It is important to involve everyone in identifying problems in the system. Give everyone a chance and encourage them to throw light on problems. Once main points are identified, it becomes easy to deal with them. The problem finding exercise will be facilitated by using the 6 M’s – Men, materials, machineries, methods, markets and money.
Sometimes people state the symptoms and not the problems. For instance, consider the question, ‘How to build better mouse trap’. How much better it would be to ask, ' How to keep mice out of my space?'. This could throw open the field to gas, poison or improving hygiene. The first question would ensure that the person is obsessed with architecture of mouse traps. Scarce resources could be spent on mouse traps which would not really get rid of mice. Get everyone to ask the right questions and identify the core problems together.
Identifying and formulating the problem is the most difficult part of creative problem solving. Very often we state symptoms of the problems and end up wasting scare resources chasing the illusionary "golden deear of the epics".Management then becomes so emotinaonally commited to the wrong path, that we can end up moving faster and faster along the wrong road. It is like a man who drills an oil well, in a bad spot. More and more money is spent with no resulting strike. But those involved, refuse to fill up the unproductive well and move on to a new location. They continue throwing good money after bad, because they do not want to admit that a mistake had been made initailly.
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