Why we can never outsource the real problem solving skills.
Throughout my career, in many capacities, I've seen an alarming trend: the never ending search for efficient processes to mask the lack of true problem solving skills. It happens all the time, everywhere, in all industries. Let me explain this in detail.
Every business has challenges, and when problems arise there is an immediate commotion to define a path for problem solving. Here's where we find the ones who truly know the answer versus the ones who try to hide behind the facade of the perfect process. People with real skills will look for the actual solution, act on it and make the proper correction in real time. People who cannot act will endlessly look for processes, procedures, protocols, systems or any path to outsource the solution of a problem, usually far away from their own domain. Why is that a problem? Because it creates a longer deadline, more complicated and more distant from the actual solution, allocating ownership and accountability elsewhere.
This is very common in businesses that grow larger, where hierarchy gets fragmented and easily distorted, making it nearly impossible to actually get to solutions in a timely manner. The more people you have inside a fragmented hierarchy, the less effective they will be. The so-called team leaders are not true leaders, they are simple place holders, passing information from one person to the next, without real input power, simply titles to gate keep information and prevent real stakeholders from finding out the truth. And what is the truth?
The problems are not actually being solved, they're simply being talked about, meeting after meeting, discussing the same things, imagining a process that will finally come to fruition and bring the final solution one day. Let's be realistic for a minute. Building a process that works for problem solving is not that difficult and it does not take that much time, but it does take someone with a strong position to define and see it through the finish line. Rules have to be set, timeline has to be followed, adjustments have to be made and actions must follow suit. There's only so much room for discussion. If no action is taken, nothing happens.
Let me give you a simple example. A business creates a generic mailbox for customer support inquiries. The idea is to gather information from customers related to issues with a specific system, creating a report, assigning it to the application team, getting it resolved and notifying the customer. Not that complicated, right? A simple two team effort can make it happen, without too much complication. You may use a unified platform to record the reports with updates for tracking and that is pretty much it. All your data for analysis will be in one spot. How can you make this a bigger problem?
Instead of unifying the teams you isolated them, each with a different recording process, one trying to automate responses instead of acting on them, another recording incidents in a different platform. The two teams don't communicate directly, they each have a buffer, and buffers or leads don't actually do the work, they simply pass information along. Now the original problem (customer raised) is pushed to the background while everyone tries to solve the communications issue, the loss of data issue, the platform issue and the timeline for response issue. The more problems arise, the higher is the demand for more budget since it seems like the business actually needs more labor to be allocated to solve all these new problems. And this is how many businesses end up bleeding out money with the convoluted narrative of building the perfect process.
This is just a simple example of how the lack of a strong presence in a project or business can absolutely destroy a company's reputation and status while watching revenue evaporate into oblivion masked behind the beautiful titles of standard operation procedures. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating for not having an efficient process, I'm simply saying that building it is much easier and faster than any vendor will make you believe. But when masking it behind this justification may be much more profitable for the vendor than a real problem solving solution delivered with transparency and honesty, the truth gets replaced by greed.
If you are a business owner out there searching for vendors and partners for solutions, be aware of this tactic. This is how a lot of contracts are built, with a long lasting timeline for everything, simply to drown you with problems and costs that should never be there to begin with, only to guarantee them an endless income with little to no delivery in sight. You, as a business owner, have to know where you want to get in terms of business goals, and that includes your ability to take the lead and master problem solving, because without this skill you will be forever hostage of vendors that will tear you apart for your last dime, every single time.
