to remember that not all solutions may work as expected. Be prepared to modify or pivot to a different solution if the initial solution does not yield the desired results. Additionally, ensure that the chosen solution aligns with the company’s policies and values and does not violate any ethical standards.

Step 4: Implement the Solution

Implementing the chosen solution requires careful planning and execution. The team needs to work together to ensure that the solution is implemented smoothly and efficiently. The plan should include a timeline, specific tasks, and deadlines. Assigning roles and responsibilities to each team member is crucial to ensure that everyone understands their role in the implementation process.

Effective communication is also essential during the implementation phase. The team should communicate regularly to discuss progress, identify any obstacles, and adjust the plan if necessary. For example, if the team decides to implement a new customer service strategy, they should train the customer service team, provide them with the necessary tools, and communicate the new strategy to customers.

It’s also important to track the progress of the implementation to ensure that everything is on track. Regular check-ins can help identify any problems early on and provide an opportunity to address them before they become bigger issues.

Step 5: Monitor and Adjust

Monitoring and adjusting the solution is crucial in ensuring that the problem is fully resolved. It’s essential to track the progress of the solution and evaluate its effectiveness. If the solution is not working as planned, it’s important to adjust it accordingly. This step requires flexibility and open communication among team members.

For example, if the team decided to adjust the project timeline, they should monitor the progress regularly and make adjustments if necessary. They should also communicate any changes to the stakeholders involved in the project. If the new timeline is not working, the team should be open to making further adjustments, such as revising the project scope or adding more resources.

Feedback plays a vital role in this step. It’s important to gather feedback from team members and stakeholders to ensure that the solution is meeting their needs. Feedback can also help identify any potential issues that may arise and allow the team to address them promptly.

Learning from mistakes is also an important aspect of effective problem solving. Every problem presents an opportunity to learn and grow. By reflecting on the process and the outcome, team members can identify areas for improvement and apply them in future problem-solving situations.

So, there you have it – a five-step process to solve any workplace problem like a pro! Whether it’s a pesky customer complaint, a tricky team conflict, or a stubborn project delay, you can tackle it with ease.

Remember, the first step is to define the problem – analyze it, gather information, and understand the root cause. Next, brainstorm possible solutions, even if they seem unrealistic or impractical. Get creative and come up with as many solutions as possible!

After that, evaluate the solutions by identifying their pros and cons, and choose the one that’s most feasible and practical. Make sure to consider the potential risks and benefits of each solution. Then, it’s time to implement the most practical solution. Develop a plan, communicate it to everyone involved, and assign roles and responsibilities.

Last but not least, monitor the progress and adjust the solution if necessary. Keep track of the progress and be open to feedback. Remember, learning from your mistakes is the key to success!

So, the next time you face a workplace problem, take a deep breath and follow these simple steps. You’ll be able to find a solution that works for everyone and become a valuable asset to your team or organization. With effective problem solving skills, you can maintain productivity, boost morale, and achieve success!

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All About Psychology

The 5 phases of problem solving

Problem solving is a complex psychological process through which we try to find the best way to overcome an obstacle or face a challenge. Unfortunately, this process is not always linear, but can follow tortuous paths, plunging us into a situation of psychological anguish when we believe that there is no possible solution.

On the other hand, knowing the phases of problem solving will save us a lot of headaches. Providing a coherent structure to the situation that concerns us, and having a common thread that guides us along the way, will help us to put some order in the mental chaos that problems usually generate.

To Solve a Problem, Experience Does not Always Work in Our Favor

Experience can be a plus or, on the contrary, become an impediment to solving problems. Psychologists from the universities of Hong Kong and Princeton examined how we implement problem-solving strategies by asking a group of people to solve a series of problems with matches.

Participants were presented with a series of linked squares. Each square in the matrix was made up of separate pieces, and people had to remove a certain number of matches while keeping a specified number of squares intact. The interesting thing about these types of problems is that they generally have more than one solution, different strategies can be used and these must change according to the configuration of the matrix, just as it usually happens with life problems.

These researchers found that participants went through two major stages in problem solving. At first they let themselves be carried away by the perceptual characteristics of the problem and began to explore different strategies, some successful and others not.

In a second moment they used the accumulated experience to narrow their options of strategies, focusing on those that were more successful. The problem is that the more the participants trusted their strategic knowledge, the more difficulties they had in solving problems that demanded the application of novel strategies. In practice, they suffered from a kind of functional fixation.

These series of experiments show us that to solve a problem we must keep an open mind because along the way circumstances are likely to change and we need the mental flexibility necessary to change our problem-solving strategies.

The Stages of Problem Solving We Can All Apply

1. Identify the problem

It may seem like a truism, but the truth is that identifying the real problem is not as easy as it seems, especially when it comes to a situation that affects us emotionally. In fact, when the problem is too scary or we sense that we do not have the psychological tools to solve it, we usually put into practice defense mechanisms such as displacement that allow us to erase the problematic situation from our conscious mind.

Instead, being able to identify the problem is the first step in finding a solution. Many times that means stopping looking outside for the culprits and searching within, wondering why a situation is particularly bothering or hindering us.

2. Understand the problem

Many times the problem brings with it the seed of the solution. So one of the steps in solving a problem is making sure we understand it. It is not enough to identify the problem, we need to define it. For this we need to analyze it from different perspectives.

For example, if we are trying to carry out a professional project that does not finish taking off, we have to clarify the reasons. Do we need more training? Are we in an overly competitive sector? Do we have enough resources? We need to understand the source of the problem.

Organizing the information available is another crucial step in the problem-solving process. We have to ask ourselves both, what we know about the problem and everything we do not know. Ultimately, the accuracy of the solution will largely depend on the amount of information available.

3. Assume a psychological distance

Most of the major problems in life have the potential to generate an emotional tsunami. However, many times that affective involvement obfuscates and prevents us from thinking clearly. That is why on many occasions one of the most important but least known phases for solving problems consists of moving away from what concerns us. To assume a psychological distance , we can take a few days away from the problematic environment or try to stop thinking about what worries us for a while.

During that time the unconscious mind will continue to work and is likely to generate creative and perfectly valid insights that lead to the solution of the problem. That distance to allow us to overcome the functional fixations that prevent us from thinking outside the box, giving way to a mental restructuring that will allow us to see the problem from another perspective.

4. Find solutions and develop strategies

Each problem is different, so it will require a specific solution. A solution cannot always be reached by insight, so it will be necessary to think of possible alternatives to solve the problem. Synectics , for example, is a problem-solving method that uses creativity to find original solutions.

The next step is to develop a strategy, since solutions that do not materialize in concrete steps are very difficult to implement. Therefore, we must ask ourselves how we are going to implement our solution. In this phase of problem solving it is important to be honest with ourselves and “land” that strategy taking into account our resources and real availability. It is useless to develop a great strategy if we cannot apply it later.

5. Evaluation of progress

Very few problems are solved overnight. These are generally complex situations that we must patiently “unwind” over time. Therefore, another of the phases to solve a problem consists of monitoring the results that we are achieving. This way we make sure that we are on the right track and we are not wasting energy and time uselessly.

In this last stage of problem solving it is important to be able to adapt our expectations. It is difficult for a professional project to take off in the blink of an eye, so we must focus on the small steps that indicate that the solution is paying off. To do this, it is important to sit down and reflect on the impact of the solution from time to time.

We must also bear in mind that circumstances often change, so we may need to make adjustments to our initial solution. This requires great mental flexibility to change course when we realize that the strategy is not as effective as we would like.

Fedor, A. et. Al. (2015) Problem solving stages in the five square problem.  Front. Psychol ; 6: 1050.

Louis Lee, N. Y. & Johnson-Laird, P. N. (2013) Strategic changes in problem solving.  Journal of Cognitive Psychology ; 25: 165–173. 

Gillen, G. (2009) Managing Executive Function Impairments to Optimize Function.  Cognitive and Perceptual Rehabilitation ; 245-283.

Jennifer Delgado

I am a psychologist and I spent several years writing articles for scientific journals specialized in Health and Psychology. I want to help you create great experiences. Learn more about me .

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5 Steps to Solving the Problems With Your Problem Solving

Follow this five-step process for defining your root problem, breaking it down to its core components, prioritizing solutions, conducting your analysis, and selling your recommendation internally..

Give me a problem, I solve it. That's how entrepreneurs work, right? We're problem solvers by nature.

That's great in theory, but here's the thing: How do you know that you're working on the right problem? That you haven't overlooked the root cause? That your chosen solutions are the ones with the highest potential impact?

Answering these questions is actually pretty easy. All you have to do is follow five simple steps. If you're rigorous about the problem-solving method you use, I promise you'll improve your chances of solving the right problem, generating solutions that address the true root cause, and selecting the ideas with the greatest impact.

How can I guarantee it will work? I've personally used these five steps for almost 15 years, and I’ve been teaching structured problem solving for a long time.

Step 1: Pin the Problem

Clearly define the issue at hand. Look at the problem from multiple perspectives . What would your CEO identify as the problem? Your customers? Your front-line associates? You get the picture. Problems look different to different people.

Also, look at causality. All of us have solved a symptom without curing the real disease. When you fix a symptom, the root problem doesn't go away--it simply manifests as a new symptom. Be sure to understand causality. Once you've looked through different lenses and found root causes, you should have a clearly defined problem.

Step 2: Identify the Issues

Start breaking down the problem into subcomponents. For example, your profit problem breaks down into revenue issues and cost issues. The revenue side breaks down further into price and volume issues. On the other side, you've got fixed-cost, variable-cost, and semi-variable-cost issues. As you break the problem down and identify all the possible issues, your odds of finding the true root cause skyrocket. This process also lends structure to your problem solving so you can be deliberate in your investigation and analysis.

Step 3: Generate Hypotheses and Prioritize Proving Them

Once you've laid out all the issues, start thinking about ways to solve each one. Don't actually begin putting solutions into action--just identify possible solutions for each issue. Those possible solutions become the hypotheses you're going to prioritize, analyze, and evaluate. For example, if you have a volume issue on the revenue side of things, you might suggest entering new markets, launching a new product, or expanding distribution channels. All those ideas focus primarily on driving volume. Those are your four initial hypotheses for that particular issue.

Once you've constructed a full list of hypotheses that could solve all the issues, you need to prioritize your efforts. There’s so much waste in our current problem-solving methods because we go out and try to prove or disprove every hypothesis instead of focusing on the ones that could have the biggest ROI.

Use the 80/20 method. Do some rough calculations to see which idea might be the biggest. Don't set out to prove or disprove every hypothesis. Focus your efforts on the ones that could be the most meaningful.

Step 4: Conduct Your Analysis

You can stop twitching now--we finally get to open Excel. But again, the analysis is a focused effort designed to prove or disprove your primary hypothesis. If you prove it's a valuable solution, you'll have some impact and then move on to the next most likely idea. Ring the cash register, folks. You may not find the biggest idea on the first shot but at least you're making a contribution (unlike those folks who analyze everything but implement nothing ).

Remember--you don't need all the analysis. You need the right analysis. If you can focus your efforts on proving or disproving your primary hypothesis, you'll be more efficient and get to answers quickly versus getting stuck in the muck of analysis paralysis.

Step 5: Advance Your Answer

Now you need to start selling that recommendation so it gets implemented. Begin by transforming that hypothesis into a clearly worded recommendation. Have the core analyses required to prove your case and not one bit more. People aren't impressed by your million spreadsheets. They're impressed when you can pull out two or three core analyses that prove your case.

Once you've defined that recommendation, put it into a logical, clear storyline. Help your audience understand what the problem is, why we need to solve it, and how your recommendation saves the day.

There you go!

Five easy steps for solving even the most complex problems. Note that the method is about clarity, focus, simplicity, and elegance. It's not an Excel competition. It's about who can crack the biggest problems the fastest and also who can crack the most problems in the shortest period of time. I know it seems simple, but the discipline takes a long time to acquire .

So what are the biggest challenges you face in your problem solving?

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5 Steps to Make your Problem-Solving Process Easier

No matter what kind of job you have, the chances of a problem arising at some point is almost inevitable. If the problem isn’t taken care of immediately with proper action, it could potentially get worse. No one wants to be in a hostile work environment, so it’s crucial to be aware of how to properly solve an issue.

What is Problem Solving?

Before we can even begin to explain what problem-solving is, we need to define what a problem is. A problem is any type of disturbance from normality that is hindering progress. A problem can be time-consuming and energy wasting. They can be as little as a disagreement, to as big as a miscommunication that costs millions of dollars to fix.

One problem-solving technique is determining whether it prevents you from reaching your goal. No matter the issue’s size, it can be solved by identifying it, gathering possible solutions, choosing the best possible one, and implementing it. That’s commonly known as the problem-solving process. If a company neglects any problems in the workplace, they could potentially get worse and cause significant problems.

Problem-solving can be the difference between a business succeeding or failing. According to Forbes.com , some common barriers that will prevent companies from being successful problem-solvers include the inability to see a problem, lack of respect, and failure to include all parts involved with the problem, among others.

Problem-solvers need some specific skills, like being able to do research and make both rational and emotionally intelligent decisions. Risk management is another skill that’s imperative to making a successful decision. Your team should all be able to work together in the problem-solving process.

In fact, in 2013, the Association of American Colleges and Universities released a report claiming that 93 percent of employers agree, “a candidate’s demonstrated capacity to think critically, communicate clearly, and solve complex problems is more important than their undergraduate major.”

Here are a few more problem-solving skills:

• Team building
• Effective communication
• Active listening
• Brainstorming

There are many benefits to problem-solving in an organization. For one thing, it creates a hostility-free environment that encourages everyone to speak their mind when a problem occurs. Resolving problems together as a team can foster team building. Problem-solving can also empower a workforce and make its members more confident. If an entire organization can problem-solve efficiently, they can spend their time more wisely.

5 Steps to Better Problem-Solving

Step 1: identify the problem.

As obvious as it may sound, the first step in the problem-solving process is to identify the root of the issue. However, the problem isn’t always easily identifiable and might require some extra analysis to get the source. One way you can identify a problem is by using Toyota’s “Five Whys” technique . In the event of a problem, ask yourself the five whys:

By asking yourself these questions, you’ll discover where the problem is coming from. If that isn’t enough, here are three steps you can take to better identify a problem:

Explore the situation : Expand on the problem to try to get to the bottom of it. If an individual is the problem’s source, try putting yourself in their shoes.

Draft a problem statement : Reduce the problem into the simplest of terms and put it down on paper. This can help you gather and organize your thoughts.

Try to answer the question : “Why is this current situation a problem?” Once you’ve boiled it down to one source, you’ll be able to better assess the situation.

Let’s use a coffee shop as an example. Say the coffee shop has slowly been losing business in the last quarter, despite being very successful in the past few months. The owner wants to better understand why they’re suddenly losing business.

First, they explore the situation and look at all the possible reasons for why this is happening. They look at their employees, their daily routines, and training procedures. They also observe the local competition and the regional factors, like the fact that they’re located in a college town.

After looking at every single possible reason, the owner figures out what’s causing the problem and writes it down: It’s the summer and most of their student clientele are away for the summer. Finally, the owner answers the question, “Why is this current situation a problem?” Then after further evaluation, they realize the problem is a limited market and that they must expand to get more business.

Step 2: Generate Potential Solutions

The next step is to create a list of possible solutions. Start by brainstorming some potential answers, either individually or in a group setting. The latter is recommended, because when you have more input, you get more perspectives that can lead to unique solutions.

Here are some other methods to create solutions:

Means-End Analysis : An artificial intelligence analysis that finds the best possible way of attaining a goal.

Plan Do Study Act Model : Also known as the PDSA Model. This is the shorthand version of the problem-solving method, where you start with planning, test the theory, study the results, and act based upon observations . This process is done several times.

Root Cause Analysis : This method is used to get to the root of the problem. Its four steps are to identify the problem, establish a timeline, distinguish between root causes and other factors, and create a cause graph.

Lean Prioritization Method : This method is created within a two-by-two matrix, with the X and Y-axis ranging from low to high. The X-axis is labeled as “effort”, while the Y-axis is labeled “value.” Inside the matrix, label the four squares with:

• And time sinks

Evaluate the problems and situations and put them in the appropriate categories to figure out where to focus your attention.

Step 3: Choose One Solution

Once a list of possible solutions has been made, it’s time to put your decision-making skills to the test. To find the best solution for the problem, analyze every possible resolution and decide which is best for your situation.

Before making a decision, consider the potential solution’s efficacy, practicality, timeliness, resources, and cost. Narrow your choices down with the process of elimination and with a risk manager’s input. Like brainstorming, choosing a solution doesn’t have to be done alone.

Step 4: Implement the Solution You’ve Chosen

Now that you’ve chosen a solution, it’s time to implement it throughout the necessary departments, areas, or people. On average, it takes about 66 days for a new habit to become automatic, according to a study published in the European Journal of Social Psychology. In other words, change doesn’t happen overnight. To make a new change to any business, planning, patience, and persistence are all required.

Planning : Timing is everything. When a company implements a new strategy, they often take a lot of time to implement the new idea. Decide on clear goals, address any issues or possible obstacles, and create a plan. It’s also critical to practice proper communication skills across the entire organization so that everyone knows what’s expected.

Patience : Change is scary and not everyone is going to accept it, that’s why it’s important to stay patient throughout this process. Try implementing the plan little by little so that employees aren’t overwhelmed. Encourage each other and make sure everyone understands the intention behind this change, and that everyone is participating in making it possible.

Persistence : Continuous application and monitoring of these changes are crucial. Make sure all of your employees are practicing the changes every week so they become the norm.

Step 5: Evaluate Results

The final part of the problem-solving process is to analyze the results. This can be done after a couple of weeks, months, or years, depending on what you’re trying to achieve. It’s important to remember why this problem started in the first place and how it affected the company. Ask yourself any of the following questions to better evaluate results:

• Are any of our processes being interrupted by the previous problem?
• Have any new problems arisen since we started this process?
• Is there a possibility the issue can return?
• Is everyone aware of the original problem, the solution created, and why it was created?
• Do you need to change any policy, procedure, or personnel to avoid this from happening again?

Sometimes, it’s necessary to start the process completely over. To make the problem-solving process easier, it’s best to simplify the solution as much as possible. Try to focus on the solution rather than the problem. Be positive, open-minded, and willing to make the change. With enough practice, any problem can be solved.

Problems will always occur no matter what situation you’re in, so it’s important to know how to conquer them before they get out of hand. Do you want to learn more about the process of problem-solving and how you can apply it to fix your company’s issues?

You can learn about different strategies that will help alleviate any workplace problems in KnowledgeCity’s course on Problem Solving in 5 Easy Steps . Use this information to take control of any problems that crop up at work.

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Thanks for this terrific article! I am a mentor to undergraduate students and I was researching problem solving philosophies, methodologies, and techniques. This was a perfect resource! I like the way that you provided practical examples and also provided various methodologies and systems for problem solving. I think that’s always good to provide people options as certain methodologies may be best geared for certain disciplines, industries, or situations.

I took special note of these key quotes:

“because the more input, the better, simply because different perspectives can lead to different solutions.”

“It’s important to remember why this problem started in the first place and how it was affecting the company.”

Thanks again for making this great information publicly available.

Clifford Thornton

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Problem Solving in Dance/Movement Therapy Research: Developing an Intervention Protocol for Adults Living with Treatment Resistant Depression

• Open access
• Published: 24 June 2024

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• Neha Christopher   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-9335-8244 1 , 2  

Dance/movement therapy (DMT) research requires creative and innovative thinking; this paper includes two parts demonstrating this. Part one describes and delves into the creative problem solving process undertaken over 2.5 years. Four main steps were followed towards developing an intervention session plan for a first-of-its-kind DMT study in treatment resistant depression: (i) Examining pre-existing knowledge: Reviewing insights gained from clinical practice and formal literature. (ii) Assessing the need for preliminary studies: This step demonstrates how to determine and navigate the potential need for preliminary studies in novel research. (iii) Integrating existing and new research: I discuss Watson’s (Watson, Sociological Research Online 25:66–83, 2020) braiding technique and how it may help integrate insights from steps one and two. (iv) Reviewing outputs: This includes examining the developed session plan by conducting a fidelity and biases check. Each step presents reflective questions that ultimately contributed towards protocol development. The questions listed may also be a beneficial guide to novice DMT researchers embarking on novel research.

Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.

Introduction

Creative problem solving and research planning go hand-in-hand. In the last 50 years, dance/movement therapy researchers have embraced the ambiguities of a growing profession such as, integrating within pre-existing healthcare systems, navigating varied license and practice standards in different locations; all whilst actively problem solving and contributing to knowledge about the efficacy of interventions in the field of dance/movement therapy (DMT). Within depression research, this includes exploring the use of DMT along with anti-depressants (Hyvönen et al., 2020 ) and psychedelics, precisely ketamine (Marcantoni et al., 2020 ). Likewise, researchers in the field of mental health have also attempted to understand and treat depression in novel ways, such as through transcranial magnetic stimulation (Sehatzadeh et al., 2019 ) and theta-burst stimulation (Liu et al., 2023 ). Some side effects like headaches, scalp pain, muscle twitching, and gastrointestinal and eye problems have been reported from these treatments (Sehatzadeh et al., 2019 ). This indicates a need for further research to help identify the appropriate dosage of these sessions to obtain therapeutic benefits without adverse effects. Further, such findings also compel researchers to consider other non-invasive treatment options with potentially lesser side effects, with DMT being one such option.

Treatment-resistant depression (TRD) has not yet been explored in DMT. While this scarcity of research is understandable in a nascent profession, when critically examined from a social justice lens, this is not justified and must be addressed to enable equitable care for all. Although socioeconomic status is a commonly discussed factor in social justice driven research (Amaddeo & Jones, 2007 ), barriers to equitable care are not limited to financial access. Gaps in the literature may also cause inaccessibility towards treatment. Having identified a gap in DMT literature, where TRD is yet to be explored, gave impetus to my research project on studying the effect/s (if any) of DMT on treatment resistant depression. Creative problem solving was a core component of my research planning process and was crucial in helping me develop a targeted intervention protocol in this area. In this paper, the term intervention protocol refers to the comprehensive list of procedural information needed to carry out research such as eligibility criteria, dosage determination, requirement strategy, fidelity checklist, etc. along with the intervention session plan itself. In this paper, I am primarily focusing on how creative problem solving helped me design the intervention session plan within the larger intervention protocol.

Creswell and Clark ( 2017 ) proposed four key areas in research planning aimed at identifying: (1) the research paradigm (e.g., axiology, epistemology, ontology, etc.); (2) the theoretical lens of the researcher and the research (e.g., radical, medical, social etc.); (3) methodological approach (e.g., mixed methods, quantitative, ethnography etc.); and (4) the method of data collection (e.g., questionnaires, interviews, recordings etc.). While an interplay between these four areas may suffice in some research, novel and niche topics often require pioneering thinking, mainly when designing the ‘intervention’ for a given study. Unlike other topics where researchers are informed by pre-existing data that either sets precedence for argumentative reasoning (Greene et al., 2016 ) or offers an opportunity for replication of some nature, this is not the same for novel and niche topics. The scope of this manuscript to offer a transparent, real-life research experience of problem solving in DMT research, which may be used a template or guide by DMT students or professionals embarking on novel DMT research. In this two-part manuscript, I will first highlight the processes I undertook to explore the traditional key areas of research (Creswell & Clark, 2017 ) in part I. Next, I will outline a 12-week DMT intervention session plan for adults living with treatment resistant depression developed through the creative and reflexive processes in part II of this manuscript.

Part I: Four Step Creative Problem-Solving Process

Treatment resistant depression (TRD) is a type of depression where one’s symptoms do not reduce despite intervention (Al-Harbi, 2012 ). Specific theoretical underpinnings of DMT, precisely that of the mind–body nexus (Berrol, 1992 ), embodiment, and kinesthetic empathy Footnote 1 (Barrero González, 2019 ; Christopher & Tamplin, 2022 ; Joufflineau et al., 2018 ) show promise for symptomatic relief if used in treating resistant depression. However, considering the vulnerability of the population (Gaynes et al., 2020 ), the mere theoretical potential from a few studies did not provide sufficient knowledge-based insights to help develop the intervention session plan in my research project. Additionally, the emerging literature on treatment resistant depression (TRD) emphasises a prevalence of comorbidities and possible intersections of race (Liu et al., 2021 ), which further marginalised potential research participants. This re-emphasised the duty of care required through the research planning process to develop an intervention session plan for a first-of-its-kind research study with DMT and TRD. I engaged in a four-step creative problem solving process to develop the intervention session plan for my project. This has been graphically represented in Fig.  1 below.

An illustrative depiction of a four-step creative problem solving process used to help develop a DMT intervention session plan over 2.5 years

STEP 1: Examining Pre-existing Knowledge

Knowledge is perceived and understood differently across the world. To me, knowledge is best described as the oral or visual understanding that enables us to comprehend the world around us (Cameron, 2020 ). While examining pre-existing knowledge in step 1 of my problem solving process, I retained this description of knowledge. I consciously considered both formal and informal forms of knowledge, as seen in the questions I sought answers to in this step:

What do I already know about this topic from my clinical experience? What does the literature say about this topic? and, How does the ‘self’ Footnote 2 of the researcher play a role in influencing the research interests?

In addition to a traditional literature review process, I reflected on the inception of my research interests, which were birthed from my clinical practice.

Clinical Practice

In the early years of my career, I worked as a dance/movement therapist with older adults living with severe and persistent mental health conditions at an outpatient clinic. During this time, I worked with Dina. Footnote 3

Dina was a 66-year-old African-American woman admitted to an outpatient clinic directly after her discharge from an adult in-patient psychiatry ward. She enjoyed the music of Johnny Cash and grooving to disco. Dina was diagnosed with depression and had a history of psychosis and interpersonal conflict. The clinic offered various services, including dance/movement therapy, cognitive behavioural therapy, support groups, housing support, psychopharmacology, and recreational groups. Most of which Dina proactively used/participated in five days a week. Dina roughly participated in two group DMT sessions a week and one individual DMT session every two weeks, amounting to monthly direct contact hours of 7.5 hours with me across 18 months. My work required robust documentation on the client’s experience of sessions. Some of her feedback that struck me includes, “I feel good”, “I enjoy it. You don’t get to do things you enjoy when you get to my age”, “It is so lovely to dance with you”, “Dancing with you is different” and, “these sessions help me get my stress out sometimes”. Dina often reported experiencing significant stress in her life, including a fear of homelessness and loss of health insurance. Although Dina continued to take her medications as prescribed by the psychiatrist, participate in therapy sessions, and attend services offered at the clinic regularly- she still expressed dissatisfaction with her mood. She reported not feeling the benefits of the various interventions despite active participation.

Revisiting Dina’s story helped me reconnect with my curiosity about kinesthetic empathy and the therapeutic movement relationship in DMT. I was also keenly aware that the process of DMT juxtaposed the treatment resistance she experienced at the clinic. Concurrently, I reconnected with my somatic cues of frustration that stemmed from a dissonance between my value of justice-based equitable care that evolved with clients’ needs and structural limitations of support in the outpatient healthcare system in the USA.

The Self of the Researcher and Research Paradigm

The ‘self’ of the researcher is an undeniable part of research planning and warrants similar reflexive exploration as aspects of the research paradigm (as mentioned on p. 1). Here, I refer to ‘self’ as the paradoxical being which is both the essence and the totality of one’s personality, as Jung (1875–1961) described it (McGehee et al., 2017 ).

Axiology Footnote 4 : Our values play a significant role in justifying our rationale in research. Further, our choices are “influenced by the type of person we are, our experiences, culture, background, social, and economic status” (Roots, 2007 , p. 20). Understanding our values from an embodied lens can help clarify research interests and inform the study design and intervention protocol. For instance, awareness and curiosity of my embodied cues (of discomfort and tension) while witnessing the dysregulation my clients experienced due to sub-optimal intervention effects clarified the scope of my research and the focus of the intervention protocol. They were (i) generating systematic knowledge on DMT and TRD and (ii) focusing on emotional regulation in the intervention designed for TRD, respectively. Another example of the influence of my axiology is seen in my use of interviews in data collection and active inclusion of storytelling, meaning-making, and dance stories in the DMT session plan, which stem from the personal value I place on multiple perspectives and oral narratives.

Epistemology Footnote 5 : Another core aspect of identifying a research paradigm is to clarify the researcher’s understanding of knowledge and its creation. By recognizing my embodied response of feeling energised at the thought of combining scientific inquiry with my research participants’ lived experiences, I discovered the importance I laid on knowledge being congruent with social realities (Park et al., 2020 ). I gained further clarity that my perception of knowledge is “relative to particular social and historical arrangements” (Scott, 2007 , p. 5), amounting to epistemic relativism. Like my axiology, these insights also influenced my research’s design and data collection method.

Ontology 5 : Growing up in a mixed-caste family in India, I was exposed to differences and diversity at a young age. This helped me recognise how social, economic, and cultural factors can affect the perception of one’s reality. My ontological stance is that of a critical realist stance, where one’s perception of reality is affected by their social reality and context (Alele & Malau-Aduli, 2023 ). For me, my ontological stance was crystalised through my interoceptive awareness. While reviewing different ontological stances, I noticed my body ‘tense up’, namely in my breath, gut, and diaphragm. As I educated myself on the critical realist stance, I noticed these functions to be restored to their natural state. I also noticed that I was no longer clenching the inner muscles of my chest and that my diaphragm had eased back into its resting state. In this way, interoceptive awareness (Khalsa et al., 2009 ) helped me confirm my ontological stance and create an embodied link between the ‘self’ of the researcher and key steps in research planning.

Methodology : To me, the mind–body nexus inherently symbolises the convergence of two forms of knowledge. Just as DMT embraces both cognitive and somatic processes, similarly, I noticed myself being intuitively drawn to converging two types of data sets by adopting a mixed methodology. From a philosophical perspective, a mixed methodology is rooted in the complexity of reality and seeks to lay a necessary emphasis on different vantage points on a given topic (Watson, 2020 ). Thus, a mixed methodology could embrace the complexity of TRD and the need for various data sets due to the novelty of this study. Here, I noticed and relied on my embodied felt sense of discerning between ‘alignment vs. fragmentation’ to ensure a clear, logical link between my chosen research paradigm, research interests and the ‘self’ of the researcher. An equally important consideration is the relevance of the intended methodology with the research question; however, I do not reflect on this in this manuscript, as this is commonly discussed in the literature (Tashakkori & Creswell, 2007 ).

STEP 2: Assessing the Need for Preliminary Studies

Typical of any research endeavour, I first formulated my research question using insights from step one (above), as suggested by McFerran and Silverman ( 2018 ). At this stage, my research question was, ‘How can a 12-week group dance/movement therapy intervention support stress management and emotional regulation in adults living with treatment resistant depression?’ Evidently, the research question had a cascading effect on the rest of the research planning process. Next, I revisited the literature reviewed in step one from the lens of the research question. This aimed to ascertain if I had access to enough literature or oral knowledge to develop a session plan that would directly answer the research question. Here, oral knowledge can be best understood as a broad term covering varied lived experiences and stories. Here, the following questions contributed to my successfully navigating this step:

How can I develop an intervention session plan based on existing information (of varied forms)? or Do I need to generate more knowledge on these topics before I can develop an intervention session plan that can answer the research question?

These questions helped me determine the need for preliminary studies to develop an intervention session plan based on adequate evidence. Once the need for preliminary studies was established, I identified the area of focus of these studies, which was directly informed by the gaps in the literature. Upon identifying the missing links in the literature, I recognised the need to conduct two preliminary studies. The first was a systematic review and meta-analysis on using DMT to treat common symptom clusters in TRD (Christopher et al., under review). The second was a survey study collating practice-based knowledge on how dance movement therapists practiced with their clients with TRD (Christopher & Tamplin, 2022 ). While the availability of funding and human resources may directly affect the type of preliminary studies that can be carried out, it is unlikely that preliminary studies can be avoided altogether in novel research areas.

STEP 3: Integrating Existing and New Knowledge

Integration is the central action in this third step of creative problem solving. Here, I asked myself the following questions:

How can I integrate new and existing information on this topic? and How does the integrated information inform the intervention session plan?

Using the study by Shim et al. ( 2021 ) as a guide, I integrated the findings of both my preliminary studies and my clinical practice experience using Watson’s ( 2020 ) technique of braiding (the findings have been schematically shown in Fig.  2 ). Braiding was a suitable option as it can combine more than just quantitative or qualitative data. Instead, braiding draws on visual, temporal, and sensorial integrations and is not bound to any one step in the research (Watson, 2020 ). Although braiding is typically used when two or more methods are sequentially employed across different research phases, I adapted this technique. I used it across different studies to suit my research needs. Watson ( 2020 ) also recommends a creative review process that usually has an exegetical output. This process can also be understood from the lens of arts-based research. Here, the words of Hervey ( 2004 ) stating “the phenomena of the arts must be allowed to speak for themselves within their unique environments (p. x)” perfectly encapsulated my rationale for the engaging in dance as my creative exegesis, which I termed ‘dancing with the data’ in my research. Through this artistic process, I processed and reviewed the insights from the preliminary studies on a somatic level. I involved the participation of another dance/movement therapist (one of my PhD supervisors, Dr Ella Dumaresq) in this step, who is referred to as the observer below. My rationale for inviting another DMT into this artistic process was similar to what (McNiff) recognises about artistic inquiry being both, subjective but also needing external perspective and potential objectivity ( 2008 ). In my case of ‘dancing with the data’, the DMT played the role of the observer bringing to my attention new considerations for movement explorations based on their observations.

The braiding process contributing to the development of the intervention session plan. As stated, the figure begins at the bottom and is designed to be reviewed vertically (bottom-to-top)

I reviewed the findings of the systematic review (the first preliminary study in this research project), after which I:

Noted down the words that described or alluded to different dance/movement therapy techniques from the systematic review findings. (E.g. improvisation, active choice-making, collaboration, props, etc.).

Wrote down all words that warranted consideration regarding study design (e.g., standard care, 12 weeks, 16 weeks, attrition, etc.).

Read the written words and used these as a prompt for an initial dance exploration, ‘Dancing with the Data-1’ while being witnessed by another dance/movement therapist.

Repeated steps (i), (ii), and (iii) with a second dance exploration, which I termed ‘Dancing with the Data-2’ after reviewing the findings of the survey study (the second preliminary study in this research project).

The observer shared verbal feedback on any repetitive or striking movement patterns they saw in steps 1 and 2.

I then danced in response to the verbal feedback from the observer. This was termed ‘Dancing with the Data-3’.

Lastly, after my final movement exploration (which I termed ‘Dancing with the Data-3) was complete, I reflected on ‘Dancing with the Data 1, 2, and 3’ and made a note of the following:

Any movement-based need I noticed in myself (that may be a consideration for the dance therapy session plan within the broader protocol).

Any standard DMT techniques I noticed across ‘Dancing with the Data 1, 2, and 3.’

In this novel research, the benefit of using braiding and creative exegesis was that it helped centralise multiple research outputs (Watson, 2020 , p. 77). The multiple research outputs obtained from step 5 (as mentioned above) were then ‘braided’ to form the outline of the intervention session plan. This has been schematically depicted below (Fig.  2 ).

STEP 4: Reviewing Outputs

Maintaining the fidelity of an intervention is part of the ethical duty of care. Since this manner of session plan development involves integration between varied facets, such as the researcher’s self, research paradigm, existing knowledge, and findings from preliminary studies, it was necessary to check my implicit biases that may have clouded my four-step process. I did this by asking the following questions:

Does this session plan directly answer the research question? and, Is there a clear rationale for each component of the intervention? If yes , Can I ascertain the links between the preliminary studies, existing literature, and my intervention session plan? If not , What changes do I need to make to ensure the intervention is built on practice knowledge, new knowledge, and principles of DMT?

A fidelity check may also help maintain the internal validity of the intervention. Here, I sought a ‘content fidelity check’ by one of my supervisors, who read the intervention session plan and provided narrative feedback on the following: (i) any concerns regarding biased use of language and misalignment between the planned intervention session plan and research question of the project, (ii) DMT recommendations in the context of emergent literature on related topics, and, (iii) any further recommendations to enrich research integrity and reduce confirmation or publication biases, if relevant. In some instances, developing an implementation fidelity checklist may also be relevant. In my research, I developed an implementation fidelity checklist adopted from Rolvsjord et al. ( 2005 ) framework for research rigour in music therapy, which included four main categories: (i) Essential and Unique, (ii) Essential and Not Unique (iii) Acceptable but not Essential and (iv) Unacceptable. I designed this checklist to be completed after each intervention session of the research project. This also served as a documentation format for any patterns of deviation that emerged during implementation. Any patterns in deviation may also be considered formal inclusions in a second iteration of the intervention session plan if there is one.

Engaging in the aforementioned steps re-emphasised the need for resourceful problem solving while developing a novel intervention session plan, particularly the importance of drawing on multi-faceted resources and forms of knowledge beyond academic literature. Further, recognizing my clients’ lived experiences and insights from clinical practice as core forms of knowledge is also symbolic of the mindset of integration. This was seen in the process of braiding (Watson, 2020 ) which enabled me to interweave multiple facets of information (cognitive, emotional, sensorial, etc.) that helped me obtain the outline of the intervention. This four-step process helped me navigate the muddy waters of novel research by prioritizing research integrity and personal reflexivity. Having discussed this process, I will present the DMT session plan from the 12-week intervention session plan developed through the abovementioned processes. The following session plan was implemented with one group of five adults with treatment resistant depression ( n  = 5) between the ages of 20 and 30 with two individuals who dropped at week 6 and 9. All individuals volunteered to participate in a research study, with results to be published in an upcoming companion paper. Individuals were eligible to participate if they fulfilled all the following criteria: (i) have a diagnosis of clinical depression that has either lasted at least 18 months or have been identified to have ‘treatment resistance’ by a medical professional (ii) lived independently (not in an assisted facility) (iii) were between 21 and 50 years of age (iv) did not experienced a significant reduction in symptoms despite engaging in treatment for at least 6 weeks (i.e., antidepressants, or 1:/group psychotherapy) (v) did not have any other illness that requires urgent and persistent medical care (vi) were willing to participate in a 16-week group DMT study (vii) were comfortable with communicating in English (writing, reading, and comprehension) (viii) were not at risk of active self-harm. Further details like exclusion criteria, additional demographic details etc. will be published in an upcoming companion paper.

Part II: The DMT Intervention

Dance/movemment therapy session plan, session structure.

To ensure predictability for participants, all sessions were divided into three main parts: a warm-up, theme development, and closure. Since this research was conducted in Australia, it adhered to the guidelines set by the National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research (Council, 2023 ) which recommends all research risks to be predicted and pre-emptively mitigated or planned for, as appropriate. In the case of this research project, structural predictability was mindfully included in the design of the intervention to offer a sense of control about participants’ exploration and sharing within sessions. Knowledge of the session structure allowed participants to use their agency, judgment and bring up new material accordingly. Each session was planned to be 45 min long and divided into the following time divisions: warm-up—approximately 10 min, theme development—approximately 20 min, and closure—approximately 15 min. A summary of the session plan is depicted below (Fig.  3 ).

A summary of the DMT session plan. Figure begins at the top and is designed to be reviewed in a vertical manner (top-to-bottom)

The warm-up was designed to prepare participants for the DMT session, both physically and emotionally. This dual purpose of warm-ups was also seen by the founders of Western DMT as a profession (Levy, 1988 ), who believed the structured and systematic movements of the warm-up parallelly prepared participants to physically engage in the movements of the sessions while developing a sense of psycho-social flexibility that prepared them for the socio-emotional components of the session (Levy, 1988 ; Nieman, 2002 ). I designed the warm-up to include the following options:

Head-to-toe warm-up: This warm-up focused on mindful stretching one muscle group at a time. Movements were typically done by rotating body parts in a clockwise, and counter-clockwise directions, and each stretch was held for five to eight counts. If music was used, music with precise rhythms or melodies (percussion or strings) was played. Music with multiple harmonies and complex melodies was avoided. This was adapted from the systematic review (Christopher et al., under review), which revealed the use of structured and planned movements (like stretching and relaxation exercises) to offer predictability and to enhance the effectiveness of the functional movements (Ho et al., 2016 , 2020 ).

Breath-and-limb activation: This warm-up focused on the activation (physiological) of the lungs (by breathing in), ribcage, diaphragm and homolateral activation of upper and lower limbs (i.e., left-hand rises along with the left leg). Here, the limbs did not cross the vertical midsection of the body and were repeated three or four times. This same breath-and-limb activation was then carried out on the opposite limbs. After mastery of this, I invited participants to try contralateral movements with each breath (i.e., left hand rises along with right leg). This was adapted from the systematic review (Christopher et al., under review), in which Ho et al. ( 2020 )’s use of contralateral movements was emphasised to help activate both hemispheres of the brain.

Body-based check-in: Here, I verbally guided the participants to bring conscious awareness to their inner rhythms systematically (i.e., their throat, heartbeat, stomach, gut and so on). As the participants were guided through different parts of their bodies, they were invited to observe any sensory experiences (touch, sound, smell, etc.) they were aware of. When relevant, I invited participants to focus on the nature and intensity of any identified sensorial experiences through the check-in. This emphasis on increasing interoceptive skills in participants was obtained from the findings of the second preliminary study, where interoceptive awareness may be a beneficial way to track somatic depression symptoms (Christopher & Tamplin, 2022 ).

Physicalizing: This warm-up was based on projective techniques in dance therapy (Chaiklin & Wengrower, 2015 ) Here, each participant was invited to identify a feeling that best described their presence in the group, verbalizing the identified feeling and adding a movement of their own to express their feeling ‘in-the-moment physically’. A variation of this was to create a small group dance from all the emergent movements. The use of creating small group dances as a DMT technique was emphasised in the individual studies included (Ho et al., 2016 , 2020 ); another study included in the review also emphasised the importance of group cohesion (Pylvänäinen et al., 2015 ). Hence, small group dances were retained in the intervention sessions as a possible way to foster said cohesion based on the findings of the systematic review (Christopher et al., under review).

Feeling check and play with props: Occasionally, props were offered to foster orientation to time, place, and person. Examples of movements that emerged from the props may include movements like ‘passing a ball’ from one participant to the following or more complex movements like using an octaband to demonstrate one’s emotional state. This was also based on physicalizing (Levy, 1988 ). Here, props were incorporated in the intervention sessions based on the DMT approaches mentioned in all studies included in the systematic review (Christopher et al., under review). Props were used to facilitate expression through metaphors and symbols and increase movement repertoire.

Lastly, the importance of a physical warm-up was also directly aligned with a dance movement therapist’s duty of care by taking all the necessary steps to prevent physical injury.

Theme Development

The overarching theme across the sessions was broadly anticipated but not predetermined. However, due to my presence and creative orientation (Young, 2017 ), changes and spontaneity were introduced to respond to any emergent needs of the participants. Keeping in line with the National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research ( 2023 ), I was prepared to work with potential themes identified based on preliminary studies. These overarching themes were derived from research and practice and were not considered fixed; predictability was primarily structural.

The 12-week DMT intervention was divided into four phases, each consisting of four sessions. These four phases were developed as a result of the braided insights from steps A, B and C (Fig.  1 above). Phase 1 was based on the findings of preliminary study 1 (Christopher & Tamplin, 2022 ) that identified that interoception to be helpful in developing a rapport, considering it was the beginning of the intervention sessions, this was suitable to phase one of the study. Sensory identification was also introduced in phase one as pre-determinant to emotional regulation, which was the aim of the research endeavour and goal designed for phase 4 of the intervention sessions. Phase two was largely informed by the literature on stress, depression and TRD. Again, considering the research question “How can a 12-week group dance/movement therapy intervention support stress management and emotional regulation in adults living with treatment resistant depression” focusing phase two on co-regulation whilst working towards the goal of independent emotional regulation was aligned with the aim of the research project and needs of the participants.

Phase 1: Theme Development: Weeks 1, 2, 3, 4

Goal: sensory identification and interoception.

In this study, sensory identification was best described as linking words to sensory experiences (Motamedi et al., 2021 ). This specifically included the activation and felt experience of all five senses. Sensory identification was offered via the following:

Sensory exposure via props: First, different textures were introduced via different props. Next, the participants were invited to select a prop (from the various options presented) and asked to spend three to 4 min tracing their fingers across the prop. Each prop had a different texture (elastic, hard ball, etc.) and was used to elicit descriptive vocabulary around their sensory experience. This was offered as a practical way for participants to normalize and practice ‘tuning in’ to their sensorial experiences. A verbal discussion and sharing/exchanging props between group members was also offered. One variation included conscious breathwork, where participants may trace their hands on a prop. Here, I also guided the participants to notice changes in breathwork and note any associations that might emerge. It is important to note that I emphasised parasympathetic tones and exhalation of breath, not merely deep inhalations, as the latter can erroneously activate the sympathetic nervous system (Jerath et al., 2019 ). Another variation was to invite participants to align their breathing patterns to their internal rhythm. This included bringing one’s attention to their heartbeat, etc. This was also directly influenced by the findings of Christopher and Tamplin ( 2022 ), in which somatic tracking was emphasised as an essential way to understand the “embodied culture” of oneself (p. 126).

Externalizing internal rhythms: Participants were invited to create movement patterns based on their internal rhythms. This was designed to help enhance/develop sensory identification and interoception due to the close attention to tuning into internal rhythms. This was done by inviting the participants to pay close attention to an internal rhythm, such as their heartbeat, and then clapping to the ‘identified rhythm’. I also invited this ‘identified rhythm’ to be externalized through different body parts (for example, stomping with one’s legs).

Somatic tracking: Typically, this was designed to engage after a body-based check-in during the warm-up section. Here, I invited participants to focus on one sensory experience in their body and respond to a verbal prompt such as, “If this sensation has to find its way out of your body, how would it travel?” or, “If this sensation had to find a safe and comfortable spot in your body, where would it go?” etc. Visual aids (such as an outline of a body on paper) were also offered to draw the path of specific sensory experiences. This was offered to be done 3 or 4 times to help identify any common or recurrent areas where sensory experiences reside or travel through in participants’ bodies.

Mirroring: Typically, this was facilitated after sensory exposure and externalization of internal rhythms. Here, I paired participants into duos and invited them to mirror each other’s rhythms. The rhythm may be a unique movement pattern or their partner’s externalized internal rhythms. In each duo, one participant was invited to engage in a movement of their choice (‘movement A’). While the partner mirrored ‘movement A’, the mover typically witnessed this movement, followed by reversed roles. Mirroring is a DMT technique used in an individual study conducted by Pylvänäinen et al. ( 2015 ), which revealed a reduction in low mood in the dance/movement therapy group more compared to the control group as noted in the systematic review (Christopher et al., under review).

Using memory to track past body-based sensations: Here, the therapist-facilitator invited the participants to recall a ‘pleasant moment they wished to relive. Participants were invited to verbalize the details of the memory in their minds or with a partner (in duos). Next, they were invited to externalize any emergent sensory experiences that arose with recalling the memory. As done in mirroring, one participant was invited to engage in a movement of their choice (termed ‘movement A’). Secondly, while the partner mirrored ‘movement A’, the mover witnessed this movement. The sequence was then repeated by reversing each role.

Phase 2: Theme Development: Weeks 5, 6, 7, 8

Goal: co-regulation.

In this theme development phase, co-regulation was the primary goal. Co-regulation, like emotional regulation, is a form of coping with dysregulation. Different from emotional regulations that occurs independently, co-regulation is a synergistic process that is influenced by both relational, socio-cultural, and social theories (Moreno et al., 2016 ) and draws on the interdependence or co-dependence among individuals that enables the goal of regulation (for one or both) to be reached. As a process, co-regulation is heavily dependent on safety within the therapeutic relationship and has previously been identified as common and essential factor in therapy (De Witte et al., 2021 ). The findings of one of the preliminary studies, (Christopher & Tamplin, 2022 ), also reinforced the need for a safe holding environment (Winnicott, 1960 ) was a possible link between kinesthetic empathy and emotional regulation. The authors proposed that expressive movement within a safe space creates the opportunity for emotional self-regulation (Christopher & Tamplin, 2022 ). This link between safety and kinesthetic empathy has also been seen in the work of Imus and Young ( 2023 ) which further validates the interweaving of literature and preliminary studies in order to develop a robust intervention session plan (Fig.  1 ). Further, teaching/coaching and practicing self-regulation skills was previously identified as one of the steps involved in learning self-regulation (Rosanbalm & Murray, 2017 ). Hence, I designed to offer co-regulation in the following ways:

Playing with polarities: Here, I invited the participants to walk around the room, spot an item that seemed to draw their attention and embody the nature (texture, shape) of the object followed by the opposite of its nature. Playing with polarities, as theorized by DMT Trudi Schoop (de Laban, 1974 ) contributed to emotional flexibility and potentially increased openness to sharing diverse movements with another participant. Props were offered as a ‘surrogate mover’ if desired by the participants.

Paired polarities: ‘Playing with polarities’ (mentioned above) can also be done in pairs. Here, the mover’s partner identifies and embodies the ‘opposite’ of one’s current/felt emotion. Like the activities in phase 1, one participant from the duo was first invited to engage in a movement of their choice (termed movement A) while the partner mirrored ‘movement A’. Typically, the mover witnessed this movement, followed by roles being reversed. Verbal discussion was offered, and some prompts included: “How did both those extremes feel in your body? Do these polarities feel familiar or unfamiliar?” etc.

Improvisational movement and/or choreography: In this intervention sessions, a choreography is best understood as a string of movements put together with contributions from the participants. The therapist may use improvisation to expand on these contributions and create a group/dyad movement after the polarities have been experienced (as mentioned above). As mentioned earlier, the use of improvisational techniques was adapted from the systematic review (Christopher et al., under review) that revealed a short-term reduction in depression (Ho et al., 2020 ), increased social connection, and engagement in healthier coping responses after the DMT intervention (Ho et al., 2016 ).

Recognizing the ‘point of return and no return’: Here, the participants were led through a guided meditation where they were lying down on a mat/sitting in a chair. Through this guided meditation, the participants were invited to reflect, identify, and embody the somatic cues that indicated “how” participants felt in their body “when” they were emotionally uncomfortable whilst also being able to tolerate the dysregulation that accompanied this state. The goal was not to expand their window of tolerance but identify and familiarize themselves with their window of tolerance being activated (Siegel, 2020 ) and recognise the ‘the point of no return’ when one goes beyond one’s window of tolerance to such a degree after which regulation may not seem immediately attainable. In this context, activation refers physiological and emotional arousal. This prepared the participants sufficiently to then engage in the next step of somatic modulation (described in phase-3 below). This was a logical precursor to somatic modulation where participants recognised their window of tolerance being activated and attempted to regulated themselves when hyper or hypo-aroused. This session was based on the finding that mindfulness could be a potential link between the dance/movement therapy sessions, kinesthetic empathy, and self-regulation in DMT sessions in adults with TRD (Christopher & Tamplin, 2022 ).

Phase 3: Theme Development: Weeks 9, 10, 11, 12

Goal: emotional self-regulation.

Emotional self-regulation is one way to foster an optimally regulated nervous system (Koole et al., 2011 ). This was fostered through the following:

Somatic Modulation: Once the participants practiced identifying and embodying the somatic cues that indicated activation of their tolerance window (movement-1), they were invited to engage in somatic modulation. Here, the goal was to try alternative movements instead of engaging in the typical movement patterns while starting to feel dysregulated or recognizing an activation of one’s window of tolerance. I often role-modelled this by providing examples of somatic modulation, after which the participants were invited to create a three-step movement pattern that they could engage in to modulate their sensory experiences towards regulation. This was offered to be done X3 or X4 times, as appropriate. For example, Footnote 6 if a participant identified movement-1 to include, tense and slightly lifted shoulders, slightly rounded back and heavy knees. The three set movement may involve: step 1: recognition of movement-1 (description above) step 2: very gently bobbing the shoulders and knees in the vertical plane and step 3: shifting gaze to a different/new area in the room. These steps 1, 2, 3 maybe repeated as few times, as mentioned.

Somatic Modulation, Practice, and Sharing: I encouraged participants to engage in somatic modulation outside the DMT sessions. Any insights/reflections were encouraged to be brought back to sessions and were further explored in the sessions.

Finally, all sessions ended with a 10-min closure. Just as the warm-up offered a dual purpose, the closure was designed to offer a physical ‘cool down’ and ensure an emotionally safe transition from the session to the participants’ individual lives. No new themes were consciously introduced or explored in this section. Closure was facilitated in the following ways:

Structured and planned movements (like stretching): Like the warmup activities where different body parts are systematically activated, different body parts may be stretched again to bring moving to a close. This was done with or without musical accompaniment (slow and non-lyrical music was used here).

Self-soothing touch: Participants were invited to engage in a ‘self-soothing’ touch. This may include giving oneself a gentle neck rub or rubbing one’s palm against another.

Verbal processing: The need for verbal processing was determined depending on the themes explored in the session. A verbal discussion may be initiated since words are a common and more familiar way for individuals to process and typically understand new and old experiences. This was based on the study by Ho et al. ( 2020 ) (included in the systematic review, in peer-review) (Christopher et al., under review), in which verbal processing was explicitly used to help foster a sense of closure. A few examples of verbal prompts were: How are you feeling as we reach the end of today’s session? Can you identify a part of you that you discovered or reconnected with in today’s session? How did it feel to move your body in the same or new ways today? Lastly, are there one or two insights from today’s session that you want to keep in mind?

Mobility accessibility : The entire 12-week DMT session plan could be done seated or standing. Chairs were always in the room, and yoga mats were present when needed.

Response to Intervention Session Plans : Overall, there were a few modifications made to the intervention session plan based on spontaneous movement and emotional needs that emerged in the moment. Participants responded most positively to the planned activity: ‘identifying the point of return and no return’, this was evidenced by the qualitative data collected as part of this research study. Overall, the emergent movement patterns had a small kinespheric range and were interestingly expansive in space, with more movement in the extremities of the body compared to the torso; this may be attributed to the severity of illness. Each participant engaged in the sessions in a unique manner. It is beyond the scope of this paper to discuss this; however, the results of this research will be presented in a case series format in an upcoming companion paper.

Limitations

While this research provides a transparent and replicatable way for dance/movement therapy students and professionals to engage in creative problem solving of their own, the findings of this article need to be tested across various niche/novel dance/movement therapy research topics in order for the findings of this study to be validated or critically questioned and bettered over time. Further, the current intervention session plan developed was only used with a sample size of n  = 5. Larger studies with the same population would be ideal to test the suitability of the intervention plan developed via the processes described in this article.

An embodied exploration of the ‘self’ of the researcher and research paradigm can aid in developing both the larger intervention protocol and the intervention session plan. As mentioned, this is especially helpful whilst embarking on the journey of novel research that lacks precedence for replication or argumentative reasoning (Greene et al., 2016 ). In my research on DMT and treatment resistant depression, I attempted to navigate the challenges of developing a 12-week session plan based on the research question, How can a 12-week group dance/movement therapy intervention support stress management and emotional regulation in adults living with treatment resistant depression? I navigated the challenges of novel and niche research by engaging in a four step creative problem solving process, which entailed asking myself reflexive questions at each stage (mentioned above at each stage). Further, using an arts-based approach can be helpful in integrating various sources of information such as clinical practice, existing literature, preliminary studies, embodied self-reflection and dance in order to obtain centralized research outputs (Watson, 2020 ). This multilayered information served as the outline of the intervention session plan in my research. This creative problem solving approach maybe be one of many ways to develop a comprehensive intervention session plan in novel research. Additional evaluation is required to validate this creative problem solving approach to be helpful across in novel research in DMT.

There is no universally accepted definition of kinesthetic empathy (KE) in DMT. Conceptually, the understanding of KE has been influenced by various schools of thought (social/performative/relational, etc.). Broadly, KE can be understood as the experience that results from the “co-presence of bodies in intersubjective situations” (Joufflineau et al., 2018 , p. 1).

Here, ‘self’ suggests Jung’s concept of self.

Dina is a pseudonym.

Axiology encompasses our values and beliefs about what we consider to be true and valuable in the world.

Epistemology refers to our study of ‘how’ we can obtain more information on what we believe exists, whereas ontology refers to understanding ‘what’ exists.

This is an example and not a three-step movement pattern from participants of this study.

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Acknowledgements

I acknowledge my supervisory team for their guidance and support as I undertook the processes discussed in this paper: Associate Professor Janette Tamplin (The University of Melbourne, Australia), Dr Ella Dumaresq (The University of Melbourne, Australia), and Professor Emerita Sharon Goodill (Drexel University, USA).

Open Access funding enabled and organized by CAUL and its Member Institutions. The corresponding author is supported by the Melbourne Research Scholarship for Academic Merit by the Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, University of Melbourne, Australia.

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Christopher, N. Problem Solving in Dance/Movement Therapy Research: Developing an Intervention Protocol for Adults Living with Treatment Resistant Depression. Am J Dance Ther (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10465-024-09403-1

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Accepted : 23 May 2024

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DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s10465-024-09403-1

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