what is a problem solving meeting

Solving the Problem with Problem-Solving Meetings

Leadership development expert Jonathan Levene shares an effective tool for facilitating productive problem-solving meetings.

Jonathan Levene

Your team is facing a complex problem. So you gather everyone for a meeting, only to spend hours disagreeing on the ideal solution — with no progress toward consensus.

Facilitating productive problem-solving meetings can be challenging. You want to foster an open dialogue and gain buy-in while working toward an ideal solution. To do this effectively, it helps to understand one very important aspect of human nature: how we reason.

A Tool for Better Group Reasoning

In my work with clients, I have found that the ladder of inference* is an essential framework for understanding human reasoning, identifying opportunities, and keeping group reasoning on track. It is especially helpful when your challenge involves ambiguity or complexity.

The ladder of inference lays out the mental steps in our reasoning — from receiving data to drawing a conclusion. It also explains how we adopt certain beliefs about the world.

While our reasoning process may feel logical, our analysis at every step is always based on past experience. And everyone’s experience is different.

Here is how the ladder of inference reveals our reasoning process:

• We begin with the pool of information available to us — the observable data and experiences.
• We then select some of the information — typically that which grabs our attention or seems particularly significant — and ignore the rest.
• Then, we interpret the information, drawing on personal/cultural meanings and making assumptions based on those meanings.
• Finally, we draw a conclusion based on that interpretation. Over time, these conclusions inform our beliefs and drive our actions.

Our beliefs might be founded on faulty selection or interpretation of data. For example, if you have a number of memorable interactions with a few customers, you might focus on and generalize from those experiences. This leads you to certain conclusions about the entire marketplace. We all proceed through these mental steps, often subconsciously. And we’re not always aware of our assumptions.

By using the ladder of inference as a tool to expose chains of reasoning, we are better able to understand ourselves and our colleagues, find the best solutions, and overcome resistance to change.

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Your Role in Meetings of the Minds

As the moderator, your job is to:

• Listen carefully to the views expressed.
• Figure out what type of contribution each person is offering: belief, assumption, or interpretation.
• Bring hidden reasoning into the open by asking questions.

For example, if a person makes an assertion about what should be done, you might ask him or her to describe the chain of reasoning that led to that conclusion.

If two people have reached very different conclusions, one or both may be missing a key subset of data. Or perhaps they are missing an interpretive lens that would lead to a new set of possibilities.

The only way to know is to ask open-ended questions, such as:

• Can you help me understand your thinking?
• What was your chain of reasoning?
• What assumptions are you making?
• What data are you basing your recommendation on?

In asking these questions, you are not challenging people or judging them. You don’t want to put anyone on the defensive. Instead, you want to bring their reasoning to light so that it becomes part of the group’s thinking.

To do so, you can reflect back on what you’re hearing: “It sounds like we’re talking about assumptions here.” Or, if someone has difficulty articulating a chain of reasoning, you might say, “Think about it, and we’ll come back to you.”

At the same time, you should consider what is  not  being said. Keep in mind that silence does not imply agreement — or that a person has nothing to say. Your goal is to understand what’s happening in people’s heads and surface ideas that have not been articulated.

Better learning and decision-making result from staying low on the ladder. By slowing down the conversation — focusing on selecting and interpreting data — you encourage the group to avoid reaching conclusions prematurely. Using the ladder of inference, you can invite more contributions. Think about the ideas that might come to light when you ask questions like:

• Does anyone else have data that bears on this?
• Does anyone think something different might happen if we did this?
• Did anyone else arrive at a different conclusion?
• Did anyone make different assumptions?

The Ladder of Inference in Your Toolbox

As a manager, you can use the ladder of inference in multiple ways. You might start by employing it yourself as a framework for structuring your  own  thinking and interactions. Then, as you become more familiar with the approach, you can introduce the ladder as an explicit standard tool in team meetings.

Once you have introduced the concept, your team will begin to take on ownership of the process. They’ll develop better habits of mind and follow your lead by probing one another’s reasoning in meetings.

Over time, the ladder can become an integral part of how you think and work. Along the way, you’ll be encouraging open-mindedness, building more effective teams—and coming up with better solutions.

*The ladder of inference was initially developed by the late Chris Argyris, former professor at Harvard Business School, and elaborated on in numerous publications including The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook: Strategies and Tools for Building a Learning Organization (Peter Senge, Richard Ross, Bryan Smith, Charlotte Roberts, Art Kleiner).

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About the Author

Levene is a leadership coach and facilitator at Harvard Business School with over 15 years experience leading teams in product development organizations.

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7 types of meetings (and how to get them right)

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7 different types of meetings

How to plan effective meetings that add value to your team 

If you think you’re attending more meetings than before, that’s because you are. 

In a mid-Covid workplace, the number of meetings we attend has increased . Whether we’re working from home or in the office, it’s important to understand the different types of meetings we take part in. 

Meetings are a way to collaborate , share information, and find solutions as a team , no matter where we work from. They are an opportunity to use brainstorming techniques to generate new and creative ideas. 

The problem is that many meetings that take place today are inefficient. According to Doodle’s State of Meetings report, professionals spend 2 hours each week in pointless meetings . 

How can we make meetings feel less like a waste of time and more productive ? 

Let’s begin by learning about the different types of meetings and how to make sure they add value to you and your team. 

7 different types of meetings 

When done right, each meeting we attend serves an important purpose. Let’s familiarize ourselves with some important types, so we can better understand how to conduct them the right way. 

Here are the 7 most common business meetings types:

• Decision-making meetings. These are called when an action needs to be taken by a group.
• Problem-solving meetings. These are used when a group needs to come together to solve a specific problem.
• Team-building meetings. These meetings are used to build cohesion within a group and improve the way team members work together.
• Brainstorming meetings. These are used to generate new ideas or make links between novel or innovative concepts.
• One-on-one meetings. This is a meeting scheduled between two people to discuss something specific.
• Quarterly planning meetings. Held every three months, these are used to plan how a team will execute the company’s goals.
• Check-in meetings. These meetings are used to monitor task progress against an expected outcome.

Let’s look at each in a bit more detail:

1. Decision-making meetings 

A decision-making meeting is a collaborative effort led by a team leader . 

According to McKinsey, it’s typically made up of 6 to 8 attendees and contains a structured agenda that identifies the decision that needs to be made . 

The participants involved are key decision-makers or subject matter experts. For example, deciding on a new hire will only include certain employees like hiring managers. 

To run an effective decision-making meeting, participants must know in advance how the decision will be made , explains a Harvard Business Review article. 

For instance, if the team can’t come to a consensus within 60 minutes, they’ll put it to a vote or the key decision-maker will make the final call. Knowing in advance how the decision will be reached avoids wasting time. 

Another important aspect of decision-making meetings is information gathering. You’ll want to make sure you have all the necessary information you need to make the best decision. 

• Deciding on a new hire  
• Making a employer branding change 
• Operational changes like downsizing or cutting costs
• Final approval of a design 

2. Problem-solving meetings 

The main goal of a problem-solving meeting is to find the optimal solution to an issue facing the organization. 

And when it comes to finding the best course of action, two heads (or a few in this case) are better than one. A Harvard Business Review article explains that effective problem-solving meetings require participants to come together and generate as many potential solutions as possible. 

Once that objective is achieved, participants have to decide who will implement the best solution. This responsibility can be assigned to one person or shared among a few team members. 

Finally, a successful problem-solving meeting isn’t complete without identifying the root cause of the issue. Understanding what led to the problem in the first place will prevent it from happening again. 

Examples: 

• Operational problems 
• Productivity issues
• High employee turnover  

3. Team-building meetings 

Team building meetings are designed to strengthen teamwork, trust, and cohesion. Improving the way employees work together leads to an increase in productivity as well as employee happiness . 

A team-building meeting aims to create a fun and interactive atmosphere through the use of games or team challenges. This is a great opportunity for organizers or leaders to get involved and form stronger connections with their teams. 

As more employees are working remotely , virtual team-building meetings are becoming increasingly important. They’re a way to engage and connect with employees who work from home and may feel isolated from their team members and organization . Engaging with remote employees helps prevent company culture and employee morale from deteriorating.

• Virtual board games 
• Virtual team challenges 
• Lunch and learns 
• Internal TED Talks
• Team outings 

4. Brainstorming meetings 

Brainstorming sessions are innovation meetings. Participants collaborate to generate new and creative ideas. 

During these sessions, team members work as equal co-contributors or under the guidance of a facilitator. These idea-generating meetings are loosely structured, allowing teams to “think big” and tap into their creative potential . Using a variety of brainstorming techniques like mind mapping , employees use their creative thinking skills to come up with fresh ideas or new products.

Idea-generating meetings are most successful when teams are diverse . Diverse perspectives generate better ideas, identify potential blind spots, and create more innovative solutions. 

• Product development 
• Ad campaign creation 

5. One-on-one meetings 

A one-on-one meeting is a meeting between two people. It is scheduled for a specific purpose. 

For example, it can be a performance review between a manager and their employee, or a meeting between a sales rep and their client . 

While you don’t need to follow an agenda during a one-on-one, a running document on what each person needs to touch on is common. Otherwise, the meeting is loosely formatted and unfolds like a normal conversation . 

According to Microsoft Workplace Insights, one-on-one check-ins have increased by 18% since the pandemic . Their research found that regular touchpoints foster a sense of connection and fun for remote employees. 

• Weekly one-on-one 
• New employee introduction  
• Quarterly performance review 
• Coaching or mentoring session 
• Client sales meeting 

6. Quarterly planning meetings 

Every three months, teams come together to strategically implement a company’s short-term and long-term goals . 

Like problem-solving and decision-making meetings, attendance is limited to participants that will execute the plan. Each participant is expected to contribute and commit to implementing the plan. 

While the structure of the meeting can vary, it’s usually led by the team leader who assigns tasks to each attendee . 

Quarterly planning meetings are a great way to track a team’s progress and keep team members motivated . They’re also a good opportunity to reflect on the previous quarter and review what needs to be executed in the following one. 

• Strategic planning 
• Project planning
• Event or campaign planning 

7. Check-in meetings 

Check-in meetings are one of the most common types of meetings. Organizations regularly hold these progress-check meetings for several reasons: 

• Share project updates and progress 
• Ensure everyone is carrying out their roles and responsibilities  
• Get employee feedback  
• Discuss any challenges, successes, or ideas 
• Figure out the next steps 

During a weekly team cadence meeting, for example, employees update their managers and team on their weekly progress. 

Check-in meetings are becoming increasingly important as more people are working from home , and not directly under the supervision of managers. Regular check-ins help ensure remote employees stay informed and their goals align with the rest of the team. 

• Project status update meetings 
• Client check-in meetings 
• New employee onboarding check-in 
• Weekly one-on-one check-in meetings 
• Weekly team meetings 
• Project debriefs

There’s no denying the frequency of meetings has increased since the pandemic began. Another Microsoft report shares that weekly meeting time has more than doubled with the rise of the hybrid work environment. 

With fewer opportunities to connect in the office, online meetings are a way to stay updated, socialize, and share information. 

As your employees attend more types of meetings, It’s important to make each one as productive and efficient as possible. Otherwise, they can negatively affect your team’s morale and productivity. 

But before you begin to plan your next meeting, ask yourself this question –– Is a meeting really necessary, or could it be an email? For example, if the meeting doesn’t need a discussion or decision making, relaying certain information is best done via email. 

According to a recent SurveyMonkey poll, 32% of employees think, “this meeting could have been an email” all or most of the time . This is usually the sentiment when meetings are pointless and far too frequent. 

However, when you do need to plan a meeting, each one must be worth every minute of your time and your employees’ time. 

Here are a few tips to help you organize more efficient meetings: 

Set clear a clear objective and agenda

Before sending a meeting invite, make sure you know the exact purpose of the meeting. What is your end goal? This will help you figure out what kind of meeting you should be having and who needs to attend. 

Once your objective is set, your meeting needs to follow a clear agenda to ensure every minute of it is used efficiently. 

A survey by the tech company Barco found that 13% of meeting time is wasted because people discuss topics outside of the meeting’s objectives. Following a meeting agenda will cut back the time spent discussing topics that aren’t relevant to the meeting. 

Without a clear structure, meetings can quickly become unproductive. 

Avoid inviting too many attendees

Determine which team members need to be there and don’t overcrowd the meeting. For example, a decision-making meeting should only involve key stakeholders. 

This ensures those who need to be in attendance have an opportunity to contribute and make their voices heard. 

Ensure everyone arrives on time 

Barco’s survey also found that 11% of meetings are spent waiting for someone to arrive. And according to Doodle’s State of Meetings report, people arriving late is one of the main factors that turns a good meeting sour.

Start your meeting promptly and emphasize the importance of being on time with your employees. 

Keep it short 

Ensure the meeting is no longer than it needs to be. As Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple , is famously quoted as saying, “The longer the meeting, the less is accomplished.” 

Microsoft found that the optimal meeting time for their employees is no longer than thirty minutes. Employees organically transitioned to shorter meetings to optimize their productivity and move away from time-consuming meetings that affect employee happiness . 

Keep the team focused

The meeting leader or facilitator should ensure participants come prepared and focused. For instance, if someone in the group is constantly checking their phone during the meeting, the team leader should intervene. 

Keeping participants accountable ensures no time is wasted and everyone gets the most out of the meeting. 

Which types of meetings can you improve within your organization? 

There are many types of meetings leaders are responsible for planning. 

From weekly team huddles to more formal meetings, each one is uniquely valuable to the organization and team’s success. Understanding the importance of each one and how to run it efficiently is the key to reducing time-wasting, pointless meetings. 

Start working with a BetterUp coach to increase the effectiveness of your meetings and build lasting organizational transformation.

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Maggie Wooll, MBA

Maggie Wooll is a researcher, author, and speaker focused on the evolving future of work. Formerly the lead researcher at the Deloitte Center for the Edge, she holds a Bachelor of Science in Education from Princeton University and an MBA from the University of Virginia Darden School of Business. Maggie is passionate about creating better work and greater opportunities for all.

Love them or hate them, meetings promote social learning and growth

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Problem Solving Meeting Agenda: 4 Effective Steps to Conduct a Problem Solving Session

By Ted Skinner

Strategy Execution

Effective Meetings

One of the easiest changes to your meeting is to attempt to solve at least one problem per week. Not just any problem, you should pick the most important problem facing your team each and every week. Think of all of the additional productivity you, your team, and your company could gain if you were able to put the team together and solve at least one problem per week. That’s an additional 52 problems you could solve each and every year, clearly putting you on the path to out-execute your competition and gain a competitive advantage in the marketplace.

At Rhythm Systems, our business KPI and OKR dashboards allow you to quickly and easily find the most important problems each week to solve. Since all of our key performance indicators (KPIs) and projects (Quarterly Priorities) have clear Red, Yellow, Green success criteria and are updated weekly by the owner, the team has a clear visual indicator of the business problems they are facing. Our clients can easily determine where there are problems, find the most important ones (as all KPIs and priorities/OKRs are ranked in order of importance), and brainstorm together on how to get back on track during their weekly adjustment meetings. 

As you can see in our KPI dashboard below, we have a clear issue with our sales pipeline - a leading indicator for revenue. As this is a leading indicator, it helps the team predict revenue in the future; it gives us the added bonus of fixing the revenue problem BEFORE it shows up in the bottom line. To take your KPIs to the next level, follow these  five tips to make sure your team is tracking the right KPIs - both leading and results indicators - successfully.  It is extremely important to define the problem properly, so that you can get to the root cause of the issue.

Now that you have identified the problem to focus on, you can work deeply on the problem until you are able to devise and execute a complete game plan to solve it. If you follow our problem-solving meeting template below, you'll have the proper meeting agenda to help you break through any challenges you face. Use this as a primary agenda, but remember to allow team members to add an agenda item.

4-Step Process for a Problem Solving Meeting Agenda with This Problem-Solving Session Template (or Agenda).

Step One: List and brainstorm every potential cause for the problem or challenge.

• We want to make sure that we solve any structural issues first. These might be open sales positions, known bugs in the software, issues with a supplier - internal or external, known production issues, and those types of challenges. Do we have a standard and complete understanding of the problem? Is the meeting goal clear to everyone? This root cause analysis is an essential part of the process. If you don't find the root of the problem, it will feel like groundhog day as you'll solve the symptoms repeatedly.

Step Two: Brainstorm possible resources to help.

• During this step, think of the people and resources that might help you solve the problem. Are the resources in the room? Are they in the company? What are the budget constraints for a solution? In the sales pipeline example, the sales and marketing leader would likely need to be involved in solving the issue. This is critical to group problem solving: knowing where to get the necessary resources. You'll need to think of resources that might be outside the room. There needs to be a shared understanding of the root cause of the issue and all possible solutions to solve the problem.

Step Three: List and brainstorm every potential solution or approach.

• Think of as many ideas as you can. You might list an email blast to all of your prospects, a sales promotion to help with a sales pipeline issue, contracting an outside expert for search engine optimization, investing in more outbound sales representatives to schedule more meetings, and any other potential approach that is likely to solve the problem. This is where the team comes to a final decision on the recommended course of action or potentially two teams trying two different approaches.

Step Four: Recommendation for action.

• Discuss, Debate, and Agree on the course of action and execute against that plan. Discuss the plans entirely with the person who suggested them, taking the lead to explain their approach to the solution. Allow the team to debate the positive and negative merits of the proposal and repeat the process until all ideas have been presented. The team should be able to reach a consensus on the best course of action. Now the team can agree on the most likely solution (or two - if they are different resources) and create a game plan to execute against. Make sure that everybody on the team can answer the question "what is my role in the solution?"  This action planning process ensures that you have an execution plan to solve the problem.

Move forward with your action plan and keep a constant and deliberate eye on your metrics and KPIs. If that isn't doing enough to move the needle to correct the problem, run through the process again, and determine additional steps to take to alleviate the issue. Keep working until you solve the problem. You can read more about different applications for the process  here  and download our free and handy Breakthrough to Green tool  here .   

However, many of you reading this post don't have a business dashboard solution already, so what can you do?  

• Ask for any issues from the team when setting the agenda for your weekly meeting.
• If you are a manager, bring one of your problems to your team to have them help solve it with you. Making yourself human and vulnerable will encourage them to do the same with any issues they face.
• Work on solving problems, rather than placing blame, when discussing issues. Creating a safe environment for healthy discussions about things that are off track is crucial in solving problems in your business.
• Monitor your KPIs weekly and make sure significant projects get frequent (and honest) updates. If you wait too long between updates, you lose the ability to make the necessary adjustments if issues arise.
• Create a shared spreadsheet to start tracking your most important metrics and projects as a place to start. However, you might find that you'll  outgrow your spreadsheet  quickly; it is a place to get started and organize your thoughts.  
• You're likely to have conflicting opinions, so ensure you set the proper ground rules for conduct and respect.
• Creative problem-solving isn't an event; it is a state of mind. You might not get it 100% right the first time, but with this problem-solving framework, you'll have the correct process to get to the desired solution.

Good luck taking your weekly staff meetings back and making them more productive! Download the free Breakthrough to Green tool to help you properly frame your problem and create an action plan to solve it. Thousands of teams have used this problem-solving process and can help yours too!

Additional Rhythm Systems Weekly Staff Meeting Resources:

How To Have Effective Weekly Staff Meetings (With Sample Agenda Template)

4 Easy Steps to Fix Your Weekly Staff Meetings [Video]

Download our weekly meeting agenda

Supercharge Your Meetings with This Effective Weekly Meeting Agenda

8 Ways to Make Weekly Meetings Strategic vs. Tactical (Video)

Weekly Adjustment Meetings vs. Weekly Status Meetings (Infographic)

Consider using   Rhythm Software to run your weekly meeting , where the status and agenda are automatically created weekly to keep you on track!

Photo Credit:   iStock  by Getty Images 

Ted Skinner

Photo Credit: iStock by Getty Images

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Tips for Running Effective Problem-Solving Meetings

Brenda R. Smyth, Content Creator at SkillPath

Mar 26, 2019

Unproductive workplace meetings are frustrating. And most of us would like all meetings to move along quickly, follow the agenda and solve the problems we were gathered to solve. 

But workplace meetings have varied purposes. Some sail along smoothly because the purpose and agenda are simple. Filled with sharing, recapping and planning, they’re practically a Hallmark moment. Who could argue with a rundown of someone’s latest sales triumph or profit margins?

Problem-solving meetings are some of the most challenging to lead.

"How do we fix this problem?" That's the purpose of a problem-solving meeting. And that gets complicated. So don’t beat yourself up if you’ve found your group mired — talking in circles, disagreeing on even a basic problem and making little progress — only to reconvene a week later to repeat the same discussion.

For problem-solving meetings to work, they must encourage effective discussion and lead to well-considered decisions. Sounds easy enough. But consider that often a group is grathered after there's a problem, so strategizing under pressure can be stressful. There can be time pressure, conflict and defensiveness as discussion moves forward. Without strong meeting leadership, viewpoints can be stifled or discussions can easily turn into monologues or debates. And decisions can become personal rather than objective.

The trouble often starts at the outset when the group first tries to agree on the problem. As the meeting leader, you give a concise outline of the situation. “We’re here to discuss how we’re going to counter our competitor’s latest online price cut.” Just one minute in, and those individuals who are closest to the situation may pile their version of the problems onto this purposely well-honed sentence. “I don’t know if you saw what they did yesterday. But, now they’re not just offering 20 percent off, but they’re also giving customers a free trial membership. I think we need to get out ahead of this and offer our own 25 percent discount before half our customers leave.” Yep. Buckle in for the long haul. Problems are not static. And they can look different from various perspectives.

Problem-solving meetings can take stronger facilitation. Preparing for and running an effective problem-solving meeting would include first creating and distributing an agenda and any supporting information. This enables the team to come prepared (and let those invited know that you expect this preparation). 

Let's take a look at example agenda for a problem-solving meeting:

• Clearly define the problem or objective. The meeting leader can get this started by preparing his or her version of the problem and then asking for input. (That’s right. There’s nothing wrong with input.) This is a time to ask and answer questions with the goal of everyone understanding and agreeing on the problem. It is, however, important that the facilitator ask everyone to wait to share ideas about solutions until you get to that portion of the meeting.
• Identify and prioritize requirements and constraints of potential solutions. Consider any parameters your ideal solution must meet. Which aspects are most important? Examples of constraints: Time, staffing or budget. Also, consider if the people who control these things are in the room. Should they be?
• Consider possible solutions. Give meeting participants a few minutes to consider solutions or add to thoughts they brought with them to the meeting. (These may need to be altered if earlier discussion has redefined the problem.) If you’re meeting in person, have everyone jot down ideas. If participants are not all in the same room, try an online brainstorming tool or whiteboard. Save discussion until after all ideas have been collected.
• Discuss all possibilities, ask questions, combine ideas and closely evaluate the top solutions. Let the person who suggested the idea take the lead in explaining their solution. What are the positive and negative merits? At this stage, try to encourage discussion participation by everyone present—check out these approaches to help avoid groupthink.
• Agree on a solution or allow the problem owner to have the final say. This is where the priorities and constraints you discussed earlier can help. If several options seem equally viable, consider which is the most realistic, most likely to solve the problem long term, or least risky. When solutions become more technical, defer to the participants with greatest expertise or responsibility.

Here are a few additional tips to help you run more effective problem-solving meetings:

• Keep the group small if possible and invite only stakeholders. This includes people involved in events leading up to the problem with unique insights into possible solutions, suggests MeetingSift.com , as well as those who will be affected by the solution.
• Help ensure participation by everyone in attendance. Encourage this by explaining the ground rules up front and letting the group know why various individuals have been included (their expertise).
• Chart progress by assigning someone to take notes that can be revisited if a second meeting is needed. This can help you avoid covering the same ground more than once.

Problem-solving meetings are often necessary in the workplace. But they don’t have to be painful. To reach a satisfying solution without becoming stuck in never-ending disagreement and discussion, take the lead.  

Brenda Smy t h  is a content creator at SkillPath. Drawing from 20-plus years of business and management experience, her writings have appeared on Forbes.com and Entrepreneur.com.

Since 1989,  SkillPat h   has provided strategic and innovative training solutions to companies and businesspeople around the world. Check out some of the Training Programs available in your area, as a  virtual semina r  or webinar, or accessible anytime on the STAR12 online learning.

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Meetings to solve a problem

When it comes to problem-solving, a group brings an important mix of perspectives and expertise. The key in these meetings is to uncover and address root causes.

Meeting Purpose:

Click below for practical tips and tools.

Uncover one or two actions or approaches that you know will make better use of the meeting time and lead to a better outcome.

Ensure that the problem is clearly defined. An accurate and comprehensive problem statement is essential. Without it, a meeting can go in multiple inefficient directions.

Avoid jumping to solutions. It’s tempting to skips steps and cite a solution at the outset. But this “quicker” approach can lead to ineffective or temporary fixes that end up wasting time and solving nothing.

Dig deep to address causes. An analytical approach takes more time, but it helps groups pinpoint what needs to be solved – and keeps everyone from addressing surface-level symptoms or rushing to superficial solutions.

Bring in relevant information. Collect and review data, facts, and insights related to the problem and its causes. Encourage meeting-goers to share their perspectives, observations, and expertise to enrich the discussion.

Hear from stakeholders who are affected by the problem. They are a crucial source of input regarding impact, root causes, and potential solutions. Among the approaches to use: input sessions (with 3-5 stakeholders and five or so questions), one-on-one conversations (with a set of questions), and surveys.

Circulate key info to ensure understanding. If the solution involves a set of agreements and action steps or other key items, spell them out in a document that’s sent to all meeting participants. 

The following agenda is a general example designed to serve as a starting point. Note that there are two agendas.

The percentages are approximate time allotments, to be adjusted  based on specific needs or priorities for the meeting.

1. Introduction (5%)

• Review the purpose and intended outcomes of the meeting.
• Define the problem and stress the need to identify its root cause.

2. Identifying Symptoms vs. Root Causes (25%)

• Differentiate between symptoms and root causes.
• Discuss initial insights.

3. Root Cause Analysis (25%)

• Delve into understanding the core issue. (Consider using a structured method like the Why Technique.)

4. Solution Brainstorming (20%)

• Generate solutions specifically targeting the identified root cause(s).

5. Solution Evaluation (15%)

• Assess solutions based on effectiveness in addressing the root cause and feasibility.
• Choose and finalize the best-fit solution.

6. Action Plan (10%)

• Outline clear steps for implementation, assign responsibilities, and set realistic timelines.

To find effective solutions to problems, groups need to uncover root causes, then study these to see which one or two causes have the biggest, and then develop actions to eliminate or at least reduce those big causes. As this process unfolds, it helps immensely to write down and draw out key ideas and observations – because simply talking back and forth won't get you the clarity, understanding, and impact that are needed to keep the discussion moving forward.

If your meeting space has a whiteboard or flip chart , put it to work. If sticky notes are available, meeting-goers can use those to jot down ideas,. If you're in an online meeting, turn on screen share and use something like Microsoft Whiteboard or draw.io . Or prep a visual before the meeting and have it ready to share. 

Root cause analysis is the process of uncovering and resolving the key underlying factors that contribute to a problem – versus simply addressing surface-level symptoms. Getting to the root of the problem is the surest way to bring about an effective and long-lasting solution.

Step by step:

1. Define the problem: Clearly describe the issue you're facing and its impact or symptoms.

2. Ask why: Start by asking why the problem exists. Identify immediate reasons or factors contributing to it.

3. Dig deeper: For each reason you find, ask "why" again to uncover deeper causes or related issues. Then for each of those findings, ask "why" yet again. Keep doing this – asking why, why, why – in order to peel back the layers and get to root causes. (The  5-Why Technique is a commonly cited tool for root cause analysis. The name suggests five passes of asking why, but in practice, you might get to the root by asking why three or four times – or you might need to go beyond five.)

4. Collect information: Whenever possible, gather relevant data that can help the group better understand the nature and impact of emerging root causes that seem to have significant impact. For example, if the group theorizes that incomplete submissions are due to people not knowing what to submit or how to submit, a quick survey of submitters could explore this and get greater clarity. (See  Pareto Diagram  below.)

5. Find solutions: Once you've identified the one or two most significant root cause(s), move on to practical solutions or actions that can address them effectively.

6. Monitor and adjust: Implement your chosen solutions and keep an eye on how well they work. Adjust as needed to ensure the problem doesn't come back.

A Pareto diagram helps you discover which causes or issues are the biggest factors in giving rise to a problem. The name comes from the Pareto Principle, which states that roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. The Pareto diagram is truly a visual tool – once the graph is created, the tallest bars show what is most contributing to the problem. This knowledge is essential to effective problem solving.

Note: A Pareto diagram is created in advance, typically with input from the group. The finished diagram is then shared and discussed at a meeting.

Step by step to create a Pareto diagram:

1. List the issues: Get clear on the problem that's being studied – then identify the likely contributing causes/factors to analyze with data. These can include defects, errors, complaints, costs, and so on. Also identify the appropriate unit of measure for each of these (such as number of frequency of occurrence  impact).

2. Collect data: For a given time period, gather data on each of the causes. For example, if one of the causes is "submissions arrive with missing information," track and record the number and percentage of submissions where this occurs.

3. Rank the issues: Arrange the issues in descending order based on their frequency or impact, starting with the most significant problem at the top.

4. Calculate cumulative percentage: Calculate the cumulative percentage by adding up the percentages of each issue as you go down the list.

5. Plot the graph: Construct a graph by plotting the ranked issues along the horizontal axis (x-axis), and their respective frequencies or impacts along the vertical axis (y-axis). Also, include a line graph illustrating the cumulative percentages to show the cumulative impact or contribution of each issue.

6. During the meeting, review the graph and identify the vital few: Compare the frequency or other measure of each category relative to all the others. Identify the "vital few" issues that contribute to approximately 80% of the total problems or impacts.

7. Put it to work: To solve (or significantly reduce) the problem, adddress the one or two causes that are most responsible for the problem – instead of implementing a laundry-list of actions that may or may not have any real impact. 

A3 problem solving is a structured approach for solving a well-defined workplace problem. The "A3" name is based on the paper size that was originally used to document all the problem-solving steps on one large page. You can use whatever size you want, on paper or on screen.

Fill-save A3 templates:

    Portrait format [pdf]     Landscape format [pdf]

1. Define the problem: At the top of the A3 sheet, clearly state the problem or issue you're addressing, and describe why it's important to solve.

2. Describe the evidence: Note what's being seen that indicates a problem. Include relevant data, observations, or evidence that highlights the extent and impact of the issue. Use facts, figures, or visual aids to illustrate the current state effectively.

3. Define goals: Clearly articulate what you aim to achieve and by when. Include intended outcomes – and also iinclude specific, measurable targets or criteria that would signal resolution or improvement.

4. Uncover root causes: Conduct an analysis to explore the root causes contributing to the problem. On the A3, note the most likely root cause(s).

5. Develop and evaluate solutions: Develop solutions or interventions to address the root causes. Evaluate each solution based on its feasibility and impact (potential to resolve the problem effectively). Consider the pros and cons, resources required, timing, and anticipated outcomes of each proposed solution. After deciding, document these solutions (called "countermeasures" in A3 lingo) on the A3 template.

6. Plan the implementation: Develop an action plan outlining the specific steps, tasks, responsibilities, and timelines for implementing the chosen solutions. Define clear action items, assign responsibilities, and establish time frames.

7. Monitor progress: Implement the action plan and monitor outcomes and results. You need to know:  Are the countermeasures having the intended impact?

8. Further improve: Use insights from periodic progress checks to determine what still needs to be done to further reduce or continue preventing the problem.

The Six Thinking Hats method, developed by Edward de Bono, is a structured technique that works well for problem-solving. The "hats" help people explore a problem (and its causes) from different angles, one angle at a time. The approach ensures very thorough thinking.

What Is the Six Thinking Hats approach? (1:58 min.)

Using the Six Thinking Hats (7:20 min.)

The hat is a metaphor that cues the group on what to think about. Participants "wear" one hat at a time, focusing their discussion accordingly.

There isn't a required order in which to use the Six Thinking Hats for problem solving., but the following sequence is sometimes recommended:

1. Blue Hat (Managing Hat): Start with the Blue Hat to set the agenda for problem-solving. Clearly define the problem, state the objectives, and establish the rules for the discussion. Ensure that everyone understands the focus of the problem-solving session.

2. White Hat (Factual Hat): Put on the White Hat to gather and present factual information about the problem. Explore data, facts, and any relevant information that contributes to a clear understanding of the situation. Identify what is known and unknown.

3. Red Hat (Emotional Hat): Switch to the Red Hat to express emotions and feelings related to the problem. Encourage participants to share their intuitive responses and personal reactions. This can provide insights into the emotional aspects of the problem.

4. Black Hat (Critical Hat): Move to the Black Hat to critically analyze the problem. Identify potential risks, drawbacks, and obstacles. Evaluate the weaknesses and challenges associated with the problem to gain a realistic perspective.

5. Yellow Hat (Positive Hat): Transition to the Yellow Hat to explore positive aspects and potential solutions. Focus on opportunities, strengths, and benefits associated with various approaches to solving the problem. This phase is about generating constructive ideas.

6. Green Hat (Creative Hat): Finally, put on the Green Hat to stimulate creativity and generate innovative solutions. Encourage participants to think outside the box, explore unconventional ideas, and brainstorm creative approaches to solving the problem.

More about the Six Thinking Hats

Force Field Analysis isn't used for analyzing a problem or developing solutions, but it can be very important when thinking ahead to implementation of a solution. Groups can use it to uncover "driving" forces that are likely to be supportive of the changes that come with implementation, and "restraining" forces likely to hinder change.

In other words, force field analysis is a change-management tool. It helps groups be eyes wide open to the various forces likely to help and hurt the rollout of their solutions. 

1.Define the changes: Clearly articulate the solution – and the key aspects of change that it will involve as implementation unfolds.

2. List the driving forces: Identify and list all the factors that are supportive and pushing toward the change.

3. List the restraining forces: Similarly, identify and list the factors or forces that are likely to hold back or oppose the change. 

4. Assign weights: Assign a numerical value or weight to each "force" based on its likely strength or impact. This can be a subjective assessment, using a scale like 1 to 5, where 1 is weak and 5 is strong.

5. Evaluate the balance: Calculate the total scores for both driving and restraining forces. Compare the totals to evaluate the balance between the forces pushing for the change and those resisting it. A higher score for driving forces indicates a greater likelihood of success, while a higher score for restraining forces suggests challenges and resistance.

6. Develop strategies: Based on the findings, brainstorm strategies or actions to strengthen the driving forces and weaken or overcome the restraining forces. Build these into the implementation plan, to go with the actions already planned for implementing the solution.

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What is a Problem Solving Meeting?

Teams use Problem Solving Meetings to analyze a situation and its causes, assess what direction to take, then create an action plan to resolve the problem.

You can find an introduction to Problem Solving Meetings in Chapter 25 of our book, Where the Action Is . You may also want to visit the Learn More link, below, for resources to help you plan, run, and troubleshoot the specific meetings your team needs.

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A Complete Guide: Planning a Problem Solving Meeting

January 6, 2022

By MeetingFull Team

What’s the best way to prepare for a meeting where the goal of that meeting is to solve a problem? What’s the key difference between a problem solving meeting and a decision making meeting?

Let’s first identify the challenges in a problem solving meeting and make sure our plan addresses each of those points.

Meeting challenges:

• Different perceptions of the definition of the problem.
• Unclear understanding of the magnitude and future consequences of the problem.
• Disorganized brainstorming process for a solution.
• Misalignment on the cost/benefit of different solutions.
• No clear ownership of the solution.

The goal of a problem solving meeting is to discuss solutions to a problem only after all participants fully agree on the definition of that problem . Everyone attending the meeting should be a part of a group responsible for identifying and correcting the problem.

In a decision making meeting, the group is already presented with a solution(s) and is coming to a consensus on how to proceed. The method for how to come to a decision is predefined as either a vote , group consensus or a leader made decision.

Also Read: A Complete Guide: Planning a Decision Making Meeting

Now that we understand what we’re aiming to accomplish in our two meeting types, let’s address solutions for each of our problem solving meeting challenges.

Listen to the participant’s definition of the problem. Ideally, a meeting organizer can try soliciting input prior to the meeting and share a summary of it at the start of the meeting. It’s key that everyone agrees that their perspective is being repeated accurately.  If that’s not possible, participants should share their definition of the problem at the start of the meeting. Before moving forward, get agreement from everyone on the definition of the problem.

Discuss how long the problem has been going on and what will happen if the problem isn’t resolved. The solutions people present in a problem solving meeting are highly dependent on understanding the real impact (or cost) of the problem. Share with the team how long ago the problem started and what the future will look like depending on when the problem is solved.

Weigh the pros and cons of a solution in real time. A core practice to keeping a brainstorming process organized is to write things down as you go and document the advantages and disadvantages of each proposal. You can do this on a shared document or up on the whiteboard. All participants should be viewing the growing list.

Create criteria for key factors that should be considered. Common factors are financials , resources, time, values and accessibility . Discuss these areas in the meeting. Consider each factor while brainstorming on a solution.

Gain consensus before ending the meeting. There should be one option that the list of advantages and disadvantages shows as a winner. The participants included in this meeting should be the people who can execute on a solution. Clearly defined next steps that are reviewed and distributed are the last steps for this problem solving meeting.

Also Read: A Complete Guide: Creating the Perfect Meeting Agenda

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How to Run Problem Solving Meetings

Problem Solving Meetings are oriented around solving either a specific or general problem, and are perhaps the most complex and varied type of meetings.

At problem solving meetings the outcome is often an important decision and thus these meetings can be crucial to the development of a team or product. If the wrong action is chosen, it could be hugely damaging. To make sure that this doesn’t happen at your next problem solving meeting, follow the tips provided here.

Primary Goals in Problem Solving Meetings

The goal underlying these meetings is to leave with a new strategy designed to counter a current issue preventing or hindering the team’s progress.

The key objective for problem solving meetings is to find the most optimal solution or reach the best compromise that can resolve an issue facing the group or organization. In order to do this the group first has to identify possible solutions, and then evaluate these based on relevant requirements and criteria.

Agreeing on the most optimal solution

What truly is the most optimal solution can vary a lot, depending on the setting and situation. It is important to clearly define what the problem is, as well as agree on key criteria for the solution, in order to start identifying possible options.

Sometimes the best solution is the quickest one, other times it is the one that requires the least resources, while other times the solution that brings the most long term benefits is the best alternative. If all planning decisions were made by one person, not only would the choices be uninformed, there would also be little unity around team goals and direction.

Key Roles in Problem Solving Meetings

Problem solving meetings should be oriented around issues that affect and are only resolvable by the team. If a problem is the responsibility of, or can be fixed by one person, a group meeting is likely a waste of time. However, when a singular person’s decision affects that of the entire team, it may be worth it.

The significance of a problem and the amount of group time spent solving it should be considered before calling forth any group problem solving meeting. The participant roles found in a problem solving meeting tend to vary more than most other meeting types. This is because problem solving meetings exist across such a large variety of contexts and group.

Meeting leader

Just as with decision making meetings, there is a need for direction and authority in the process of problem solving. The person in charge should either be the person with the deepest understanding of the situation or someone with the most responsibility over the outcome (i.e. the highest ranking member of the team). The leader should be able to provide the team with a general overview of the situation. They should then lead the team through the guided process.

Meeting participants

All other attendees of the meeting should be people who fall under two categories. The first is of participants who may have been involved in the events leading up to the problem. This group is not there to be blamed or criticized, but rather to provide information about how the situation was reached. In addition, this group has unique insights on how potential solutions may or may not fit with the current approach.

The second group of people who should be invited are those who will be impacted by the solution. If, for example, one subgroup of a company has to restructure the timing of their releases, representatives from other groups who will have to adapt their schedule as a result should be included.

Common Challenges in Problem Solving Meetings

Often the most successful problem solving meetings are ones that happen before a major issue arises. Taking time to identify potential future problems allows a team to have solutions immediately ready. Unfortunately, problem solving meetings are all too often done only after a problem occurs, adding a variety of challenges that would not exist in other meeting types.

Problem solving can be a particularly stressful type of group strategizing. For instance, the urgency and decisiveness that is necessary in this meeting type can lead to disagreements that wouldn’t happen if teammates were not strained.

Identifying the real problem

Identifying the true problem to be addressed can on the surface seem like a very simple task. However, different meeting participants are likely to have slightly different perspectives of what they are gathered to address. Without a common understanding of what problem they are aiming to solve, the problem solving meeting is not going to yield any productive solutions.

Intra-group conflicts

With any problem solving or decision making meeting there is bound to be some conflicting opinions on how to go forward. Because problem solving meetings are often high strung, and because of the importance of selecting a correct plan, resolving these conflicts effectively is crucial. When making group decisions, a number of different strategies can be used to reach a compromise.

Defensiveness

When any type of group decision needs to be made, participants in the process can become too attached to their own suggestion to truly consider other options. While this leads to a lot of passionate and potentially productive conversation, it can also lead members to feel personally offended when their solutions are rejected.

Time pressure

Often problem meetings are extremely time-constrained. This can be because the problem is an approaching deadline or because there was simply no time scheduled in the initial plan for a problem to arise

How to Host Successful Problem Solving Meetings

The best way to approach a problem solving meeting is to first properly define the problem and the restrictions of potential solutions. Before brainstorming solutions, evaluate them, and decide on the best one.

Identify the problem to be addressed

The first key step to solving any problem is to identify the issue at hand. Problem solving meetings are designed to address any type of situation specific to the group. Determining what the problem is may be easier if it has already become a pressing issue. However, problem solving meetings can also be designed to generate preemptive solutions to problematic situations that may arise in the future. Regardless, any problem solving meeting should begin with a discussion of the specific issues that need to be changed or resolved by the end of the meeting.

Often, when a pervasive issue exists within a group, .some members are more aware of it than others. Beginning a problem solving meeting by explicitly identifying the issue not only makes clear what the meeting goals are, but also puts all team members on the same page about the state of the group or project. Identifying this problem early on also gives the team the ability to modify the topics or members involved in reaching a solution.

Define solution requirements and restraints

Once a problem has been identified, the group should propose all possible ways to approach and resolve the issue. The reason why problem solving is often easier said than done is because of existing restraints that withhold many of the ideal options available. For example, these restrictions could involve a lack of time or a lack of corporate resources. These restraints are important to consider because problems often result as a lack of consideration for them in the first place.

Brainstorm possible solutions

To choose among feasible solutions, it is important to define not only the possible limitations but also where group priorities lie. The most effective choices are made once the team’s understanding of the most urgent aspects of a future decision have been defined. Without a realistic idea of which aspects are most important, the solutions proposed will either be unrealistic or oriented around personal opinions. This step in the problem solving methodology allows for the most important and realistic strategies to be the ones most discussed.

Evaluate top solutions

After the feasible solutions to a problem have been isolated, the group must come to a collective conclusion about the best approach. This process should involve group consideration and evaluation of proposed options. It can be important to highlight and compare potential options against each other. For example, depending on the priorities of the group, an option which extends the timeline might be preferable to one that sacrifices quality or vice versa.

Agree on a solution

The best and most appropriate options that are generated during this meeting should be approached in the same way as options within a decision making meeting. Feedback, opinions and questions about each strategy should be considered and everyone involved in the meeting should feel free to voice their opinions. The final decision should be one that is not only realistic but that puts the entire team on the same page going forward.

Better Problem Solving Meetings with MeetingSift

MeetingSift’s brainstorm activity can help determine the problem, identify restrictions, and come up with ideas for possible solutions. The polling and ranking activities can then give an overview of where the group’s opinions lie. Using these tools can relieve not only the above mentioned problems but many others that are associated with problem solving meetings.

Gather honest opinions through anonymous feedback

The anonymous contribution platform that MeetingSift provides allows for more candid feedback, as well as helping the group to focus on the issue rather than the person.

Not only does this lead participants to be less upset when their ideas are not chosen, but also to not feel like they must support one particular solution or plan just because it was proposed by someone with authority in the group. In short, MeetingSift allows for the group to focus on the problem solving process rather than office politics.

Cut meeting time with parallel input

With MeetingSift, group polls can be conducted and decisions made in a fraction of the time that it usually takes to collect that amount of information. Additionally, MeetingSift allows facilitators to time the duration of their slides and activities in order to cut down and condense unnecessary aspects of the conversation.

Efficiently identify solutions or acceptable compromises

With problem solving meetings we suggest using an empirical voting tool such as ranking or voting to choose a winner, rather than trying to find a compromise between the two. In the face of a problem at hand, it is often best to choose and stick with one dominant strategy.

Easily record and share the final solution

While these opinions should be incorporated in the process, MeetingSift reports serve as a useful tool to share the solution decisions with as many other people as possible.

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Problem Solve with MeetingSift

The best way to approach a problem solving meeting is to follow the simple steps outlined in this article.

MeetingSift  brainstorm activity can help determine the problem and opportunities, and identify restrictions related to possible solutions. The evaluate , polling, and ranking activities can quickly reveal where the group’s opinions lie.

Using these tools can relieve common challenges like time pressure, intra-group conflicts, defensiveness, and many others that are associated with the stressful nature of problem solving meetings.

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All teams and organizations encounter challenges as they grow. There are problems that might occur for teams when it comes to miscommunication or resolving business-critical issues . You may face challenges around growth , design , user engagement, and even team culture and happiness. In short, problem-solving techniques should be part of every team’s skillset.

Problem-solving methods are primarily designed to help a group or team through a process of first identifying problems and challenges , ideating possible solutions , and then evaluating the most suitable .

Finding effective solutions to complex problems isn’t easy, but by using the right process and techniques, you can help your team be more efficient in the process.

So how do you develop strategies that are engaging, and empower your team to solve problems effectively?

In this blog post, we share a series of problem-solving tools you can use in your next workshop or team meeting. You’ll also find some tips for facilitating the process and how to enable others to solve complex problems.

Let’s get started! 

How do you identify problems?

How do you identify the right solution.

• Tips for more effective problem-solving

Complete problem-solving methods

• Problem-solving techniques to identify and analyze problems
• Problem-solving techniques for developing solutions

Problem-solving warm-up activities

Closing activities for a problem-solving process.

Before you can move towards finding the right solution for a given problem, you first need to identify and define the problem you wish to solve. 

Here, you want to clearly articulate what the problem is and allow your group to do the same. Remember that everyone in a group is likely to have differing perspectives and alignment is necessary in order to help the group move forward. 

Identifying a problem accurately also requires that all members of a group are able to contribute their views in an open and safe manner. It can be scary for people to stand up and contribute, especially if the problems or challenges are emotive or personal in nature. Be sure to try and create a psychologically safe space for these kinds of discussions.

Remember that problem analysis and further discussion are also important. Not taking the time to fully analyze and discuss a challenge can result in the development of solutions that are not fit for purpose or do not address the underlying issue.

Successfully identifying and then analyzing a problem means facilitating a group through activities designed to help them clearly and honestly articulate their thoughts and produce usable insight.

With this data, you might then produce a problem statement that clearly describes the problem you wish to be addressed and also state the goal of any process you undertake to tackle this issue.  

Finding solutions is the end goal of any process. Complex organizational challenges can only be solved with an appropriate solution but discovering them requires using the right problem-solving tool.

After you’ve explored a problem and discussed ideas, you need to help a team discuss and choose the right solution. Consensus tools and methods such as those below help a group explore possible solutions before then voting for the best. They’re a great way to tap into the collective intelligence of the group for great results!

Remember that the process is often iterative. Great problem solvers often roadtest a viable solution in a measured way to see what works too. While you might not get the right solution on your first try, the methods below help teams land on the most likely to succeed solution while also holding space for improvement.

Every effective problem solving process begins with an agenda . A well-structured workshop is one of the best methods for successfully guiding a group from exploring a problem to implementing a solution.

In SessionLab, it’s easy to go from an idea to a complete agenda . Start by dragging and dropping your core problem solving activities into place . Add timings, breaks and necessary materials before sharing your agenda with your colleagues.

The resulting agenda will be your guide to an effective and productive problem solving session that will also help you stay organized on the day!

Tips for more effective problem solving

Problem-solving activities are only one part of the puzzle. While a great method can help unlock your team’s ability to solve problems, without a thoughtful approach and strong facilitation the solutions may not be fit for purpose.

Let’s take a look at some problem-solving tips you can apply to any process to help it be a success!

Clearly define the problem

Jumping straight to solutions can be tempting, though without first clearly articulating a problem, the solution might not be the right one. Many of the problem-solving activities below include sections where the problem is explored and clearly defined before moving on.

This is a vital part of the problem-solving process and taking the time to fully define an issue can save time and effort later. A clear definition helps identify irrelevant information and it also ensures that your team sets off on the right track.

Don’t jump to conclusions

It’s easy for groups to exhibit cognitive bias or have preconceived ideas about both problems and potential solutions. Be sure to back up any problem statements or potential solutions with facts, research, and adequate forethought.

The best techniques ask participants to be methodical and challenge preconceived notions. Make sure you give the group enough time and space to collect relevant information and consider the problem in a new way. By approaching the process with a clear, rational mindset, you’ll often find that better solutions are more forthcoming.  

Try different approaches  

Problems come in all shapes and sizes and so too should the methods you use to solve them. If you find that one approach isn’t yielding results and your team isn’t finding different solutions, try mixing it up. You’ll be surprised at how using a new creative activity can unblock your team and generate great solutions.

Don’t take it personally 

Depending on the nature of your team or organizational problems, it’s easy for conversations to get heated. While it’s good for participants to be engaged in the discussions, ensure that emotions don’t run too high and that blame isn’t thrown around while finding solutions.

You’re all in it together, and even if your team or area is seeing problems, that isn’t necessarily a disparagement of you personally. Using facilitation skills to manage group dynamics is one effective method of helping conversations be more constructive.

Get the right people in the room

Your problem-solving method is often only as effective as the group using it. Getting the right people on the job and managing the number of people present is important too!

If the group is too small, you may not get enough different perspectives to effectively solve a problem. If the group is too large, you can go round and round during the ideation stages.

Creating the right group makeup is also important in ensuring you have the necessary expertise and skillset to both identify and follow up on potential solutions. Carefully consider who to include at each stage to help ensure your problem-solving method is followed and positioned for success.

Document everything

The best solutions can take refinement, iteration, and reflection to come out. Get into a habit of documenting your process in order to keep all the learnings from the session and to allow ideas to mature and develop. Many of the methods below involve the creation of documents or shared resources. Be sure to keep and share these so everyone can benefit from the work done!

Bring a facilitator 

Facilitation is all about making group processes easier. With a subject as potentially emotive and important as problem-solving, having an impartial third party in the form of a facilitator can make all the difference in finding great solutions and keeping the process moving. Consider bringing a facilitator to your problem-solving session to get better results and generate meaningful solutions!

Develop your problem-solving skills

It takes time and practice to be an effective problem solver. While some roles or participants might more naturally gravitate towards problem-solving, it can take development and planning to help everyone create better solutions.

You might develop a training program, run a problem-solving workshop or simply ask your team to practice using the techniques below. Check out our post on problem-solving skills to see how you and your group can develop the right mental process and be more resilient to issues too!

Design a great agenda

Workshops are a great format for solving problems. With the right approach, you can focus a group and help them find the solutions to their own problems. But designing a process can be time-consuming and finding the right activities can be difficult.

Check out our workshop planning guide to level-up your agenda design and start running more effective workshops. Need inspiration? Check out templates designed by expert facilitators to help you kickstart your process!

In this section, we’ll look at in-depth problem-solving methods that provide a complete end-to-end process for developing effective solutions. These will help guide your team from the discovery and definition of a problem through to delivering the right solution.

If you’re looking for an all-encompassing method or problem-solving model, these processes are a great place to start. They’ll ask your team to challenge preconceived ideas and adopt a mindset for solving problems more effectively.

• Six Thinking Hats
• Lightning Decision Jam
• Problem Definition Process
• Discovery & Action Dialogue

Design Sprint 2.0

• Open Space Technology

1. Six Thinking Hats

Individual approaches to solving a problem can be very different based on what team or role an individual holds. It can be easy for existing biases or perspectives to find their way into the mix, or for internal politics to direct a conversation.

Six Thinking Hats is a classic method for identifying the problems that need to be solved and enables your team to consider them from different angles, whether that is by focusing on facts and data, creative solutions, or by considering why a particular solution might not work.

Like all problem-solving frameworks, Six Thinking Hats is effective at helping teams remove roadblocks from a conversation or discussion and come to terms with all the aspects necessary to solve complex problems.

2. Lightning Decision Jam

Featured courtesy of Jonathan Courtney of AJ&Smart Berlin, Lightning Decision Jam is one of those strategies that should be in every facilitation toolbox. Exploring problems and finding solutions is often creative in nature, though as with any creative process, there is the potential to lose focus and get lost.

Unstructured discussions might get you there in the end, but it’s much more effective to use a method that creates a clear process and team focus.

In Lightning Decision Jam, participants are invited to begin by writing challenges, concerns, or mistakes on post-its without discussing them before then being invited by the moderator to present them to the group.

From there, the team vote on which problems to solve and are guided through steps that will allow them to reframe those problems, create solutions and then decide what to execute on. 

By deciding the problems that need to be solved as a team before moving on, this group process is great for ensuring the whole team is aligned and can take ownership over the next stages. 

Lightning Decision Jam (LDJ)   #action   #decision making   #problem solving   #issue analysis   #innovation   #design   #remote-friendly   The problem with anything that requires creative thinking is that it’s easy to get lost—lose focus and fall into the trap of having useless, open-ended, unstructured discussions. Here’s the most effective solution I’ve found: Replace all open, unstructured discussion with a clear process. What to use this exercise for: Anything which requires a group of people to make decisions, solve problems or discuss challenges. It’s always good to frame an LDJ session with a broad topic, here are some examples: The conversion flow of our checkout Our internal design process How we organise events Keeping up with our competition Improving sales flow

3. Problem Definition Process

While problems can be complex, the problem-solving methods you use to identify and solve those problems can often be simple in design. 

By taking the time to truly identify and define a problem before asking the group to reframe the challenge as an opportunity, this method is a great way to enable change.

Begin by identifying a focus question and exploring the ways in which it manifests before splitting into five teams who will each consider the problem using a different method: escape, reversal, exaggeration, distortion or wishful. Teams develop a problem objective and create ideas in line with their method before then feeding them back to the group.

This method is great for enabling in-depth discussions while also creating space for finding creative solutions too!

Problem Definition   #problem solving   #idea generation   #creativity   #online   #remote-friendly   A problem solving technique to define a problem, challenge or opportunity and to generate ideas.

4. The 5 Whys 

Sometimes, a group needs to go further with their strategies and analyze the root cause at the heart of organizational issues. An RCA or root cause analysis is the process of identifying what is at the heart of business problems or recurring challenges. 

The 5 Whys is a simple and effective method of helping a group go find the root cause of any problem or challenge and conduct analysis that will deliver results. 

By beginning with the creation of a problem statement and going through five stages to refine it, The 5 Whys provides everything you need to truly discover the cause of an issue.

The 5 Whys   #hyperisland   #innovation   This simple and powerful method is useful for getting to the core of a problem or challenge. As the title suggests, the group defines a problems, then asks the question “why” five times, often using the resulting explanation as a starting point for creative problem solving.

5. World Cafe

World Cafe is a simple but powerful facilitation technique to help bigger groups to focus their energy and attention on solving complex problems.

World Cafe enables this approach by creating a relaxed atmosphere where participants are able to self-organize and explore topics relevant and important to them which are themed around a central problem-solving purpose. Create the right atmosphere by modeling your space after a cafe and after guiding the group through the method, let them take the lead!

Making problem-solving a part of your organization’s culture in the long term can be a difficult undertaking. More approachable formats like World Cafe can be especially effective in bringing people unfamiliar with workshops into the fold. 

World Cafe   #hyperisland   #innovation   #issue analysis   World Café is a simple yet powerful method, originated by Juanita Brown, for enabling meaningful conversations driven completely by participants and the topics that are relevant and important to them. Facilitators create a cafe-style space and provide simple guidelines. Participants then self-organize and explore a set of relevant topics or questions for conversation.

6. Discovery & Action Dialogue (DAD)

One of the best approaches is to create a safe space for a group to share and discover practices and behaviors that can help them find their own solutions.

With DAD, you can help a group choose which problems they wish to solve and which approaches they will take to do so. It’s great at helping remove resistance to change and can help get buy-in at every level too!

This process of enabling frontline ownership is great in ensuring follow-through and is one of the methods you will want in your toolbox as a facilitator.

Discovery & Action Dialogue (DAD)   #idea generation   #liberating structures   #action   #issue analysis   #remote-friendly   DADs make it easy for a group or community to discover practices and behaviors that enable some individuals (without access to special resources and facing the same constraints) to find better solutions than their peers to common problems. These are called positive deviant (PD) behaviors and practices. DADs make it possible for people in the group, unit, or community to discover by themselves these PD practices. DADs also create favorable conditions for stimulating participants’ creativity in spaces where they can feel safe to invent new and more effective practices. Resistance to change evaporates as participants are unleashed to choose freely which practices they will adopt or try and which problems they will tackle. DADs make it possible to achieve frontline ownership of solutions.

7. Design Sprint 2.0

Want to see how a team can solve big problems and move forward with prototyping and testing solutions in a few days? The Design Sprint 2.0 template from Jake Knapp, author of Sprint, is a complete agenda for a with proven results.

Developing the right agenda can involve difficult but necessary planning. Ensuring all the correct steps are followed can also be stressful or time-consuming depending on your level of experience.

Use this complete 4-day workshop template if you are finding there is no obvious solution to your challenge and want to focus your team around a specific problem that might require a shortcut to launching a minimum viable product or waiting for the organization-wide implementation of a solution.

8. Open space technology

Open space technology- developed by Harrison Owen – creates a space where large groups are invited to take ownership of their problem solving and lead individual sessions. Open space technology is a great format when you have a great deal of expertise and insight in the room and want to allow for different takes and approaches on a particular theme or problem you need to be solved.

Start by bringing your participants together to align around a central theme and focus their efforts. Explain the ground rules to help guide the problem-solving process and then invite members to identify any issue connecting to the central theme that they are interested in and are prepared to take responsibility for.

Once participants have decided on their approach to the core theme, they write their issue on a piece of paper, announce it to the group, pick a session time and place, and post the paper on the wall. As the wall fills up with sessions, the group is then invited to join the sessions that interest them the most and which they can contribute to, then you’re ready to begin!

Everyone joins the problem-solving group they’ve signed up to, record the discussion and if appropriate, findings can then be shared with the rest of the group afterward.

Open Space Technology   #action plan   #idea generation   #problem solving   #issue analysis   #large group   #online   #remote-friendly   Open Space is a methodology for large groups to create their agenda discerning important topics for discussion, suitable for conferences, community gatherings and whole system facilitation

Techniques to identify and analyze problems

Using a problem-solving method to help a team identify and analyze a problem can be a quick and effective addition to any workshop or meeting.

While further actions are always necessary, you can generate momentum and alignment easily, and these activities are a great place to get started.

We’ve put together this list of techniques to help you and your team with problem identification, analysis, and discussion that sets the foundation for developing effective solutions.

Let’s take a look!

• The Creativity Dice
• Fishbone Analysis
• Problem Tree
• SWOT Analysis
• Agreement-Certainty Matrix
• The Journalistic Six
• LEGO Challenge
• What, So What, Now What?
• Journalists

Individual and group perspectives are incredibly important, but what happens if people are set in their minds and need a change of perspective in order to approach a problem more effectively?

Flip It is a method we love because it is both simple to understand and run, and allows groups to understand how their perspectives and biases are formed. 

Participants in Flip It are first invited to consider concerns, issues, or problems from a perspective of fear and write them on a flip chart. Then, the group is asked to consider those same issues from a perspective of hope and flip their understanding.  

No problem and solution is free from existing bias and by changing perspectives with Flip It, you can then develop a problem solving model quickly and effectively.

Flip It!   #gamestorming   #problem solving   #action   Often, a change in a problem or situation comes simply from a change in our perspectives. Flip It! is a quick game designed to show players that perspectives are made, not born.

10. The Creativity Dice

One of the most useful problem solving skills you can teach your team is of approaching challenges with creativity, flexibility, and openness. Games like The Creativity Dice allow teams to overcome the potential hurdle of too much linear thinking and approach the process with a sense of fun and speed. 

In The Creativity Dice, participants are organized around a topic and roll a dice to determine what they will work on for a period of 3 minutes at a time. They might roll a 3 and work on investigating factual information on the chosen topic. They might roll a 1 and work on identifying the specific goals, standards, or criteria for the session.

Encouraging rapid work and iteration while asking participants to be flexible are great skills to cultivate. Having a stage for idea incubation in this game is also important. Moments of pause can help ensure the ideas that are put forward are the most suitable. 

The Creativity Dice   #creativity   #problem solving   #thiagi   #issue analysis   Too much linear thinking is hazardous to creative problem solving. To be creative, you should approach the problem (or the opportunity) from different points of view. You should leave a thought hanging in mid-air and move to another. This skipping around prevents premature closure and lets your brain incubate one line of thought while you consciously pursue another.

11. Fishbone Analysis

Organizational or team challenges are rarely simple, and it’s important to remember that one problem can be an indication of something that goes deeper and may require further consideration to be solved.

Fishbone Analysis helps groups to dig deeper and understand the origins of a problem. It’s a great example of a root cause analysis method that is simple for everyone on a team to get their head around. 

Participants in this activity are asked to annotate a diagram of a fish, first adding the problem or issue to be worked on at the head of a fish before then brainstorming the root causes of the problem and adding them as bones on the fish. 

Using abstractions such as a diagram of a fish can really help a team break out of their regular thinking and develop a creative approach.

Fishbone Analysis   #problem solving   ##root cause analysis   #decision making   #online facilitation   A process to help identify and understand the origins of problems, issues or observations.

12. Problem Tree 

Encouraging visual thinking can be an essential part of many strategies. By simply reframing and clarifying problems, a group can move towards developing a problem solving model that works for them. 

In Problem Tree, groups are asked to first brainstorm a list of problems – these can be design problems, team problems or larger business problems – and then organize them into a hierarchy. The hierarchy could be from most important to least important or abstract to practical, though the key thing with problem solving games that involve this aspect is that your group has some way of managing and sorting all the issues that are raised.

Once you have a list of problems that need to be solved and have organized them accordingly, you’re then well-positioned for the next problem solving steps.

Problem tree   #define intentions   #create   #design   #issue analysis   A problem tree is a tool to clarify the hierarchy of problems addressed by the team within a design project; it represents high level problems or related sublevel problems.

13. SWOT Analysis

Chances are you’ve heard of the SWOT Analysis before. This problem-solving method focuses on identifying strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats is a tried and tested method for both individuals and teams.

Start by creating a desired end state or outcome and bare this in mind – any process solving model is made more effective by knowing what you are moving towards. Create a quadrant made up of the four categories of a SWOT analysis and ask participants to generate ideas based on each of those quadrants.

Once you have those ideas assembled in their quadrants, cluster them together based on their affinity with other ideas. These clusters are then used to facilitate group conversations and move things forward. 

SWOT analysis   #gamestorming   #problem solving   #action   #meeting facilitation   The SWOT Analysis is a long-standing technique of looking at what we have, with respect to the desired end state, as well as what we could improve on. It gives us an opportunity to gauge approaching opportunities and dangers, and assess the seriousness of the conditions that affect our future. When we understand those conditions, we can influence what comes next.

14. Agreement-Certainty Matrix

Not every problem-solving approach is right for every challenge, and deciding on the right method for the challenge at hand is a key part of being an effective team.

The Agreement Certainty matrix helps teams align on the nature of the challenges facing them. By sorting problems from simple to chaotic, your team can understand what methods are suitable for each problem and what they can do to ensure effective results. 

If you are already using Liberating Structures techniques as part of your problem-solving strategy, the Agreement-Certainty Matrix can be an invaluable addition to your process. We’ve found it particularly if you are having issues with recurring problems in your organization and want to go deeper in understanding the root cause. 

Agreement-Certainty Matrix   #issue analysis   #liberating structures   #problem solving   You can help individuals or groups avoid the frequent mistake of trying to solve a problem with methods that are not adapted to the nature of their challenge. The combination of two questions makes it possible to easily sort challenges into four categories: simple, complicated, complex , and chaotic .  A problem is simple when it can be solved reliably with practices that are easy to duplicate.  It is complicated when experts are required to devise a sophisticated solution that will yield the desired results predictably.  A problem is complex when there are several valid ways to proceed but outcomes are not predictable in detail.  Chaotic is when the context is too turbulent to identify a path forward.  A loose analogy may be used to describe these differences: simple is like following a recipe, complicated like sending a rocket to the moon, complex like raising a child, and chaotic is like the game “Pin the Tail on the Donkey.”  The Liberating Structures Matching Matrix in Chapter 5 can be used as the first step to clarify the nature of a challenge and avoid the mismatches between problems and solutions that are frequently at the root of chronic, recurring problems.

Organizing and charting a team’s progress can be important in ensuring its success. SQUID (Sequential Question and Insight Diagram) is a great model that allows a team to effectively switch between giving questions and answers and develop the skills they need to stay on track throughout the process. 

Begin with two different colored sticky notes – one for questions and one for answers – and with your central topic (the head of the squid) on the board. Ask the group to first come up with a series of questions connected to their best guess of how to approach the topic. Ask the group to come up with answers to those questions, fix them to the board and connect them with a line. After some discussion, go back to question mode by responding to the generated answers or other points on the board.

It’s rewarding to see a diagram grow throughout the exercise, and a completed SQUID can provide a visual resource for future effort and as an example for other teams.

SQUID   #gamestorming   #project planning   #issue analysis   #problem solving   When exploring an information space, it’s important for a group to know where they are at any given time. By using SQUID, a group charts out the territory as they go and can navigate accordingly. SQUID stands for Sequential Question and Insight Diagram.

16. Speed Boat

To continue with our nautical theme, Speed Boat is a short and sweet activity that can help a team quickly identify what employees, clients or service users might have a problem with and analyze what might be standing in the way of achieving a solution.

Methods that allow for a group to make observations, have insights and obtain those eureka moments quickly are invaluable when trying to solve complex problems.

In Speed Boat, the approach is to first consider what anchors and challenges might be holding an organization (or boat) back. Bonus points if you are able to identify any sharks in the water and develop ideas that can also deal with competitors!   

Speed Boat   #gamestorming   #problem solving   #action   Speedboat is a short and sweet way to identify what your employees or clients don’t like about your product/service or what’s standing in the way of a desired goal.

17. The Journalistic Six

Some of the most effective ways of solving problems is by encouraging teams to be more inclusive and diverse in their thinking.

Based on the six key questions journalism students are taught to answer in articles and news stories, The Journalistic Six helps create teams to see the whole picture. By using who, what, when, where, why, and how to facilitate the conversation and encourage creative thinking, your team can make sure that the problem identification and problem analysis stages of the are covered exhaustively and thoughtfully. Reporter’s notebook and dictaphone optional.

The Journalistic Six – Who What When Where Why How   #idea generation   #issue analysis   #problem solving   #online   #creative thinking   #remote-friendly   A questioning method for generating, explaining, investigating ideas.

18. LEGO Challenge

Now for an activity that is a little out of the (toy) box. LEGO Serious Play is a facilitation methodology that can be used to improve creative thinking and problem-solving skills. 

The LEGO Challenge includes giving each member of the team an assignment that is hidden from the rest of the group while they create a structure without speaking.

What the LEGO challenge brings to the table is a fun working example of working with stakeholders who might not be on the same page to solve problems. Also, it’s LEGO! Who doesn’t love LEGO! 

LEGO Challenge   #hyperisland   #team   A team-building activity in which groups must work together to build a structure out of LEGO, but each individual has a secret “assignment” which makes the collaborative process more challenging. It emphasizes group communication, leadership dynamics, conflict, cooperation, patience and problem solving strategy.

19. What, So What, Now What?

If not carefully managed, the problem identification and problem analysis stages of the problem-solving process can actually create more problems and misunderstandings.

The What, So What, Now What? problem-solving activity is designed to help collect insights and move forward while also eliminating the possibility of disagreement when it comes to identifying, clarifying, and analyzing organizational or work problems. 

Facilitation is all about bringing groups together so that might work on a shared goal and the best problem-solving strategies ensure that teams are aligned in purpose, if not initially in opinion or insight.

Throughout the three steps of this game, you give everyone on a team to reflect on a problem by asking what happened, why it is important, and what actions should then be taken. 

This can be a great activity for bringing our individual perceptions about a problem or challenge and contextualizing it in a larger group setting. This is one of the most important problem-solving skills you can bring to your organization.

W³ – What, So What, Now What?   #issue analysis   #innovation   #liberating structures   You can help groups reflect on a shared experience in a way that builds understanding and spurs coordinated action while avoiding unproductive conflict. It is possible for every voice to be heard while simultaneously sifting for insights and shaping new direction. Progressing in stages makes this practical—from collecting facts about What Happened to making sense of these facts with So What and finally to what actions logically follow with Now What . The shared progression eliminates most of the misunderstandings that otherwise fuel disagreements about what to do. Voila!

20. Journalists  

Problem analysis can be one of the most important and decisive stages of all problem-solving tools. Sometimes, a team can become bogged down in the details and are unable to move forward.

Journalists is an activity that can avoid a group from getting stuck in the problem identification or problem analysis stages of the process.

In Journalists, the group is invited to draft the front page of a fictional newspaper and figure out what stories deserve to be on the cover and what headlines those stories will have. By reframing how your problems and challenges are approached, you can help a team move productively through the process and be better prepared for the steps to follow.

Journalists   #vision   #big picture   #issue analysis   #remote-friendly   This is an exercise to use when the group gets stuck in details and struggles to see the big picture. Also good for defining a vision.

Problem-solving techniques for developing solutions 

The success of any problem-solving process can be measured by the solutions it produces. After you’ve defined the issue, explored existing ideas, and ideated, it’s time to narrow down to the correct solution.

Use these problem-solving techniques when you want to help your team find consensus, compare possible solutions, and move towards taking action on a particular problem.

• Improved Solutions
• Four-Step Sketch
• 15% Solutions
• How-Now-Wow matrix
• Impact Effort Matrix

21. Mindspin  

Brainstorming is part of the bread and butter of the problem-solving process and all problem-solving strategies benefit from getting ideas out and challenging a team to generate solutions quickly. 

With Mindspin, participants are encouraged not only to generate ideas but to do so under time constraints and by slamming down cards and passing them on. By doing multiple rounds, your team can begin with a free generation of possible solutions before moving on to developing those solutions and encouraging further ideation. 

This is one of our favorite problem-solving activities and can be great for keeping the energy up throughout the workshop. Remember the importance of helping people become engaged in the process – energizing problem-solving techniques like Mindspin can help ensure your team stays engaged and happy, even when the problems they’re coming together to solve are complex. 

MindSpin   #teampedia   #idea generation   #problem solving   #action   A fast and loud method to enhance brainstorming within a team. Since this activity has more than round ideas that are repetitive can be ruled out leaving more creative and innovative answers to the challenge.

22. Improved Solutions

After a team has successfully identified a problem and come up with a few solutions, it can be tempting to call the work of the problem-solving process complete. That said, the first solution is not necessarily the best, and by including a further review and reflection activity into your problem-solving model, you can ensure your group reaches the best possible result. 

One of a number of problem-solving games from Thiagi Group, Improved Solutions helps you go the extra mile and develop suggested solutions with close consideration and peer review. By supporting the discussion of several problems at once and by shifting team roles throughout, this problem-solving technique is a dynamic way of finding the best solution. 

Improved Solutions   #creativity   #thiagi   #problem solving   #action   #team   You can improve any solution by objectively reviewing its strengths and weaknesses and making suitable adjustments. In this creativity framegame, you improve the solutions to several problems. To maintain objective detachment, you deal with a different problem during each of six rounds and assume different roles (problem owner, consultant, basher, booster, enhancer, and evaluator) during each round. At the conclusion of the activity, each player ends up with two solutions to her problem.

23. Four Step Sketch

Creative thinking and visual ideation does not need to be confined to the opening stages of your problem-solving strategies. Exercises that include sketching and prototyping on paper can be effective at the solution finding and development stage of the process, and can be great for keeping a team engaged. 

By going from simple notes to a crazy 8s round that involves rapidly sketching 8 variations on their ideas before then producing a final solution sketch, the group is able to iterate quickly and visually. Problem-solving techniques like Four-Step Sketch are great if you have a group of different thinkers and want to change things up from a more textual or discussion-based approach.

Four-Step Sketch   #design sprint   #innovation   #idea generation   #remote-friendly   The four-step sketch is an exercise that helps people to create well-formed concepts through a structured process that includes: Review key information Start design work on paper,  Consider multiple variations , Create a detailed solution . This exercise is preceded by a set of other activities allowing the group to clarify the challenge they want to solve. See how the Four Step Sketch exercise fits into a Design Sprint

24. 15% Solutions

Some problems are simpler than others and with the right problem-solving activities, you can empower people to take immediate actions that can help create organizational change. 

Part of the liberating structures toolkit, 15% solutions is a problem-solving technique that focuses on finding and implementing solutions quickly. A process of iterating and making small changes quickly can help generate momentum and an appetite for solving complex problems.

Problem-solving strategies can live and die on whether people are onboard. Getting some quick wins is a great way of getting people behind the process.   

It can be extremely empowering for a team to realize that problem-solving techniques can be deployed quickly and easily and delineate between things they can positively impact and those things they cannot change. 

15% Solutions   #action   #liberating structures   #remote-friendly   You can reveal the actions, however small, that everyone can do immediately. At a minimum, these will create momentum, and that may make a BIG difference.  15% Solutions show that there is no reason to wait around, feel powerless, or fearful. They help people pick it up a level. They get individuals and the group to focus on what is within their discretion instead of what they cannot change.  With a very simple question, you can flip the conversation to what can be done and find solutions to big problems that are often distributed widely in places not known in advance. Shifting a few grains of sand may trigger a landslide and change the whole landscape.

25. How-Now-Wow Matrix

The problem-solving process is often creative, as complex problems usually require a change of thinking and creative response in order to find the best solutions. While it’s common for the first stages to encourage creative thinking, groups can often gravitate to familiar solutions when it comes to the end of the process. 

When selecting solutions, you don’t want to lose your creative energy! The How-Now-Wow Matrix from Gamestorming is a great problem-solving activity that enables a group to stay creative and think out of the box when it comes to selecting the right solution for a given problem.

Problem-solving techniques that encourage creative thinking and the ideation and selection of new solutions can be the most effective in organisational change. Give the How-Now-Wow Matrix a go, and not just for how pleasant it is to say out loud. 

How-Now-Wow Matrix   #gamestorming   #idea generation   #remote-friendly   When people want to develop new ideas, they most often think out of the box in the brainstorming or divergent phase. However, when it comes to convergence, people often end up picking ideas that are most familiar to them. This is called a ‘creative paradox’ or a ‘creadox’. The How-Now-Wow matrix is an idea selection tool that breaks the creadox by forcing people to weigh each idea on 2 parameters.

26. Impact and Effort Matrix

All problem-solving techniques hope to not only find solutions to a given problem or challenge but to find the best solution. When it comes to finding a solution, groups are invited to put on their decision-making hats and really think about how a proposed idea would work in practice. 

The Impact and Effort Matrix is one of the problem-solving techniques that fall into this camp, empowering participants to first generate ideas and then categorize them into a 2×2 matrix based on impact and effort.

Activities that invite critical thinking while remaining simple are invaluable. Use the Impact and Effort Matrix to move from ideation and towards evaluating potential solutions before then committing to them. 

Impact and Effort Matrix   #gamestorming   #decision making   #action   #remote-friendly   In this decision-making exercise, possible actions are mapped based on two factors: effort required to implement and potential impact. Categorizing ideas along these lines is a useful technique in decision making, as it obliges contributors to balance and evaluate suggested actions before committing to them.

27. Dotmocracy

If you’ve followed each of the problem-solving steps with your group successfully, you should move towards the end of your process with heaps of possible solutions developed with a specific problem in mind. But how do you help a group go from ideation to putting a solution into action? 

Dotmocracy – or Dot Voting -is a tried and tested method of helping a team in the problem-solving process make decisions and put actions in place with a degree of oversight and consensus. 

One of the problem-solving techniques that should be in every facilitator’s toolbox, Dot Voting is fast and effective and can help identify the most popular and best solutions and help bring a group to a decision effectively. 

Dotmocracy   #action   #decision making   #group prioritization   #hyperisland   #remote-friendly   Dotmocracy is a simple method for group prioritization or decision-making. It is not an activity on its own, but a method to use in processes where prioritization or decision-making is the aim. The method supports a group to quickly see which options are most popular or relevant. The options or ideas are written on post-its and stuck up on a wall for the whole group to see. Each person votes for the options they think are the strongest, and that information is used to inform a decision.

All facilitators know that warm-ups and icebreakers are useful for any workshop or group process. Problem-solving workshops are no different.

Use these problem-solving techniques to warm up a group and prepare them for the rest of the process. Activating your group by tapping into some of the top problem-solving skills can be one of the best ways to see great outcomes from your session.

• Check-in/Check-out
• Doodling Together
• Show and Tell
• Constellations
• Draw a Tree

28. Check-in / Check-out

Solid processes are planned from beginning to end, and the best facilitators know that setting the tone and establishing a safe, open environment can be integral to a successful problem-solving process.

Check-in / Check-out is a great way to begin and/or bookend a problem-solving workshop. Checking in to a session emphasizes that everyone will be seen, heard, and expected to contribute. 

If you are running a series of meetings, setting a consistent pattern of checking in and checking out can really help your team get into a groove. We recommend this opening-closing activity for small to medium-sized groups though it can work with large groups if they’re disciplined!

Check-in / Check-out   #team   #opening   #closing   #hyperisland   #remote-friendly   Either checking-in or checking-out is a simple way for a team to open or close a process, symbolically and in a collaborative way. Checking-in/out invites each member in a group to be present, seen and heard, and to express a reflection or a feeling. Checking-in emphasizes presence, focus and group commitment; checking-out emphasizes reflection and symbolic closure.

29. Doodling Together  

Thinking creatively and not being afraid to make suggestions are important problem-solving skills for any group or team, and warming up by encouraging these behaviors is a great way to start. 

Doodling Together is one of our favorite creative ice breaker games – it’s quick, effective, and fun and can make all following problem-solving steps easier by encouraging a group to collaborate visually. By passing cards and adding additional items as they go, the workshop group gets into a groove of co-creation and idea development that is crucial to finding solutions to problems. 

Doodling Together   #collaboration   #creativity   #teamwork   #fun   #team   #visual methods   #energiser   #icebreaker   #remote-friendly   Create wild, weird and often funny postcards together & establish a group’s creative confidence.

30. Show and Tell

You might remember some version of Show and Tell from being a kid in school and it’s a great problem-solving activity to kick off a session.

Asking participants to prepare a little something before a workshop by bringing an object for show and tell can help them warm up before the session has even begun! Games that include a physical object can also help encourage early engagement before moving onto more big-picture thinking.

By asking your participants to tell stories about why they chose to bring a particular item to the group, you can help teams see things from new perspectives and see both differences and similarities in the way they approach a topic. Great groundwork for approaching a problem-solving process as a team! 

Show and Tell   #gamestorming   #action   #opening   #meeting facilitation   Show and Tell taps into the power of metaphors to reveal players’ underlying assumptions and associations around a topic The aim of the game is to get a deeper understanding of stakeholders’ perspectives on anything—a new project, an organizational restructuring, a shift in the company’s vision or team dynamic.

31. Constellations

Who doesn’t love stars? Constellations is a great warm-up activity for any workshop as it gets people up off their feet, energized, and ready to engage in new ways with established topics. It’s also great for showing existing beliefs, biases, and patterns that can come into play as part of your session.

Using warm-up games that help build trust and connection while also allowing for non-verbal responses can be great for easing people into the problem-solving process and encouraging engagement from everyone in the group. Constellations is great in large spaces that allow for movement and is definitely a practical exercise to allow the group to see patterns that are otherwise invisible. 

Constellations   #trust   #connection   #opening   #coaching   #patterns   #system   Individuals express their response to a statement or idea by standing closer or further from a central object. Used with teams to reveal system, hidden patterns, perspectives.

32. Draw a Tree

Problem-solving games that help raise group awareness through a central, unifying metaphor can be effective ways to warm-up a group in any problem-solving model.

Draw a Tree is a simple warm-up activity you can use in any group and which can provide a quick jolt of energy. Start by asking your participants to draw a tree in just 45 seconds – they can choose whether it will be abstract or realistic. 

Once the timer is up, ask the group how many people included the roots of the tree and use this as a means to discuss how we can ignore important parts of any system simply because they are not visible.

All problem-solving strategies are made more effective by thinking of problems critically and by exposing things that may not normally come to light. Warm-up games like Draw a Tree are great in that they quickly demonstrate some key problem-solving skills in an accessible and effective way.

Draw a Tree   #thiagi   #opening   #perspectives   #remote-friendly   With this game you can raise awarness about being more mindful, and aware of the environment we live in.

Each step of the problem-solving workshop benefits from an intelligent deployment of activities, games, and techniques. Bringing your session to an effective close helps ensure that solutions are followed through on and that you also celebrate what has been achieved.

Here are some problem-solving activities you can use to effectively close a workshop or meeting and ensure the great work you’ve done can continue afterward.

• One Breath Feedback
• Who What When Matrix
• Response Cards

How do I conclude a problem-solving process?

All good things must come to an end. With the bulk of the work done, it can be tempting to conclude your workshop swiftly and without a moment to debrief and align. This can be problematic in that it doesn’t allow your team to fully process the results or reflect on the process.

At the end of an effective session, your team will have gone through a process that, while productive, can be exhausting. It’s important to give your group a moment to take a breath, ensure that they are clear on future actions, and provide short feedback before leaving the space. 

The primary purpose of any problem-solving method is to generate solutions and then implement them. Be sure to take the opportunity to ensure everyone is aligned and ready to effectively implement the solutions you produced in the workshop.

Remember that every process can be improved and by giving a short moment to collect feedback in the session, you can further refine your problem-solving methods and see further success in the future too.

33. One Breath Feedback

Maintaining attention and focus during the closing stages of a problem-solving workshop can be tricky and so being concise when giving feedback can be important. It’s easy to incur “death by feedback” should some team members go on for too long sharing their perspectives in a quick feedback round. 

One Breath Feedback is a great closing activity for workshops. You give everyone an opportunity to provide feedback on what they’ve done but only in the space of a single breath. This keeps feedback short and to the point and means that everyone is encouraged to provide the most important piece of feedback to them. 

One breath feedback   #closing   #feedback   #action   This is a feedback round in just one breath that excels in maintaining attention: each participants is able to speak during just one breath … for most people that’s around 20 to 25 seconds … unless of course you’ve been a deep sea diver in which case you’ll be able to do it for longer.

34. Who What When Matrix 

Matrices feature as part of many effective problem-solving strategies and with good reason. They are easily recognizable, simple to use, and generate results.

The Who What When Matrix is a great tool to use when closing your problem-solving session by attributing a who, what and when to the actions and solutions you have decided upon. The resulting matrix is a simple, easy-to-follow way of ensuring your team can move forward. 

Great solutions can’t be enacted without action and ownership. Your problem-solving process should include a stage for allocating tasks to individuals or teams and creating a realistic timeframe for those solutions to be implemented or checked out. Use this method to keep the solution implementation process clear and simple for all involved. 

Who/What/When Matrix   #gamestorming   #action   #project planning   With Who/What/When matrix, you can connect people with clear actions they have defined and have committed to.

35. Response cards

Group discussion can comprise the bulk of most problem-solving activities and by the end of the process, you might find that your team is talked out! 

Providing a means for your team to give feedback with short written notes can ensure everyone is head and can contribute without the need to stand up and talk. Depending on the needs of the group, giving an alternative can help ensure everyone can contribute to your problem-solving model in the way that makes the most sense for them.

Response Cards is a great way to close a workshop if you are looking for a gentle warm-down and want to get some swift discussion around some of the feedback that is raised. 

Response Cards   #debriefing   #closing   #structured sharing   #questions and answers   #thiagi   #action   It can be hard to involve everyone during a closing of a session. Some might stay in the background or get unheard because of louder participants. However, with the use of Response Cards, everyone will be involved in providing feedback or clarify questions at the end of a session.

Save time and effort discovering the right solutions

A structured problem solving process is a surefire way of solving tough problems, discovering creative solutions and driving organizational change. But how can you design for successful outcomes?

With SessionLab, it’s easy to design engaging workshops that deliver results. Drag, drop and reorder blocks  to build your agenda. When you make changes or update your agenda, your session  timing   adjusts automatically , saving you time on manual adjustments.

Collaborating with stakeholders or clients? Share your agenda with a single click and collaborate in real-time. No more sending documents back and forth over email.

Explore  how to use SessionLab  to design effective problem solving workshops or  watch this five minute video  to see the planner in action!

Over to you

The problem-solving process can often be as complicated and multifaceted as the problems they are set-up to solve. With the right problem-solving techniques and a mix of creative exercises designed to guide discussion and generate purposeful ideas, we hope we’ve given you the tools to find the best solutions as simply and easily as possible.

Is there a problem-solving technique that you are missing here? Do you have a favorite activity or method you use when facilitating? Let us know in the comments below, we’d love to hear from you! 

thank you very much for these excellent techniques

Certainly wonderful article, very detailed. Shared!

Your list of techniques for problem solving can be helpfully extended by adding TRIZ to the list of techniques. TRIZ has 40 problem solving techniques derived from methods inventros and patent holders used to get new patents. About 10-12 are general approaches. many organization sponsor classes in TRIZ that are used to solve business problems or general organiztational problems. You can take a look at TRIZ and dwonload a free internet booklet to see if you feel it shound be included per your selection process.

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Chapter 7. conducting problem-solving meetings, introduction.

The purpose of a problem-solving meeting is TO FOSTER DISCUSSION of your topic. Most people are not trained for leading participative discussions. Asked to chair a meeting, managers may have no idea how to proceed. Most of the time people fall back on their own experiences, which can be good or bad, but at least it's a guideline, so the thinking goes. This section shows how to lead a discussion so that the meeting objective is achieved, participants have enough "air time" so that they feel their issues have been heard, and managers gather employee input to guide decision making. Meanwhile, remember this!

DO call a meeting when:

you want information or advice.

you want help solving a problem.

an issue impacts the organization.

problems exist between groups.

you or the groups want to meet.

DON'T call group meetings when:

you or the bosses have made rhe decision already.

you can contact the group a more efficient way.

you don't have time to prepare for the meeting.

you don't have enough information to meet.

you need to hire, fire, discuss salary, or evaluate employees!

Most managerial work is conducted through meetings, since meetings function as information-processing systems. People discuss issues and make decisions which, in turn, form organizational policy. Thus, organizations very well may succeed or fail based on the strength of their meetings!

What is a "good" meeting? Issues are discussed, and decisions are made. The decisions are well-considered and require no rework. Plus, those who attend enjoy the process and feel good about their participation, even if their favored view isn't selected as the best choice. ( Tropman, 1996).--> This is the goal of meeting management - having "good" meetings! Now, if a meeting consists of well-considered decisions in which people participate fully, how do we do the "well-considered" part? Through effective discussions!

Purpose of Problem-Solving Discussion

Discussions vary according to time, circumstance, and people, but universally, they are social activities. Our democratic society favors direct participation due to our national concepts of equality, reasoned thinking, deliberation, and orderly processes. A discussion is not a debate, a monologue, or a conversation. It is a cooperative effort in which group members help others study a problem, so there are no winners or losers. It is an interchange with purpose and reason, not a casual conversation. It is systematic in that a steady progression toward a goal takes place. It is creative when people react to opinions and various turns in the discussion. It requires participation through listening and speaking. It calls for leadership so that discussion stays focused, but encourages full expression of viewpoints. Discussion, well-conducted, is a superior way to study a problem.

Discussion calls for reflective thinking - weighing pros and cons, considering alternatives, using logic, considering consequences of possible actions. Groups try to understand the problem and act with a common purpose in solving it. When understanding is the object, participants correct others' thinking or information errors, and all understand that this is for the common good of dealing with the problem.

Problem-solving answers the question "How." In problem-solving discussions, groups seek answers to conflicts or problems facing them. They discuss facts relevant to stated problems and discuss pros and cons of various solutions. Problem-solving discussions truly benefit from many points of view, so fostering a free exchange of ideas is vital. Groups seek ways to correct bad situations, improve current situations, or resolve conflicts between situations or people through discussion. This allows all to hear what others see as workable solutions to problems, PLUS the probable consequences of solutions.

Problem-Solving Meeting Objective

Since the idea here is to get opinions and ideas from others, the meeting objective must reflect this. Meeting objectives start with an infinitive - to do something: to create ways to solve a problem, to gather ideas on an issue, to brainstorm on the impact of decisions already made - a definite "doing" activity. Don't choose wimpy statements, such as "to be aware of" or "to become familiar with"! Be as specific as possible, since the objective tells participants the content and the level of detail to expect in the meeting.

To practice creating problem-solving meeting objectives, go back to the topic selected at the start, look at the three main points covered, and select an idea to use for your problem-solving meeting. Examples follow.

Problem-solving meeting objective: To create ways to support depressed people in the workforce

Problem-solving meeting objective: To find ways to limit the use of dietary supplements in junior- and senior-high athletes

Problem-solving meeting objective: To create ways to provide lumber without using old-growth timber on public lands

Problem-solving meeting objective: To create ways to encourage responsible use of credit cards

In thinking about problem-solving meeting objectives, consider what question can be asked that will elicit opinions and ideas from attendees. Don't ask them to repeat back information from the first meeting; ask them an open question - one that requires explanation. If the question has multiple answers that will vary according to the perspective taken, then it's probably a good problem-solving meeting objective.

Leader Role in Problem-Solving Discussion

In general, leaders clarify the meeting objective and decide the structure which follows - ways in which discussion proceeds. However, if groups make suggestions on modifying procedures, leaders can certainly accommodate them. Often groups are content just with being asked. Being consulted by leaders about meeting process increases feelings of commitment to the meeting outcome. Following this, the actual problem-solving discussion takes place. Then, in closing the meeting, leaders ask participants to reach conclusions based on their discussion. Leaders should listen for key ideas and points made during the discussion and RESTATE THESE IN SUMMARY FORM. This calls for skill in leaders, but is quite important in terms of everyone's understanding of group conclusions or recommendations. This is a "big picture" of what transpires in a problem-solving meeting.

The Climate

Discussion leaders are responsible for establishing the correct atmosphere for problem solving. A good climate to establish is one in which respect for persons and opinions is evidenced, and one in which groups cooperate in an open, warm way. Sarcasm, even the kind intended to be humorous, is out of place in this atmosphere, as is anger. The atmosphere must be positive! How to ensure this? Establishing ground rules and having a copy posted at each meeting is one part. Introduce people if they don't know one another. Clarify meeting roles. Be positive yourself, rather than complaining about problems. Be prepared for the meeting in terms of supplies and information.

The most important part of presenting meetings is the agenda! At the start of a meeting, review the agenda, making sure the meeting objective is clear and what the expectations are for the meeting. Agendas don't have to be long and formal. Short lists for simple meetings are fine, but if a meeting is fairly complex, the agenda should reflect this. Agendas should be detailed enough that a leader can use them as an outline for conducting the meeting.

  Create a positive climate.

  Use the agenda.

  Lead the discussion.

  Focus on the objective.

  Confront / clear up issues.

  Control disruptive people.

  Call on silent people.

  Summarize key points during discussion.

  Summarize ending conclusions / actions.

  Start and end on time.

The Discussion

The next concern is the downfall of most meetings. With no planning about how a discussion is conducted, most people allow random exchanges of information and commentary, which consume meeting time and result in no accomplishment of purpose. Without clear procedural directions from leaders, attendees may think, "We're going at this all wrong. I want no part of this!" Then they won't accept any decisions made because the procedure seemed flawed, OR they think their input doesn't really matter and stop participating. With either response, meetings and results are not well considered, and meetings-are-a-waste-of-time thoughts begin to work their way into the organizational culture. People who truly are interested in furthering the goals of the organization become frustrated with process and people. It does make a difference how groups study problems through discussion! Here are some steps to include.

First establish a basis for the discussion. Have a review of an information meeting, make a prepared statement, give highlights of a written report, ask a resource person to establish facts or reasons, or do some activity that brings a picture to the minds of the attendees. Clarify the meeting objective! Examples include, "to solve the problem of..." or, "to deliberate the issue of..." or, "to consider the pros and cons of...."

Then, use one of the following development ideas:

If a topic has pros and cons, have two people with known responses speak first; then open the floor to a general discussion.

Ask someone to make a prepared statement (or make one yourself) and set aside a time only for clarification questions. Then follow with a time period for exchanges of agreement or disagreement of participants.

Ask each participant to make an initial response to the meeting objective, and ask for exchanges from all attendees based on what they've heard.

If only one differing viewpoint emerges, role play to bring out more.

Divide the group into subgroups representing differing viewpoints of the problem (customers, employees, management; or teachers, parents, students; or community residents, local administrators, real estate developers). Ask each group to prepare a positional statement and perhaps some questions for others. Then have a general exchange between all people.

Divide the group into subgroups and ask them to produce an agreed-on number of solutions or recommendations which answer the question posed by the meeting objective. Follow this with a summary of points.

When dividing the whole group into subgroups, provide a list of key questions to answer. Sample questions could ask for:

• Relevant facts for this stand
• Key reasons for this stand
• Probable consequences of the group stand
• Essential features affecting the view of this group
• Main causes for the problem from the standpoint of this group
• Actions which would eliminate the problem
• Other problems which might occur if particular actions were taken

Depending on your topic, it is possible to inject a bit of humor in subgroups and their vantage points. If the meeting objective is to discuss problems with a cafeteria in an organization, the subgroup representing the chef and the kitchen staff could wear chef's hats or white coats. Food suppliers for the kitchen could wear delivery hats, while supervisors could wear sheriff's posse hats or white ten-gallon hats (to represent the "good guys"). Dressing the part helps establish connection to the role or vantage point being expressed and adds to the esprit de corps of the groups. Props can also help make a point: having attendees wear earplugs during a discussion of ways to reduce workplace noise is quite effective.

Discussion Formats

Discussion formats used most often in group meetings are: ordinary group technique, brainstorming, and nominal group technique.

ORDINARY GROUP format is most common. It is an effective way to get a full discussion of the issues, since attendees pay attention to the discussion flow and have easy access to "the floor." Issues get full consideration because of the interactional nature of this meeting process. In ordinary group format, the leader chooses a structure for the meeting and leads the whole group to reach consensus. Without firm leadership, however, things can go wrong: discussion can drag on beyond utility, vocal people can dominate the discussion, members can be swayed by social pressure to agree with the majority opinion rather than sticking up for a minority one. As a result, fewer alternatives may be developed, but in a skillfully led meeting, all sides of the picture are represented, participants feel "heard," and the summary of meeting outcomes truly represents the thoughts and feelings of the group. Success of ordinary group format is highly dependent on the leader's skill and ability to get everyone to participate harmoniously.

BRAINSTORMING is a format which encourages the generation of lots of ideas, some of which may be useful. Rules for this format are:

• Many ideas should be encouraged.
• Diverse ideas should be encouraged ("wild, crazy" ideas are OK).
• "Piggybacking" on each other's ideas should be encouraged.
• No ideas may be critiqued or criticized.

Participants enjoy brainstorming in small groups (three to five people), but it can also be done in a larger group with a leader (six to ten people). People appreciate being asked for viewpoints and feel a sense of accomplishment in contributing. Brainstorming sometimes doesn't produce a large number of ideas in practice, because people self-censor their ideas or fear others will reject them and so don't offer them in the first place. However, this social pressure to conform to majority opinion occurs far less in small groups than in large ones, such as the ones used in ordinary group format. Especially if groups are cohesive, fledgling ideas emerge and are nourished in this format. Groups that work together over time learn the strengths of each member and encourage better idea creation with good nurturing.

It's important here to write down everything anyone says and not comment on the merits of any suggestion. (No killer phrases, like "That's not going to work," or "People will never do that.") It's also important not to think of implementation of ideas, a how-would-our-organization-do-this approach. The sole purpose of brainstorming is to hatch ideas, never mind how popular or doable these may seem initially. Frequently, wild ideas turn out to offer more to the solution than people originally think. Another caveat in brainstorming (and the other formats as well) is not to stop thinking when a good idea emerges. Linear-thinking persons can usually create one or two good ideas, but they have a tendency to think "problem solved!" after this, content with one or two ideas. This is NOT brainstorming in its finest form!

NOMINAL GROUP TECHNIQUE, developed by Andre Delbecq at University of Wisconsin, is a stylized form of brainstorming. Four stages include:

• Statement of the problem followed by participants individually writing down alternative solutions (semi-adhesive notes are good for this);
• Participants take turns reporting their ideas while a recorder writes them down or the adhesive notes are grouped according to ideas. This can be done singly or in small groups or in a large group;
• A brief discussion clears up ambiguities or misunderstandings;
• Participants are asked to select the best ideas represented. This can be done several ways: participants can be asked to distribute, say, 10 points between their choices, or they could be asked to vote for three choices. If no clear outcome prevails, more discussion is held until consensus emerges.

A variant of this is the gallery technique. Individuals' written ideas are copied on a chalkboard or large sheets of paper and participants are given stars or stickers with which to select the best ideas. In essence, they circulate among the ideas rather than the ideas circulating among people (although this happens anyway). Persons selected as discussants in one location could interpret ideas for strolling attendees and perhaps create a summary of thoughts or suggestions as a part of the meeting process. In this version, people enjoy circling the meeting room when several "idea locations" are established, engaging in one-on-one discussions or listening to others weighing pros and cons. Leaders should ensure that the ideas are discussed at some point, either just after they are written individually or after they appear on the large lists, so that all understand each suggestion or idea. Selecting the best ideas for further consideration can be done by counting the number of stars or stickers, or having discussants present an overview of comments heard from the strolling participants. In nominal group discussions, people produce a large number of good ideas.

Discussion Focus

Keeping attendees focused on meeting objectives is a major task for leaders. To do this, leaders need practice in contributing to discussions themselves, summarizing the contributions of others, and focusing on meeting outcomes.

Leader contributions can make or break meetings! Leaders must decide before-hand how to contribute to a discussion without dominating it. After all, problem-solving meetings are called to gather group input, not to dispense views held by leaders only. Ask yourself whether you'll be the authoritative resource for the group. Who will track comparisons and explanations? Who will serve as group memory? Who will summarize group thinking on issues? If the answer to these questions is you, then you might well be dominating a meeting, not conducting it. Look at this scenario.

Meeting Objective: To Discuss Implementing the New Call Schedule Trent, a sales supervisor for a AT&T opened a department meeting for employees making sales calls for the company. For the first five minutes Trent gave performance statistics for the preceding week and asked for questions. No one spoke. Trent then launched the topic of the meeting, which was to examine a new way to schedule sales calls, an idea advanced by a vice president of sales. Trent thought a problem-solving meeting would give employees a chance to troubleshoot potential glitches and to react to the new procedure. Trent started, "You all received the memo from our vice president about the new calling schedule. This is going to change the way we do business. I have some ideas on how we can work into this new system, but I'd like to get your ideas. Anyone care to contribute?" No one spoke. "OK, here's what I think we should do...," and Trent outlined his plan. No discussion ensued after that, so Trent adjourned the meeting. When Trent's boss asked how the meeting went, Trent said, "My people never have any ideas at meetings. I give them a chance, but I end up doing most of the talking. They just don't care!"

What is Trent doing wrong? The idea of having this meeting is good, the meeting objective is concisely stated, and attendees had a memo as preparation. Trent failed to plan and execute a discussion procedure. One of the discussion development ideas given earlier in this chapter would have worked. For example, Trent could have asked each employee to make an initial response and then ask for exchanges of information and ideas. He could have divided the whole group into sub-groups and asked for five or ten suggestions for implementing the new schedule. He could have asked specific questions concerning key implementation problems, causes for these problems, and actions that would eliminate these problems. He could have used any of the three discussion formats: ordinary group, brainstorming, or nominal group. Although Trent's purpose was to conduct a problem-solving meeting, he actually had an information-giving meeting.

Confronting Issues

One way to ensure participation from participants is to assign them roles in the meeting itself. Giving people specific things to do during a discussion maximizes their involvement and improves the quality of the discussion. Having an attendee present a position paper, asking someone to be the first speaker after your introduction, asking someone to serve as resource person, assigning the responsibility for summarizing periodically and/or recapitulating discussion results at the end, asking others to keep track of time spent, to record meeting transactions, and to greet/seat people as they arrive are all ways to improve discussion structure.

The Meeting Roles chapter delineated four activity roles: Leader, Facilitator, Recorder, and Participant. In leading problem-solving meetings, use at least a Facilitator and Recorder.

Role of the Recorder

Keep a visual record of the meeting without paraphrasing what people actually say.

Use key words and phrases, not complete sentences.

Check with leader to ensure accuracy; don't write until Leader states what to write.

Ask for help if note-keeping slows meeting progress.

Record overhead or whiteboard content; construct meeting minutes.

A Facilitator's sole purpose is to ensure a smoothly run meeting. Facilitators can do the "heavy lifting" during a meeting. Leaders can ask them to do whatever needs doing, but their customary roles revolve around those in the list below. Good Facilitators are observant, noticing the silents or shys in groups and asking for their opinions or participation. Facilitators should have the moxie to tell authority figures if they are breaking ground rules and when they have a turn in speaking. Among peer groups, Facilitators will call for quiet in a meeting, block dominators from affecting group members, gain cooperation from reluctant participants, and shut down silly behavior. In problem-solving meetings, Facilitators will listen in on group discussions to make sure they are on track with the meeting objective. They can also carry a portable microphone to speakers in the meeting. They can conduct some steps in the meeting if the Leader asks. For example, they can coordinate participation in the gallery technique by keeping people moving, ensuring that all suggestions are included, and asking people to speak up if their voices are too soft for all to hear. Facilitators may be asked their opinions, but since they are supposed to be unbiased, good ones will decline answering.

A caveat here is a caution against acting like a militant constituent when facilitating meetings. None of the foregoing activities needs to be done in an unpleasant or unnecessarily abrupt manner. Smile and use a pleasant voice. Be firm, fair, and consistent in dealing with people.

Role of the Facilitator

Manages the meeting process so that the Leader is free to manage meeting content;

Listens for discussion "drift"; refocuses on meeting purpose;

Deals with disruptive and inappropriate behavior;

Mediates conflicting opinions; does NOT voice own opinions;

Suggests other approaches when one isn't working;

Monitors time spent on agenda items;

Takes directions from Leader

Now, what does a Leader actually do when it comes to contributing to discussions, summarizing the contributions of others, and focusing on meeting outcomes? First, please know that a Leader can't just sit back and let whatever happens happen. The Leader is conducting an ensemble of participants by interacting and being attentive and prepared to participate.

When meeting attendees ask for information or an opinion, Leaders should contribute. The art comes in not contributing too much or too often. The center of attention should be the participants themselves and the intellectual task which lies before them.

Leaders can lend their expertise by

Providing needed information, if an essential point is being left out.

Correcting critical errors that others don't correct.

Responding to requests.

Offering a new way to view a problem under discussion.

Especially when confronting and clearing up issues, Leaders should offer mini-summaries of the discussion from time to time (or designate someone to do this). After several people have spoken about a problem segment, condense what has been said or indicated by body language or tone of voice. Reflect the emotions described and the content. This has the effect of crystallizing the thought processes, sometimes giving participants common terminology which they can use to further the discussion. To do this:

clarify points made by people;

reflect the impact of their remarks;

offer alternative meanings for speakers' comments.

In doing this, try to find merit in others' ideas, make sure you understand others' main points, and check your understanding by stating their views back to them without implying criticism. Don't interject your own ideas until you have fully understood what others have said.

In summarizing the contributions of others, Leaders must be good listeners and be skilled in helping people express themselves. One way to do both is to ask questions. Here are some questioning techniques:

Testing the water to discover the group's feelings:

"What would your reaction be if we went to this new system?"

Getting participation from the group:

"We've heard from Kent and Kristen. What do the rest of you think?"

Getting specific facts:

"What were our final sales figures last month? Does anyone have this?"

Getting the reluctant attendee to talk:

"John, you've been here for ten years. What do you think of these ideas?"

Clarifying / elaborating on someone's point:

"Can you give more information on that issue?" or, "Are you saying...."

Focusing meeting outcomes is another task of Leaders in confronting and clearing up issues. Sometimes discussion drifts so gradually, it's hard to recognize. However, a Leader must not only recognize it, but put it back on its intended course or direct it on another path that seems desirable. The Facilitator can assist in detecting meeting drift also. Both must keep in mind the meeting objective and the point of the discussion.

Leaders can connect previous statements or summaries with current ones to direct the meeting toward a specific focus. It's important that Leaders give reasons for refocusing on the original objective or emphasizing a different part of the meeting purpose. This makes logical sense to participants and keeps everyone posted on current deliberations. If a group is "spinning its wheels," repeating the same ideas without advancing the discussion, Leaders can make a negative statement or exclude something that is not adding to the discussion. "We won't consider that aspect of the problem now, but we do have time to talk more about...." In this way, Leaders make spur-of-the-moment decisions based on an overall plan for the meeting and the needs of the attendees.

Encourage lots of ideas and consider differences of opinion as creative opportunities. When you disagree or have another opinion, state it, but once you've made your point, don't harp on it. Don't get vested in your own position, but don't support ideas you can't live with, either. Above all, don't get overly emotional; maintain a sense of calm and reason, even when exchanges become heated.

In guiding meeting focus, Leaders should:

keep the discussion going in planned directions, always trying to make progress in discussion, rather than rehashing issues

set limits on what can be discussed

connect the needs of participants to the overall discussion plan

Questions to ask in focusing / refocusing are:

"We've heard all the cons of the new system. What are some pros?"

"Let's stop discussing this one aspect and consider instead how this new system will affect quality."

"What would happen if...?"

"We've discussed this issue pretty thoroughly. Are you ready to move on to issues we haven't talked about yet?"

Leaders will ...

Provide needed information; correct errors

Offer new ways to view problems

Offer mini-summaries from time to time

Clarify points and reflect the impact of remarks

Restate views of others to check understanding

Find merit in others' ideas

Ask questions to help others express thoughts

Focus on meeting objectives / points of discussion

Exclude ideas that do not add to discussion

Make progress in discussions

State your viewpoints and listen to others'

Remain calm and reasonable in exchanges

Summarize group conclusions; seek agreement

Deterrmine further actions / implementation

Behaviors To Limit

The next items in THE RULES have been discussed in previous sections. The negative behaviors that disrupt meetings are familiar and must be dealt with when they occur in meetings. Some of these behaviors are:

attacking people and their ideas

competing for group attention with boasting

dominating "air time"

horsing around or clowning

making irrelevant comments

speaking sarcastically

going off on tangents

withdrawing by acting indifferent

Some of these behaviors can be checked by establishing and enforcing ground rules. Ground rules establish ahead of time what is expected of attendees. If people tend to talk among themselves a lot at meetings, make a ground rule about speaking only when called on by the Leader. If people tend to go on and on and on once they start speaking, limit each speaker to one minute at a time and have the Facilitator keep track of time and silence speakers once the time limit is met. Some people tell "war stories" or recite "pity party" tales ("bitch" sessions) when they meet, so make a ground rule that no problems are brought up for discussion without presenting solutions. Eliminate personal agenda discussions; these occur when a person or persons have a singular viewpoint and keep expressing it over and over in different ways. Once they've been heard, keeping refocusing on the meeting objective itself and stop calling on these people unless they offer new insights. Also, rule out "they" statements in attributing blame. Finally, insist on no killer phrases, belittling remarks, and abrupt subject shifts. Control your meeting through ground rules. A sample follows.

Arrive and start on time.

Be there and be prepared to meet.

Be responsible for following these ground rules.

Stick to the agenda.

Listen to all people respectfully and respond thoughtfully.

No interruptions, side conversations, killer phrases, etc.

No social loafing or silent attendees.

Use appropriate humor selectively.

Work for consensus in making major decisions.

Accept responsibility for meeting roles and duties.

Summarizing the Discussion

Finally, THE RULES call for ending the meeting appropriately. If you have achieved the goals of the meeting or if people run out of energy or interest or if you run out of time, close the meeting. It's better, however, to have your Facilitator track time well enough that you have sufficient time to close the meeting in an unhurried fashion.

Leave time in the agenda for the end phase. A discussion without an appropriate end leaves participants with uncertainty about what they accomplished, plus a feeling of dissatisfaction. Also called closure, ending a meeting or closing discussion calls for a recapitulation of the key points of the discussion. The Recorder can do this, provided the Leader has asked periodically for recording of mini-summaries. Leaders can also ask participants to draw conclusions, and the Leader can summarize as well.

In summarizing, define areas of agreement and disagreement between people or groups and synthesize the major ideas advanced into five alternatives you can take into your next meeting, decision-making.

Synthesizing means looking at everyone's suggestions and deciding which ones represent the major ideas of the participants. If there is a minority opinion, decide how this can be expressed. If there is general disagreement about ideas advanced, consider how to phrase the major outcomes so that the diverging ideas or opinions are clearly included. This is especially important when differing viewpoints from the factions involved in the problem have been considered. For example, customers, employees, and management may have very different ideas about solving a problem common to all. The summary demands that Leaders think on their feet!

In closing a discussion, Leaders should convey a sense of firmness so that attendees know this is the final overview, not a bid to open up more discussion. If interaction occurs at this stage, people lose their focus because they are hearing that the meeting is over. They've closed their mental notebooks and are thinking of their jobs, or what they're having for dinner, or where the nearest bathroom is; they don't want to reopen the discussion.

Another tip is to make the closing quick. Don't take this time to fill the group in on personal perspectives, and so on. Be brief in opening AND closing. A final act can be to ask the participants where they want to go from here - suggested activities for the future, or a to-do statement. Complimenting the group for providing excellent points for discussion is in order. Then, true to your word, close the meeting.

Problem-Solving Meeting Example: Neighborhood Park at Risk

It's springtime, and a neighborhood park in a Midwestern city of 50,000 is having problems. The Parks Superintendent, Al Smith, has informed Park Board members about acts of vandalism: posts and railings are being ripped from bridges, graffiti is being painted on benches, and off-road bikes are ridden over grassy banks, making trails and causing erosion. Local police caught four juveniles shooting paint balls at hikers at the park and discovered three other youths rappelling from the Hundred Foot Bridge over Crow Creek. (Rappelling had been heavily discouraged after a youngster fell, injuring himself seriously two years ago.) Finally, residents of a nearby subdivision are depositing tree limbs and grass clippings near the park entrance, and realtors are using the entrance way to post "FOR SALE" signs.

Al Smith also pointed out a project offer made by a Boy Scout earning his Eagle Scout badge. Andrew Pike asked the Board if he could landscape a parking lot and entryway to a new trail in the park and presented a plan for flowers, plants, and trees.

A problem-solving session is called for! First, consider what the meeting objective should be. Is it to deal with each individual problem or would an overall approach work better? Think about these things: what is the problem, who is responsible for dealing with the problem, what is causing the problem, what actions would eliminate the problem, and what other problems may occur if particular actions are taken. A good meeting objective might read: to create a list of solutions for our neighborhood park problems. Then create an agenda for this problem-solving meeting.

The minutes for the meeting reflected the action discussed. The issue discussion yielded the result that the problem was caused by young people in the park, especially at night, a lack of supervisory "presence," and flagging community support for the park. The Town Board accepted responsibility for pursuing solutions. The brainstorming produced these:

After the brainstorming portion of the meeting, Frank Corvin noted that some solutions were positive and some were negative. He suggested that unrealistic solutions, such as putting an electric charge on bridge rails be eliminated and that solutions which were positive and involved community effort to accomplish be used in the final list of solutions. The final list:

Adopt-a-spot program for bridge, trails, and benches

Form a citizens' watch program with volunteers from all age groups

Increase lighting in park

Designate bike trails and construct barriers for bikes on eroded areas

Sponsor bench-painting contest with local artists or school children

Establish a park curfew / closing time; police patrol at night

Police patrol outside park perimeter for paint ball shooters

Community service for juvenile offenders - park maintenance

Realtors sponsor vests to identify volunteers on duty

Enact ordinance to make bridge rappelling illegal

Encourage service organizations (Lions, Kiwanas, church groups) to sponsor more youth activities in the community

Yard waste pick up in subdivision

During the discussion of impact of these solutions, the participants voiced their satisfaction with a positive approach to problems. Since budget concerns were an issue, the Board felt effective, but not costly solutions could be found. They discussed encouraging more Boy Scout projects, similar to Andrew Pike's. They realized that involving the community would require their coordinating efforts and more meetings at Town Hall, but they felt they could do that. Finally, they agreed to get information on implementation and meet again to decide which ideas to implement first.

Problem-Solving Meeting Practice: Saving Adolescents

Bad grades, defiant attitudes, odd clothes, withdrawal from school activities, little communication with parents - typical teen behavior or warning signs? After a nine-year study, The Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development reported that the nation is neglecting young adolescents to the extent that half of our 19 million+ population may not be able to lead productive lives!

The report, Great Transitions , focused on 10- to 14-year-olds which a 27-member panel of scientists, scholars, and others described as being most in need of guidance and support at a time when parents and society find dealing with them perplexing. Children entering adolescence try to become more independent through new behavior and activities just when parental involvement in school and their influence in young lives decrease. Three-fourths of parents surveyed stated high and medium involvement with their nine-year-olds, while more than half make this claim with 14-year-olds.

Recommendations of the report? Parents need to maintain their involvement with young teens with the help of their employers in creating time to do this. Youth groups need to reach out to adolescents. Schools could better meet the developing needs of this age group, and health professionals should be better attuned in order to treat them. Finally, the media needs to tone down violence, sex, and drug use by emphasizing the downside of these, rather than glamourizing them.

Add to this a contribution from Joseph Califano, Director of the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse, that details which teens are more or less likely to use drugs.

Your assignment: Create a meeting agenda, complete with objective, for a problem-solving discussion of these issues. Choose a discussion format, and plan a meeting which should produce a consensus of five specific suggestions for your community. Practice conducting this meeting with a group of friends or persons interested in this topic.

Westside Toastmasters on Meetup

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Senior Quantitative Researcher, People Insights

Principal Writer

How to manage meetings like an expert facilitator

A skilled meeting facilitator can get a group to discuss, debate, and, above all,  decide  a lot of stuff in not-a-lot of time. Trouble is, most teams don’t have dedicated program managers or agile coaches to step in and fill that role. So as the modern workplace becomes ever-more collaborative, it’s increasingly important for all team members to know how to run effective meetings .

I’ve been facilitating meetings for years, and I’ve had to grabble with quite a few facilitation questions. What if the pace is too fast, or too slow? Is the agenda pitched at the right level? How will the vibe in the room change if I “double-click” on an uncomfortable truth that surfaces? Will I be able to get the inevitable strong personality in the room to button up and listen to their peers? Sheesh. So many x-factors to keep track of!

The good news is that meeting facilitation is simply a skill you have to practice. To help build your chops and conquer your fears, here are some pointers and pro tips that will help you manage your next meeting with confidence.

Bookmark this post so you can review it quickly the next time you’re about to facilitate a meeting.

1. Understand your role as meeting facilitator

Hint: It’s not about you

Me, I’m a classic “talker”. So standing in front of a group to facilitate a meeting isn’t much of a stretch. (In fact, when I was learning how to manage meetings, the hardest part was getting myself to shut up so the rest of the group could speak.)

Being an effective meeting facilitator while simultaneously being a meeting participant is near impossible – you can’t be emcee and performer at the same time. Embrace the facilitator’s role of managing time, encouraging participation, and asking juicy questions. Let the other people in the group be the stars of the show.

2. Create an interactive agenda

Structure your agenda such that there are opportunities for different people to lead parts of the discussion. This lets you sink into the background, observe the group, and focus on driving the group toward that outcome or decision.

As meeting facilitator, it’s a best practice to send a meeting agenda out to all participants before the meeting so they can come prepared. Many folks here at Atlassian will simply pop the agenda into the meeting’s calendar invite.

3. Establish your meeting’s purpose

Every meeting you facilitate needs to have a clear endpoint: an objective to achieve, or a decision to make. Make sure your agenda covers this so participants know why they’re there, and (importantly) what it would take to finish the meeting early.

It’s worth reiterating the objective at the start of the meeting, too. Heck, you could even write it on the whiteboard to serve as guardrails for the discussion – especially if you’re likely to have detractors in the room. If the conversation heads down a rabbit hole or veers off-course, you can get the group back on track by reminding them of the meeting’s purpose.

4. Close your laptop and open your ears

People are far more engaged in discussions when they’re not firing off an email or checking Facebook. So take a hardline approach and ask for all laptops, tablets, and phones to be turned off. The only exception is the meeting’s scribe, who gets a pass to use their device for taking meeting minutes . Don’t start the meeting until everyone is tuned in and ready to contribute.

A laptops-closed/phones-off policy is critical for sessions that revolve around active listening and flat-out, transparent sharing. Can you imagine someone working up the courage to share a dissenting opinion while their teammates pecked away on email? Not so much. For team  retrospectives  and similar  types of meetings , it’s best if the facilitator takes notes so all participants are fully engaged in the discussion.

If someone insists they need to be working on something else during the meeting, then give them permission to leave the room and go do it. They’ll have an easier time of it and produce better work without the distraction of people talking around them anyway.

5. Make space for everyone to contribute

Sometimes there’s a “celebrity” in the room: a strong personality with strong opinions who is highly respected by other people in the group. They can dominate the discussion (usually without intending to), or even disrupt it by advancing their own agenda.

Give them a pen, and ask them to take charge of capturing ideas on the whiteboard. Not only does this intrinsically task them with listening (i.e., creating space for others to speak), you also avoid the scenario where they sit in the back of the room trashing ideas that diverge from their own. No hecklers, please.

If they’re a strong detractor or feel particularly strongly about the session, you’ll be glad you shared the agenda and purpose in advance and gathered their input before the meeting. Help them walk in ready to make a constructive contribution.

6. Facilitate conversation through questions

Many meetings are essentially problem-solving workshops ( 5 Whys , Experience Canvas , Premortem , Empathy Mapping … If you’ve ever checked out the Atlassian Team Playbook , these are probably familiar!). As the meeting facilitator, it’s not your job to have all the answers. It  is  your job, however, to lead the group to answers. That means posing the right questions at the right time. When done well, pointed questions will challenge assumptions that may be preventing the group from getting to that “ah-ha!” moment.

Be the first to know about new plays.

Even if you think you have The Answer™, resist the temptation to offer it up. Instead, ask leading questions that guide the group to that answer (it’s more meaningful if they arrive at that conclusion themselves). Here are a few of my favorites that you can customise:

• Can you expand on that point?
• Is this conversation moving us in the direction we want?
• Your last point intrigues me, but it feels counterintuitive – in what context could you see that applying?
• How would you summarise that?
• What would that look like?
• How does that make you feel?
• How would you measure success in that instance?

Of course, asking the right questions requires you to bust out your active listening skills. Give the group space to burn through the ideas that come quickly, and pay attention to what they’re saying so you know which questions can get them to think deeper. But generally stay out of the discussion until it stalls out or starts going in circles.

7. Read the room

Tune into the energy of the room and look for visual cues like body language. Are people fidgeting in frustration? Do looks of discontent or disagreement abound? These are signs you need to intervene. It’s ok to gauge sentiment in the room by simply asking people straight-up: Is this resonating? Do we feel comfortable with the progress we’re making?

Bringing focus to the group’s emotional state helps you understand whether they’re engaged or disconnected. And if the group is disconnected, it’s time for you to jump in and lead them down an alternate path.

Pay especially close attention in meetings that tend to be highly emotional like team health checks , goal-setting workshops , and root-cause analysis sessions

Getting your energetic radar calibrated will take time, and you’ll get it wrong once or twice. Being mindful and observant are the first steps.

8. Create a “parking lot” for good ideas that distract

If an idea pops up that is valuable, but off-point, offer to create a “parking lot” and jot it down (usually on the whiteboard or in the meeting notes) so you can come back to it later. Because right now is all about nailing your objective for this meeting.

Knowing their thoughts aren’t lost forever to the aether helps people return their focus to the outcome you’re striving for.

9. Know your audience

If you’re facilitating a problem-solving meeting or a  retrospective , be on high alert for people who need to be drawn into the discussion. Consider the personality types amongst your attendees, and try to get everyone to contribute to the discussion evenly (more or less). The quiet people in the group might not be shy, per se. In fact, they might have a lot to say, if given the opportunity. It’s your job as the facilitator to carve out space for them to speak.

A veteran facilitator might even observe people as they enter the room, mentally noting who they sit next to or who they avoid. It’s ok to use your judgment and re-arrange chairs (or who sits where) if that’ll help bring out the best in everyone.

Also, understand who has the final say on whatever decisions you’re making, and use them as a tie-breaker if the group can’t reach a consensus. That person can also come in handy when deciding who owns follow-up items.

8. Get moving to keep the energy up

Stand up, congregate around the whiteboard, and bring some dynamic energy to the room. This isn’t the UN General Assembly, after all. (Unless you actually work at the UN. In which case, good on ya.)

One dead-simple facilitation hack I like is having people write their thoughts on sticky notes, then walk up to the front of the room and post them a whiteboard or butcher’s paper. Once everyone is done posting up ideas, take turns coming up front to present those ideas to the group. Works great in problem-solving or brainstorming-flavored meetings like mindmapping  and  premortems .

Incidentally, when paired with coffee, a whiteboard is easily the most innovative tool in the knowledge worker’s tool kit. Seriously!

Running meetings and workshops will be clunky at first, and you’ll make some mistakes. That’s ok! You don’t have to be an ace facilitator to save your team weeks’ worth of time spinning their wheels.

Your skills will improve with practice. So you know what’s next, right? Get out there and start practicing! Browse the brainstorming and problem-solving meeting ideas in the Atlassian Team Playbook – our free, no-BS guide to working better together – and schedule a session with your team.

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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.

Get Advice From The Verywell Mind Podcast

Hosted by therapist Amy Morin, LCSW, this episode of The Verywell Mind Podcast shares how you can stop dwelling in a negative mindset.

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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."

The 16 Types of Business Meetings (and Why They Matter)

There is SO MUCH advice out there about how to run meetings, and most of it is just useless.

It’s not that the advice is wrong, per se. It’s just not specific enough.

• Introduction
• Background: The thinking behind the taxonomy
• Cadence Meetings
• Catalyst Meetings
• Meetings to Evaluate and Influence
• Table: Summary of Types
• Example: How Different Types of Meetings Work Together

For example, it’s not wrong to tell people they need an agenda with clear outcomes listed for every topic. It just doesn’t apply to a lot of situations. A detailed agenda for the one-on-one with my boss? For the sales demo? For our morning huddle? Yeah, I don’t think so. For the board meeting or the requirements analysis meeting? Absolutely.

Sometimes an organization has a pervasive problem with meetings. People complain that there are too many meetings, nothing gets done, it’s wasted time, it’s all power and politics instead of productivity—and they start to look for solutions. They find lots of generic advice, and they find lots of this kind of drivel:

Crushing morale, killing productivity – why do offices put up with meetings? There’s no proof that organisations benefit from the endless cycle of these charades, but they can’t stop it. We’re addicted. by Simon Jenkins for the Guardian September 2017

This article is wildly popular. Over 1000 people who hate having their time wasted in meetings paradoxically had extra time they could spend commenting here to express their agreement and outrage.

Mr. Jenkins has clearly struck a nerve. It’s the kind of pandering that drives clicks and sells ads, which makes that a job well done for the Guardian. But it’s also nonsense.

There’s no proof that organizations benefit from meetings? You can only say something like that when you’re speaking too generally for anyone to know what you’re talking about. Because otherwise – did you hear that, sales teams? There’s no proof those client meetings help your company. Go ahead and cancel them! Hospital workers, stop wasting your time in those shift-change meetings! You should know what to do without talking to each other so much – go heal people already! Boards? Board meetings are for losers. Just use chat and email to manage all your governance duties.

When you get specific about the kind of meeting you’re talking about, the generic “meetings waste time” or “you must have 5 people or less” statements become ridiculous, and people who complain about meetings in general sound like childish whingers.

A meeting is not a meeting.

Want to skip the background information?  Jump ahead to the taxonomy.

This doesn’t mean that meetings in general work great and that there’s no problem to solve here. It just means that there isn’t a singular meeting problem that has a simple meeting solution .

This is a challenge for us!

At Lucid, we work to help our clients get meaningful business results from their meetings, and to do this, we have to get specific. The coaching we provide for our committee clients is not the same advice we give to leadership teams .

Mr. Jenkins correctly points out that when you invite 20 people to a meeting designed for 5, it doesn’t work anymore. Well, duh. His conclusion is that meetings don’t work. A more useful conclusion is that if you’re going to invite 20 people, you should run a meeting designed to work for 20 people. That’s entirely doable, but it’s also a very different meeting.

In brief: the solution to a meeting problem depends on the kind of meeting.

Which raises the question: what are the different kinds of meetings? If it isn’t useful to provide guidelines for all meetings, is it at least possible to establish useful guidelines for a certain type of meeting? Or do we really need to look at each and every single meeting as if it was totally unique and special?

This question has driven much of our work over the past 10 years.

We found that there is a core structure underlying all successful meetings , acting as a kind of skeleton. Every meeting needs bones, but after that, the kind of animal you get on top of those bones can vary wildly. A fish is not a bird is not a kangaroo, despite the fact that they all have a head and a tail.

We found that meetings work together , and that looking at individual meetings in isolation leads to misunderstandings. It’s like studying a single bee; the drone’s dance doesn’t make a lot of sense unless you know that there are other bees watching. Meetings are designed to beget action that is evaluated and built upon in subsequent meetings, and the sequence and cadence at which these meetings occur drives the momentum of that action. Looking only at a single meeting means you miss the clues that lead to the honey.

We work with facilitators and experts to design agendas and guidebooks for running specific meetings . We’ve seen where the structures look the same, and where they differ. There are lots of specific ways to run a status meeting, but even though there’s a lot of variety between them, every status meeting still looks way more like every other status meeting than it does like any strategic planning session. Mammals are more like other mammals than any of them are like an insect.

And of course we work with clients and hear concerns about all those things that the experts don’t talk about, like how to lead a decent meeting when the group thinks meetings aren’t cool, or how to prepare in advance when your goal is to “wow” everyone during the meeting. We know people worry about how to walk those fine lines between inclusiveness and efficiency, and between appropriate framing and facilitation on the one hand, and manipulation on the other. We hear how they experience specific meetings in the context of getting real work done, and can see how priorities shift between getting the content right and getting people connected.

A Taxonomy for Meetings

From all of this, we’ve developed a taxonomy for meetings that we use to help answer these questions:

• Assessing Meeting Performance Maturity : Which kind of meetings does an organization run, and which ones does it need to know how to run well? How well does it run those meetings?
• Meeting Design : If I need to design a new meeting, is there a core pattern I can build on? What factors of the design have the greatest impact on success for this kind of meeting?
• Meeting Problem Diagnoses: If there is a problem with a meeting, are there common requirements for that kind of meeting that I can check first? Are there things going on in that meeting that might work in other meetings, but are incompatible with success in this one?
• B.S. Filter: Is the advice I’m hearing or reading relevant to the success of this meeting, or is it meant for another sort? Or worse, is it generic B.S.?

Background Work: Forming the Hypothesis

We’re not the first to propose a meeting taxonomy. If you search for “types of meetings” and if you read any books on meetings, you’ll find many ways to break down meetings by type. Most lists include between 4 and 6 different types; things like Issue Resolution meetings and Decision Making meetings.

To build our taxonomy, we started with a set of 6 types and a list of all the different kinds of meetings we could think of, then tried to match them up.

This was frustrating. No matter which list we started with, within a few minutes we always found an example that didn’t fit.

For example, Google highlights this list of the 6 Types of Meetings by MeetingSift as the definitive list. It’s very similar to many of the other lists out there.

• Status Update Meetings
• Information Sharing Meetings
• Decision Making Meetings
• Problem Solving Meetings
• Innovation Meetings
• Team Building Meetings

So – you tell me. Which one of those does the board meeting fit into? How about the project retrospective? The answer is that meetings like the ones that you might actually find on your calendar can fit into several of these types.

Whenever we found a meeting that didn’t fit, we set it aside and asked “why?” What is it about that meeting which meant it should be treated differently than these others?

Because we are focused on driving tangible business results, we found we needed to get more specific. In the end, we found that there were three major factors that impact how to approach a meeting.

• The Meeting Intention
• The Meeting Format

The Expected Participation Profile

Our current taxonomy uses these factors to describe 16 distinct meeting types, and gives a nod to a significant 17th that falls outside of our scope.

The Differentiators: Intention, Format and Participation Profile

Before we dive into the specific types, let’s take a look at the factors that make them distinct in more detail.

Meeting Intention

The intention behind a meeting is most often expressed as the meeting’s purpose and desired outcomes. In other words, why do people run this kind of meeting? What is it meant to create?

There are two major outcomes for any meeting: a human connection and a work product. We found that many attempts to categorize meetings dealt only with the work product, which often led to bad advice.

For example, the intention of a decision making meeting is:

• A decision (the work product) and
• Commitment to that decision from the people in the room (a human connection outcome)

It is very easy to run a decision making meeting that achieves 1 (a decision) but fails to achieve 2 (commitment), and therefore will fail to deliver the expected business result. If you have ever been in a meeting where you’re discussing a decision you thought had already been made, you know this to be true.

Our taxonomy attempts to look at both kinds of outcomes when describing the meeting intention.

When we first started looking at meeting format, we used a standard breakdown of “formal” and “informal” to help distinguish between the board meetings and the team meetings, but we abandoned that pretty quickly because it didn’t hold up in practice.

In practice, we found that while boards have rules that they must follow by law, and they do, this didn’t necessarily mean that the majority of the meeting followed any very strict structure. Many board meetings actually include lots of free-form conversation, which is then briefly formalized to address the legal requirements.

By contrast, we would have considered an Agile team’s daily stand-up meeting as an informal meeting. Heck, we run those and I don’t always wear shoes. But despite this casual, social informality, the daily stand-up runs according to a very clear set of rules. Every update includes just three things, each one is no longer than 2 minutes, and we never ever ever problem solve during the meeting.

It turns out that formal and informal told us more about a participant’s perception of social anxiety in a meeting than it did about the type or format of a meeting. I experience stand-ups and interviews as informal, largely because I’m in charge and am confident of my role in these meetings. I doubt everyone I interview considers it an informal chat, though, and I imagine our stand-up may feel pretty uptight to someone who wasn’t used to it.

Instead of formal and informal, we found that the strength of the governing rituals and rules had a clearer impact on the meeting’s success. By this measure, the daily stand-up is highly ritualistic, board meetings and brainstorming sessions abide by governing rules but not rigidly so, and initial sales calls and team meetings have very few prescribed boundaries.

This still didn’t quite explain all the variation we saw in meeting format, however. When we looked at the project status update meeting, we realized it shared some characteristics with the board meeting, but these project meetings aren’t governed by rules and laws in the same way. And while the intention for project updates is always the same—to share information about project work status and manage emerging change—there’s a ton of variation in how people run project status updates. Some teams are very formal and rigid, while others are nearly structure free. This means our “governing rituals” criteria didn’t work here.

The format characteristic all project status update meetings do share, and that you’ll also see with board meetings, is a dislike of surprises. No project manager wants to show up to the weekly update and get surprised by how far off track the team is, or how they’ve decided to take the project in some new direction. Board members hate this too. For these meetings, surprises are bad bad bad!

Surprises are bad for project updates, but other meetings are held expressly for the purpose of finding something new. The innovation meeting, the get-to-know you meeting, the problem solving meeting all hope for serendipity. Going into those meetings, people don’t know what they’ll get, but they try to run the meeting to maximize their chances of something great showing up by the time they’re done.

So, when categorizing meetings based on the meeting format, we looked at both:

• The strength of governing rules or rituals
• The role of serendipity and tolerance for surprise

Last but not least, we felt that who was expected to be at a meeting and how they were meant to interact had a major impact on what needed to happen for the meeting to succeed.

The question behind these criteria is: what kind of reasonable assumptions can we make about how well these people will work together to achieve the desired goal?

Remember: every meeting has both a human connection outcome and a work outcome.

This has many significant design impacts. For example, in meetings with group members that know each other already, you can spend less meeting time on building connection. We don’t do introductions in the daily huddle; we assume the team handled that outside the meeting.

In meetings where the work product is arguably far more important than the human connection, it’s not always necessary for people to like one another or even remember each others’ names as long as the meeting gets them all to the desired goal efficiently. A formal incident investigation meeting does not need the person under investigation to know and like the people on the review board to achieve its goal.

By contrast, some meetings only go well after the team establishes mutual respect and healthy working relationships. The design of these meetings must nurture and enhance those relationships if they are to achieve the desired outcomes. Weekly team meetings often fail because people run them like project status updates instead of team meetings, focusing too heavily on content at the expense of connection, and their teams are weaker for it.

After much slotting and wrangling, we found there were three ways our assumptions about the people in the room influenced the meeting type.

• A known set of people all familiar with one another. Team meetings fit here.
• A group of people brought together to fit a need. Kickoffs, ideation sessions, workshops all fit here.
• Two distinct groups, with a clear us-them or me-them dynamic, meeting in response to an event. Interviews fit here, as do broadcast meetings and negotiations.
• The expected leadership and participation styles. Every type of meeting has a “default” leader responsible for the meeting design; usually the boss or manager, a facilitator, or the person who asked for the meeting. Most also have an expected interaction style for participants that, when encouraged, gets the best results. Some meetings are collaborative, some very conversational, like one-on-ones, and some are very formal – almost hostile. Still others, like the All-Hands broadcast meeting, don’t require any active participation at all.
• The centrality of relationships. Finally, we looked at whether the meeting’s success depended on the group working well together. Nearly every meeting that teams repeat as part of their day-to-day operations works best when team members get along, and becomes torturous when they don’t. Outside of regular team meetings, there are also meetings designed explicitly to establish positive relationships, such as the first introduction, interviews, and team chartering workshops. In all these cases, a successful meeting design must take relationships into account.

Criteria We Considered and Rejected

There are lots of other factors that influence how you plan and run any given meeting, but we felt that they didn’t warrant creating a whole new type. Here are some of the criteria that impact meeting design, but that we didn’t use when defining types.

Location and Resources

Face-to-face or remote, walking or sitting, sticky notes or electronics documents; there’s no question that the meeting logistics have an impact. They don’t, however, change the underlying goals or core structure for a meeting. They simply modify how you execute on it.

A design workshop for creating a new logo will deal with different content than one for developing a new country-sponsored health plan or one for creating a nuclear submarine. At the human level, however, each of these design workshops needs to accomplish the same thing by engaging the creative and collaborative genius of the participants in generating innovative solutions. Similarly, project meetings in every field look at time, progress, and budget. The content changes, but the core goals and format do not.

This one is like logistics. You absolutely have to change how you run a meeting with 20 people from how you led the same meeting with 5. But again, the goals, the sequence of steps, the governing rituals – none of that changes. In general, smaller meetings are easier to run and more successful on a day-to-day basis. But if you legitimately need 20 people involved in that decision, and sometimes you do, that is an issue of scale rather than kind.

Operating Context

What comes before the meeting and what’s happening in the larger ecosystem can have a huge impact on how a team approaches a meeting. A decision-making meeting held in times of abundance feels radically different than one you run to try and figure out how to save a sinking ship. Even so, the underlying principles for sound decision making remain the same. Some situations absolutely make it way harder to succeed, but they don’t, in our opinion, make it a fundamentally different kind of meeting.

Now, given that extended lead up, what types did we end up with?

The 16 (+1) Types of Meetings

I’ve broken our list into three main groupings below and provided details for each type. Then, at the end, you’ll find a table with all the meeting types listed for easy comparison and a spreadsheet you can download.

Quickly, here’s the list. Details are below.

Team Cadence Meetings

• Progress Updates

One-on-Ones

• Action Review Meetings

Governance Cadence Meetings

• Idea Generation Meetings

Planning Meetings

• Decision Making Meeting

Sensemaking

• Introductions

Issue Resolution Meetings

• Community of Practice Meetings

Training Sessions

Broadcast meetings.

Want to learn more about this chart? See the follow-up post on the Periodic Table of Meetings .  

We Review, Renew, Refine: Meetings with Known Participants and Predictable Patterns

As we do the work of our organizations, we learn. The plans we made on day one may work out the way we expected, but maybe not. New stuff comes up and before too long it becomes obvious that we need to adjust course.

Organizations use these type of meetings to review performance, renew team connections, and refine their approach based on what they’ve learned.

All of these meetings involve an established group of people, with perhaps the occasional guest. Most happen at regular and predictable intervals, making up the strategic and operational cadence of the organization.

These meetings all follow a regularized pattern; each meeting works basically like the last one and teams know what to expect. Because the participants and the format are all known, these meetings often require less up-front planning and less specialized facilitation expertise to succeed.

The meeting types in this group are:

• Ensure group cohesion
• Drive execution
• the Weekly Team Meeting
• the Daily Huddle
• the Shift-Change Meeting
• a Regular Committee Meeting
• the Sales Team Check-In Meeting

Expected Participation Profile

These meetings are typically led by the “boss” or manager, but they can be effectively led by any team member. The best results happen when everyone invited engages collaboratively. Healthy relationships are important to meeting success.

Meeting Format

Team cadence meetings follow a regular pattern or standard agenda, which can be very ritualistic. Team meetings should surface new information and challenges, but big surprises are not welcome here. (Unless they’re super awesome!) These meetings are about keeping an established team personally connected and moving towards a common goal, and not about inspiring major change.

To learn more, visit our Team Cadence Meetings Resource Center.

Back to the list of types ⇧

Progress Checks

• Maintain project momentum
• Ensure mutual accountability
• the Project Status Meeting
• the Client Check-In

Project managers and account managers lead these meetings, and everyone else participates in a fairly structured way. In many ways, these meetings are designed to inform and reassure people that everyone else on the team is doing what they said they’d do, or if not, to figure out what they all need to do to get back on track. Functional relationships matter, but it’s not as important to the overall result that these people enjoy each other’s company. Because these meetings are mostly designed to “make sure everything is still working”, which matters to project success and the organization’s ability to plan, they can often be very boring for the individual contributors who already know what’s going on with their work.

Project updates follow a regular pattern. Some are very strict, others less so; this varies by the team and the kind of work they do. Surprises are entirely unwelcome. Any major surprise will cause a meeting failure and derail the planned agenda.

To learn more, visit our Progress Check Meetings Resource Center.

• Career and personal development
• Individual accountability
• Relationship maintenance
• the Manager-Employee One-on-One
• a Coaching Session
• a Mentorship Meeting
• the “Check In” with an Important Stakeholder

These meetings involve two people with an established relationship. The quality of that relationship is critical to success in these meetings, and leadership may alternate between the participants based on their individual goals. While these meetings may follow an agenda, the style is entirely conversational. In some instances, the only distinction between a one-on-one and a plain ol’ conversation is the fact that the meeting was scheduled in advance to address a specific topic.

One-on-ones are the loosey goosiest meetings in this set. Experienced and dedicated leaders will develop an approach to one-on-ones that they use often, but the intimate nature of these meetings defies rigid structure. People tend not to enjoy surprises in one-on-ones, but they infinitely prefer to learn surprising news in these meetings rather than in a team or governance cadence meeting. If you’re going to quit or fly to the moon or you’ve just invented the cure to aging, you’re way better off telling your manager privately before you share that with the board.

To learn more, visit our One-on-One Meetings Resource Center.

Action Reviews

• Learning: gain insight
• Develop confidence
• Generate recommendations for change
• Project and Agile Retrospectives
• After Action Reviews and Before Action Reviews (Military)
• Pre-Surgery Meetings (Healthcare)
• Win/Loss Review (Sales)

These meetings are led by a designated person from the team. When run well, action reviews demand highly engaged and structured participation from everyone present. Because action reviews are so structured, they don’t require the individuals involved to form great interpersonal relationships. They do, however, require professionalism, focus, and strong engagement. Action reviews that happen too infrequently or too far away in time from the action tend to become more conversational and less powerful.

Action reviews are highly ritualistic; these are the kind of meetings that inspire the use of the word “ritual”. The action review is a tool for continuous learning; the more frequently these are run and the tighter the team gets, the faster they learn and improve. Teams can and will change how they run these meetings over time based on what they’ve learned, and this avid pursuit of change for the better is itself part of the ritual. Action reviews take surprise in stride. The whole point is to learn and then refine future action, so while huge surprises may cause chagrin, they are embraced as lessons and used accordingly.

Can you tell these are some of my favorite meetings?

To learn more, visit our Action Review Meetings Resource Center.

• Strategic definition and oversight
• Regulatory compliance and monitoring
• Board Meetings
• Quarterly Strategic Reviews
• QBR (a quarterly review between a vendor and client)

The teams involved in governance meetings are known in advance, but don’t necessarily work together often. Nor do they need to; these aren’t the kind of meetings where everyone has to be pals to get good results. These meetings are led by a chair or official company representative, and participation is structured. This means that while there are often times for free conversation during a governance meeting, much of the participation falls into prescribed patterns. These are often the kind of meetings that warrant nicer shoes.

Governance cadence meetings are highly structured. When run professionally, there is always an agenda, it is always shared in advance, and minutes get recorded. Governance meetings are NOT the time for surprises. In fact, best practice for important board meetings includes making sure everyone coming to that meeting gets a personal briefing in advance (see Investigative or One-on-Ones) to ensure no one is surprised in the meeting. A surprise in a governance cadence meeting means someone screwed up.

To learn more, visit our Governance Cadence Meetings Resource Center.

The Right Group to Create Change: Meetings with Participants and Patterns Customized to Fit the Need

New ideas, new plans, projects to start, problems to solve and decisions to make—these meetings change an organization’s work.

These meetings are all scheduled as needed, and include the people the organizers feel to be best suited for achieving the meeting goals. They succeed when following a thoughtful meeting design and regularly fail when people “wing it”.

Because these meetings are scheduled as needed with whomever is needed, there is a lot more variation in format between meetings. This is the realm of participatory engagement, decision and sense-making activities, and when the group gets larger, trained facilitation.

Idea Generation

• Create a whole bunch of ideas
• Ad Campaign Brainstorming Session
• User Story Brainstorming
• Fundraiser Brainstorming

Idea generation meetings often include participants from an established team, but not always. These meetings are led by a facilitator and participants contribute new ideas in a structured way. While it’s always nice to meet with people you know and like, established relationships don’t necessarily improve outcomes for these meetings. Instead, leaders who want to get the widest variety of ideas possible are better off including participants with diverse perspectives and identities. Relationships are not central here; ideas are.

These meetings start with the presentation of a central premise or challenge, then jump into some form of idea generation. There are loads of idea generation techniques, all of which involve a way for participants to respond to a central challenge with as many individual ideas as possible. Unlike workshops or problem solving meetings, the group may not attempt to coalesce or refine their ideas in the meeting. Here, idea volume matters more than anything else. Organizations run these meetings when they aren’t sure what to do yet; the whole meeting is an entreaty to serendipity. As such, there are few governing principles beyond the rule to never interfere with anyone else’s enthusiasm.

To learn more, visit our Idea Generation Meetings Resource Center.

• Create plans
• Secure commitment to implementing the plans
• Project Planning
• Campaign Planning (Marketing)
• Product Roadmap Planning
• and so on. Every group that makes things has a planning meeting.

Planning meetings often involve an existing team, but also involve other people as needed. Depending on the size and scope of the plans under development, these meetings are led by the project owner or by an outside facilitator. Participants are expected to actively collaborate on the work product. They may or may not have established relationships; if not, some time needs to be spent helping people get to know each other and understand what each of them can contribute. That said, these meetings are about getting a job done, so relationships don’t get central focus.

Planning meetings vary depending on the kind of plan they’re creating, but generally start with an explanation of the overall goal, an analysis of the current situation, and then work through planning details. Planning meetings end with a review and confirmation of the plan created. Planning meetings are not governed by rules nor do they follow specific rituals; the meeting format is dictated more by the planning format than anything else. Because planning meetings happen very early in an endeavor’s life cycle, successful meetings design for serendipity. Anything you can learn   during this meeting   that makes the plan better is a good thing!

To learn more, visit our Planning Meetings Resource Center.

• Group formation
• Commitment and clarity on execution
• One or more tangible results; real work product comes out of workshops
• Project, Program and Product Kickoffs
• Team Chartering
• Design Workshops
• Value Stream Mapping
• Strategy Workshops
• Team Building workshops

Groups are assembled specifically for these meetings and guided by a designated facilitator. These meetings put future work into motion, so the focus may be split equally between the creation of a shared work product (such as a value stream map or charter document) and team formation, since successful team relationships make all the future work easier. Workshops often incorporate many of the elements you find in other types of meetings. For example, a workshop may include information gathering, idea generation, problem solving, and planning all together.

Because they attempt to achieve so much more than other meetings, workshops take longer to run and way longer to plan and set up. Most workshops expect participants to actively engage and collaborate in the creation of a tangible shared result, and a lot of effort goes into planning very structured ways to ensure that engagement. When it comes to business meetings, these are also often as close to a working party as it gets.

Smaller kickoffs may follow a simple pattern and be held in the team’s regular meeting space, but many workshops take place in a special location; somewhere off site, outside, or otherwise distinct from the normal work environment. All these meetings start with introductions and level-setting of some kind: a group exercise, a review of the project goals, and perhaps a motivational speech from the sponsor. Then, the team engages in a series of exercises or activities in pursuit of the work product. Since these meetings are long, coffee and cookies may be expected. Workshops conclude with a review of the work product, and often a reflective exercise. That said, while the basic pattern for a workshop is fairly standard, these are bespoke meetings that do not adhere to any particular rituals. The people who plan and facilitate the meeting work hard to create opportunities for serendipity; they want the team to discover things about each other and the work that inspire and engage them.

To learn more, visit our Workshops Resource Center.

Problem Solving

• Find a solution to a problem
• Secure commitment to enact the solution
• Incident Response
• Strategic Issue Resolution
• Major Project Change Resolution

These meetings involve anyone who may have information that helps the group find a solution and anyone who will need to implement the solution. Depending on the urgency of the situation, the meeting will be led by the person in charge (the responsible leader) or a facilitator. Everyone present is expected to collaborate actively, answering all questions and diligently offering assistance. Tight working relationships can help these meetings go more easily, and participants that establish trust can put more energy into finding solutions since they worry less about blame and personal repercussions. That said, these meetings need the participation of the people with the best expertise, and these people may not know each other well. When this happens, the meeting leader should put extra effort into creating safety in the group if they want everyone’s best effort.

Problem solving meetings begin with a situation analysis (what happened, what resources do we have), then a review of options. After the team discusses and selects an option, they create an action plan. We’ve all seen the shortest version of this meeting in movies, when the police gather outside of the building full of hostages and collaborate to create their plan. Problem solving meetings follow this basic structure, which can be heavily ritualized in first responder and other teams devoted to quickly solving problems. These strict governing procedures get looser when problems aren’t so urgent, but the basic pattern remains.

In a problem solving meeting, the ugly surprise already happened. Now the team welcomes serendipity, hoping a brilliant solution will emerge.

To learn more, visit our Problem Solving Meetings Resource Center.

Decision Making

• A documented decision
• Commitment to act on that decision
• New Hire Decision
• Go/No-Go Decision
• Logo Selection
• Final Approval of a Standard

Often a decision-making meeting involves a standing team, but like problem solving meetings, not always. These meetings may also include people who will be impacted by the decision or have expertise to share, even if they aren’t directly responsible for implementing the decision. Decision making meetings may be led by a designated facilitator, but more often the senior leader or chair runs them. People participate in decision making meetings as either advisers or decision makers. If the decision under discussion is largely a formality, this participation will be highly structured. If, on the other hand, the group is truly weighing multiple options, the participation style will be much more collaborative. Established relationships are not central to decision making meetings, but the perceived fairness and equanimity of the discussion is. When the group behaves in a way that makes it unsafe to voice concerns, these concerns go unaddressed which then weakens commitment to the decision.

Decision making meetings involve the consideration of options and the selection of a final option. Unlike problem solving meetings that include a search for good options, all that work to figure out the possible options happens before the decision making meeting. In many cases, these meetings are largely a formality intended to finalize and secure commitment to a decision that’s already been made. Ritual is high, and surprises unwelcome. In other situations, the group is weighing multiple options and seeking to make a selection in the meeting. There still shouldn’t be any big surprises, but there’s a whole lot more flexibility. For example, corporate leadership teams run decision-making meetings when faced with unexpected strategic challenges. Many of these teams revert to a structure-free conversational meeting approach; just “talking it out” until they reach a decision. Unfortunately for them, teams make the best decisions when their meetings follow a formal decision-making methodology .

To learn more, visit our Decision Making Meetings Resource Center.

Efforts to Evaluate and Influence: Meetings Between Us and Them, with Info to Share and Questions to Answer

These meetings are all designed to transfer information and intention from one person or group to another. They are scheduled by the person who wants something with the people they want to influence or get something from.

At the surface, that sounds Machiavellian, but the intention here is rarely nefarious. Instead, these meetings often indicate a genuine interest in learning, sharing, and finding ways to come together for mutual benefit.

Because each of these meetings involves some form of social evaluation, the format and rituals have more to do with etiquette than regulations or work product, although this is not always the case.

• To learn things that you can use to inform later action
• To gain an understanding of the current state of a project, organization, or system
• Job Interviews
• Project Discovery Meetings
• Incident Investigations
• Market Research Panels

Expected Participant Profile

These meetings are led by an interviewer or facilitator. Participants include the people being interviewed and sometimes a set of observers. Engagement in sensemaking meetings may feel conversational, but it always follows a clear question-response structure. Most interviewers work to develop a rapport with the people they’re interviewing, since people often share more freely with people they perceive as friendly and trustworthy. That said, many sensemaking meetings work fine without rapport, because the person sharing information is expecting to benefit from it in the future. For example, if a doctor asks a patient to describe his symptoms, the patient does so willingly because he expects the doctor will use that information to help him feel better.

Many interviews are governed by rules regarding privacy, non-disclosure, and discretion. These formalities may be addressed at the beginning or end of the session. Otherwise, there are no strong patterns for a sensemaking session. Instead, people regularly working in these meetings focus on asking better questions. Like idea generation meetings, information gathering meetings delight in serendipity. Unlike idea generation meetings, however, the goal is not to invent new solutions, but rather to uncover existing facts and perspectives.

To learn more, visit our Sensemaking Meetings Resource Center.

• Learn about each other
• Decide whether to continue the relationship
• the First Meeting Between Professionals
• the Sales Pitch
• the Sales Demo
• the First Meeting with a Potential Vendor
• the Investor Pitch

Introduction meetings are led by the person who asked for the meeting. The person or people invited to the meeting may also work to lead the discussion, or they may remain largely passive; they get to engage however they see fit because they’re under no obligation to spend any more time here than they feel necessary. People attempt to engage conversationally in most introductions, but when the social stakes increase or the prospect of mutual benefit is significantly imbalanced, the engagement becomes increasingly one-sided.

There are no strict rules for meetings of this type as a whole, but that doesn’t make them ad-hoc informal events. On the contrary, sales teams, company founders, and young professionals spend many long hours working to “hone their pitch”. They hope this careful preparation will reduce the influence of luck and the chances of an unhappy surprise. The flow of the conversation will vary depending on the situation. These meeting can go long, get cut short, and quickly veer into tangents. It’s up to the person who asked for the meeting to ensure the conversation ends with a clear next step.

To learn more, visit our Introduction Meetings Resource Center.

• A new agreement
• Commitment to further the relationship
• Support Team Escalation
• Contract Negotiations and Renewals
• Neighbor Dispute

These meetings are led by a designated negotiator or, if a neutral party isn’t available, by whomever cares about winning more. All parties are expected to engage in the discussion, although how they engage will depend entirely on the current state of their relationship. If the negotiation is tense, the engagement will be highly structured to prevent any outright breakdown. If the relationship is sound, the negotiation may be conducted in a very conversational style. Obviously, relationship quality plays a central role in the success of a negotiation or issue resolution meeting.

The format for these meetings is entirely dependent on the situation. Formal treaty negotiations between countries follow a very structured and ritualistic format. Negotiations between individual leaders, however, may be hashed out on the golf course. These meetings are a dance, so while surprises may not be welcome, they are expected.

To learn more, visit our Issue Resolution Meetings Resource Center.

Community of Practice Gatherings

• Topic-focused exchange of ideas
• Relationship development
• The Monthly Safety Committee Meeting
• The Project Manager’s Meetup
• The Lunch-n-Learn

The people at these meetings volunteer to be there because they’re interested in the topic. An organizer or chair opens the meeting and introduces any presenters. Participants are expected to engage convivially, ask questions and engage in exercises when appropriate, and network with each other when there isn’t a presentation on. These meetings are part social, part content, and the style is relaxed.

Most of these meetings begin with mingling and light conversation. Then, the organizers will call for the group’s attention and begin the prepared part of the meeting. This could follow a traditional agenda, as they do in a Toastmaster’s meeting, or it may include a group exercise or a presentation by an invited speaker. There’s time for questions, and then more time at the end to resume the casual conversations begun at the meeting start. People in attendance are there to learn about the topic, but also to make connections with others that create opportunities. Many hope for serendipity.

To learn more, visit our Community of Practice Meetings Resource Center.

• To transfer knowledge and skills
• Client Training on a New Product
• New Employee On-Boarding
• Safety Training

The trainer leads training sessions, and participants follow instructions. Participants may be there by choice, or they may be required to attend training by their employer. There is no expectation of collaboration between the trainer and the participants; these are pure transfers of information from one group to the next.

Training session formats vary widely. In the simplest form, the session involves the trainer telling participants what they believe they need to learn, and then participants ask questions. Instructional designers and training professionals can make training sessions way more engaging than that.

To learn more, visit our Training Meetings Resource Center.

• To share information that inspires (or prevents) action
• the All-Hands Meeting

Broadcast meetings are led by the meeting organizer. This person officially starts the meeting and then either runs the presentation or introduces the presenters. People invited to the meeting may have an opportunity to ask questions, but for the most part, they are expected to listen attentively. While they include presentations in the same way a Community of Practice meeting does, they do not provide an opportunity for participants to engage in casual conversation and networking. These are not collaborative events.

Broadcast meetings start and end on time. They begin with brief introductions which are followed by the presentation. Questions may be answered periodically, or held until the last few minutes. Because these meetings include announcements or information intended to inform later action, participants often receive follow-up communication: a copy of the slides, a special offer or invitation, or in the case of an all-hands meeting, a follow-up meeting with the manager to talk about how the big announcement impacts their team. The people leading a broadcast meeting do not expect and do not welcome surprises. The people participating often don’t know what to expect.

To learn more, visit our Broadcast Meetings Resource Center.

Frankly, I hesitated to include broadcast meetings and training as types, since both encompasses such a broad range of experiences. Also, these meetings aren’t collaborative nor generative in the way that other meetings are; they don’t create new outcomes for everyone involved. They stretch the definition of what I’d consider a meeting.

That said, I have heard people call broadcasts and training sessions “meetings” on multiple occasions. The all-staff meeting is often just announcements, but people call it a meeting. Project folks will schedule a “meeting to go over the new system” with a client, and that’s basically a lightweight training session.

And if we look at meetings as a tool we use to move information through our organizations, create connections between the people in our organizations, and drive work momentum, broadcast meetings and training sessions certainly fit that bill (as we’ll see in the story below).

Table: All 16 Meeting Types in the Taxonomy of Business Meetings

Now that you’ve seen the details, download this table as a spreadsheet .

Why a spreadsheet?

I expect people to use the taxonomy in one of these ways.

• Take inventory of your organization’s meetings. Which of these do you run, and which should you run? If you’re running one of these kinds of meetings and it isn’t working, what can you see here that may point to a better way?
• Make the taxonomy better. At the end of the day, our list of 16 types is just as arbitrary as MeetingSift’s list of 6 types. What did we miss? What doesn’t work? Let us know. Comments are welcome.

Since all models are wrong the scientist cannot obtain a “correct” one by excessive elaboration. On the contrary following William of Occam he should seek an economical description of natural phenomena. Just as the ability to devise simple but evocative models is the signature of the great scientist so overelaboration and overparameterization is often the mark of mediocrity. George Box in 1976 Journal of the American Statistical Association

Or, stated more economically, “ All models are wrong, but some are useful. ” We’ve tried to hit a mark that’s useful in a way that simpler lists were not. We invite your feedback to tell us how we did.

The 17th Type: BIG Meetings and Conferences

Just when you think you’ve really broadened your horizons and been very thoroughly inclusive, you meet someone who sets you straight. I recently had the pleasure of meeting  Maarten Vanneste , who is also a dedicated advocate for meeting design and the meeting design profession . It turns out that while we are using the same words, Maarten works in a very different world where a “meeting” might be a multi-day conference with dozens of sessions and a highly paid keynote speaker or 10. In that world, meeting planners handle logistics, room reservations, lighting requirements, branding, promotions… a wealth of detail that far exceeds anything we might worry about for even the most involved strategic planning workshop.

This is so different, why even mention it?

Because it’s another example of how using a generic word like “meeting” leads to bad assumptions . In case it isn’t clear, at Lucid when we talk about meetings and meeting design, we’re talking about the 16 types of day-to-day business meetings listed above. Professional meeting planning is a whole different kettle of fish.

How Different Types of Meetings Work Together: A Tale of 25 Meetings

To illustrate how the different kinds of meetings work together, let’s look at a typical sequence of meetings that you might expect to see in the first year of a company’s relationship with a major new client.

This is the story of two companies: ACME, makers of awesome products, and ABC Corp, a company that needs what ACME makes, and all the people working in these two companies that make their business flow.

Sam, a manager at ABC Corp, registered for the ACME company’s webinar about their exciting new product. Sam liked what he saw, and after the webinar, indicated that he’d like a call from the sales team.

Sam likes what he saw in the webinar.

Peter, ACME’s inbound sales representative, calls Sam the next day. After introducing himself, he asks Sam about ABC Corp and how ACME’s products might work for them. Peter learns that ABC Corp is very interested, and that this could be a big deal for ACME. He and Sam agree to set up a demonstration call with representatives from both companies.

Peter calls Sam and they schedule a demo meeting.

In the weekly sales meeting, Peter tells the team about the ABC Corp deal. Peter’s boss Jill knows that this deal could make the team’s quarter, and wants to make sure they do their best. She and Peter schedule a time to prepare and rehearse before the client demo.

Peter tells Jill and the sales team about the upcoming demo with Sam at ABC.

Jill, Peter and Henri (a solutions expert from ACME) meet to prepare for the demo. They begin by discussing everything they know about ABC Corp, about Sam, and about the other people coming to the demo. They review the presentation they plan to give and rehearse the demonstration, paying special attention to who will do what, and stopping to refine their presentation with examples that relate directly to ABC Corp’s business. They end the meeting with a quick recap of the key points they want to make during the demo.

Peter, Jill and Henri prepare before the demo with Sam at ABC.

Peter and Henri meet with Sam and his boss Ellen. After brief introductions, Peter confirms the agenda with Ellen and Sam. Then, Henri leads the demonstration, making sure to hit the key points they prepared earlier. Ellen and Sam are impressed, interrupting with both questions and quick comments about how the ACME product could work in their business. At the end of the demonstration, Ellen asks the ACME team to prepare a quote.

     Peter and Henri give a demo to Sam and Ellen. Ellen is impressed and asks for a quote.

Jill shares the news about the potential deal with ABC Corp in the weekly leadership meeting. For a big client like this, ACME will need to get a project team working on customizing and installing the product if the deal comes through. These projects can take months to complete, and the implementation team will have to schedule the resources. The legal team knows they’ll be called to help work on the contract (there are always redlines), and finance begins to look at how a deal like this will impact cash flow. Finally, the product team lead knows that big clients often demand special treatment, so he begins to review the roadmap and production schedule to see how they might work in any changes they’ll need to make.

Jill tells the CEO and the rest of the leadership team about the big ABC deal her sales team is working so everyone can prepare.

Peter sent an estimate and draft contract to Ellen, and she’s looking for changes. First, she wants a better price. Second, she wants a change to the product. Third, her legal team wants additional insurance on the deal and full release of liability. Fourth, her security team wants to conduct a security audit of ACME’s operations.

Peter goes over all the requests in his meeting with Ellen to make sure he understands them, but he’s in no position to authorize those changes. After the meeting, he takes the requests back to Jill.

Peter discusses the contract with Ellen. Ellen wants a better contract.

ACME’s leadership team reserves time on their calendar for tackling hard decisions each month, and this month, the ABC Corp contract is the topic. Before the meeting, each department reviews how they could respond to the ABC contract with its special demands, and comes prepared to discuss the options. Even though everyone comes prepared, the discussion still runs a full two hours as they debate the relative risks and opportunity in this contract. When they’re done, they are agreed on how they’ll respond in the next round of contract negotiations, and on how much farther beyond that they’ll go to win the deal.

The leadership team meets to decide how to respond to Ellen’s contract demands. And they do!

Several more negotiation meetings and a security review later, and the deal is signed!

Now that the contract is signed, it’s time to get the project team involved. Peter arranges a meeting between Ellen and Sam and the customer team from ACME: Gary the project manager, Henri the solutions analyst, and Esme the account manager. Going forward, Gary, Henri and Esme will handle all the communication with Sam from ABC Corp. Before the meeting ends, the ACME team schedules a trip to visit ABC Corp the following week.

     Peter introduces Sam and Ellen to the ACME team: Gary, Henri, and Esme.

Every two weeks, the ACME sales team reviews all the deals that closed and try to identify why they either lost or won the deal. When they find something that worked well, they plan to test it on other deals that haven’t yet closed, and if it works well there too, they’ll make that part of their standard sales approach. They also try to identify mistakes they made that either lost them the deal, or in cases like ABC corp, made the deal more complicated and risky than they’d like. The whole team then reviews the deals they’re working to make sure they aren’t repeating those same mistakes.

Jill, Peter and the sales review the lessons they learned closing the ABC deal.

The ACME team, Gary, Henri and Esme, arrive for a day at ABC Corp. Sam greets them, and gives them a tour of the main office. They will spend the morning giving a short demo and project overview to ABC’s leadership team. Then, in the afternoon, they’ll meet with the people on Sam’s team who will be using ACME’s product at ABC and handling the set up work on their side. Esme focuses on learning names and getting to know people. Gary connects with Sam’s project lead and starts working on the project timeline to incorporate any important dates from the ABC calendar. Henri asks everyone questions about how they work, the problems they run into on a day-to-day basis, and how they think the ACME product will help them. It’s a long exhausting day, and the team comes away with a ton of new information that they discuss on the trip back.

Sam escorts Gary, Henri, and Esme through a day of discovery meetings at ABC Corp.

Back at ACME, Henri, Esme, and Gary meet with the product deployment and customization team. Esme starts by quickly sharing a bit about what ABC Corp does and their goals. Then, Henri talks about the customer’s requirements: what they need, the special challenges they face, and anything that will have to be customized. After that, Gary shares the high-level project constraints, including how much time and budget the team gets to work with.

With the background set, everyone works together to draft the project plan. People from the implementation team suggest ways they can easily handle some requirements, and identify items that will require extra time and creativity. They begin a list of issues to solve and one of risks to manage. Starting from the desired end date and working backwards, they work together to build out a draft timeline that shows the critical path, times when they’ll need committed resources from ABC, and places where they just aren’t sure yet what they’ll find. When they feel they understand how the project will go as best they can, they review their draft plan and assign action items. Gary will work on the project timeline, matching their draft plan with available resources and factoring in holidays. Henri will contact Sam to go over questions from the implementation team, and Esme will schedule the kickoff meeting with the client team.

Gary, Henri, and Esme meet with the implementation team members to draft a project plan.

The ACME team finished the project plan and now it’s time to get started. The kickoff meeting marks the official beginning of the project. Esme has facilitation experience, so she’s guiding this initial meeting between the ACME implementation team and the people they’ll be working with at ABC. After a quick round of introductions, Sam and Ellen share a presentation about how important this project is for ABC and how it will make life better for everyone when it’s done. Then, Ellen leaves the group to work through the rest of the meeting without her, promising to return at the end to answer any questions that come up.

Next, both teams dig into the details. They go over the project plan ACME created and suggest changes. They establish performance goals for how they expect to use the product, making it clear what a successful implementation will look like. They talk about how they’ll communicate during the project and schedule a series of project update meetings. They take breaks and get to know each other, and share cookies. Then they get serious and talk about what might go wrong, and outline what they can do now to increase their odds of success.

At the end, Ellen rejoins them and the group shares their updated project plan with her. They explain changes they made and concerns they still have, and ask a few questions. Finally, they go over exactly who does what next, and set clear expectations about how and when everyone will see progress. With the kickoff complete, they all adjourn to the local pub to relax and continue getting acquainted.

Esme and Ellen lead team members from both companies through the project kickoff

Work is underway, and once per week Gary and the other project managers meet with the implementation team to review progress. Since the implementation team works on several projects at once, a problem with one project can impact progress across several others. To keep these meetings focused and efficient, and to help everyone visualize how all the pieces interact, the group meets in a room with a full wall devoted to charting project activity. People move tasks around on the wall to show progress, and mark new risks or issues with red dots. In less than 30 minutes, the group creates an updated status dashboard that anyone in the company can now review when they walk by.

Happily for Gary, the ABC project is right on schedule. For now.

Gary, the other ACME PMs, and the ACME implementation team discuss project progress every week.

Every two weeks, Gary and the implementation team from ACME meet with Sam and his team at ABC. They discuss what’s been done, and confirm the plans for the coming two weeks. They also talk through any questions that have come up since they last met. Gary leads the meeting, and this week he expects it to be pretty routine. But then Sam speaks up: there’s been a change. The ABC board decided to replace the CEO and Sam’s group is getting re-organized. Ellen is gone. Sam isn’t sure if he’ll still be involved in the project, or if his team will even still exist once the dust settles. For now, everything at ABC is on hold.

Surprise, Gary! Gary hates surprises.

Sam tells Gary there’s been a major shake-up at ABC, and the project is on hold. Oh no! What will Gary do?

Gary is freaking out, and schedules a meeting with his boss Belinda. He knows how important this project is to ACME, and he knows that the contract says they can’t send the final invoice until the work is complete. He doesn’t know how to complete the project, though, and had no idea what to tell the rest of the team. Should they stop work? Should they renegotiate the contract? Should they continue and hope it all works out?

Belinda can’t answer those questions, but she helps Gary relax and promises to get a team together who can give him the guidance he needs.

Gary meets one-on-one with his boss Belinda, and they make a plan.

Belinda, Gary, and several people from the leadership team meet to figure out how to handle this upset to the ABC project. A representative of the finance team talks about how a major delay will impact the company, and the implementation lead offers several suggestions for how they might rearrange the schedule and team members to handle a delay. While no one wants to be whipped around by these problems that aren’t their fault, the CEO is very clear that maintaining a positive relationship with the ABC people (whoever that turns out to be) is the highest priority. ACME wants this to be a profitable long-term relationship, so they can’t let a hiccup in the launch derail that. By the meeting’s end, they decide to continue work, completing everything they can do without ABC’s help. Then, if the ABC situation doesn’t resolve within the next two weeks, they’ll put a hold on the project. Gary leaves with clear instructions, and everyone understands how they’ll handle the situation in their departments.

Belinda, Gary, and the leadership team meet find a solution to the problems with the ABC project.

The shake-up at ABC corp took more than two weeks. In the end, Sam and his team stayed on the project. Hurrah! But because of the delay, ACME stopped work and reassigned the implementation team to other projects. The new (interim) CEO at ABC doesn’t care about ACME’s resource challenges; she just wants the project shipped and shipped on time. Sam’s in a tricky spot and Gary’s in a tricky spot. Gary enlists Esme’s help: as the account manager, she has negotiating options Gary doesn’t have, and perhaps together they can figure something out that helps Sam with the ABC CEO and doesn’t hurt the ACME team too badly.

When Gary, Esme, and Sam meet, they each share their constraints and goals, then focus on those places where they seem to be at an impasse. 90 minutes of back and forth, and they reach a deal. The project deadline will move out 2 weeks because of the delay at ABC, but in recompense for the missed deadline, ACME will provide 4 additional training sessions at no charge for all the people at ABC that were just reassigned and need to be brought up to speed. It’s not perfect, but it works and the project gets back on track.

Esme and Gary meet with Sam to negotiate how they’ll finish the project.

The project is nearly complete! It’s time to get the ABC people familiar with the new system and ready to put it to use. ACME product trainers run ABC employees through multiple training sessions. When an ABC employee asks a question, the trainer writes it down to share with the implementation and product teams. Sometimes these questions are easy to answer, but other times they reveal that something isn’t quite right in the product setup, or that one of the product features doesn’t work as expected. While the main goal of the training session is to educate the ABC employees, ACME trainers seize every chance they get to learn something that will help improve ACME products in the future.

ACME trainers teach the ABC team how to use the product.

What was supposed to be a 45 day project turned into an 87 day project, but now it’s done. The product is installed, it’s been tested, the training is complete: it’s time to go live.

Gary, Esme and the ACME team, along with Sam and the ABC team, meet with the ABC leadership group. They present their progress, sharing slides with graphs of tasks complete and milestones met. The leadership team asks questions along the way, making sure they understand the implications of the upcoming product launch. When everyone is satisfied, they turn to the CEO who is the decision maker in this meeting.

The launch is approved, and the new system goes live.

    Gary, Esme, Sam and their teams ask the new ABC CEO to approve the project. She does!

The ACME teams run regular after-action reviews throughout their projects, and then one larger retrospective after the final launch. For this one, they’ve reserved the whole afternoon. Everyone involved in the ABC project, from Peter on the initial sales call to the trainers who ran the last training session, all participate. This is a lot of people covering a lot of content, so they bring in a facilitator who wasn’t involved in the project to lead the meeting.

Everyone agrees that, for the most part, this was a successful project. The client is happy, the product works well, and they made money. Still, there are lessons to learn. Peter and Henri realize that they saw signs that the situation at ABC wasn’t stable in those first few conversations, but they were so eager to win the client that they dismissed them. In the future, they’ll know to pay attention more closely. Gary and the implementation team discovered ways they could keep the project running even when the client isn’t responding, and they’ll build that into their next project plan. At the end of the meeting, the group walks away with a dozen key lessons and ideas for experiments they can try to make future projects even better.

The ACME team meets to discuss what they learned from the ABC project.

The success and challenges of the ABC deal are a topic of discussion at the quarterly board meeting. The CEO sees the success of the project as an indication that ACME is ready to pursue more big clients in ABCs industry, which would be a significant strategic shift for the company. After much discussion, the board recommends investing a trial amount of marketing money to target the new market, and several board members agree to reach out to their networks to find people who might be able to help the ACME team navigate this new space.

The ACME CEO talks about the ABC project with the ACME Board, and gets approval to pursue a new market.

Sam and Esme meet to talk about how the first 3 months with ACME’s product have gone. After they spend a few minutes catching up about their kids and the weather, Esme brings up a presentation she’s prepared. It shows charts and graphs of how ABC’s product usage compares to the goals they defined before the project began. She also shows a list of the issues ABC employees have reported, and how quickly each was resolved. While not perfect, the results are better than Sam actually expected them to be. More importantly, the new CEO is happy, and that’s a huge relief for Sam. Esme and Sam spend a few minutes talking through one outstanding issue the teams are still working through, then define new performance goals for the coming quarter. The meeting goes so well, Esme asks if Sam would be willing to provide a case study for ACME’s marketing team. Sam agrees.

Esme reviews how the product is working out for the ABC team with Sam in the Quarterly Business Review.

The day after meeting with Esme, Sam gets a call from ACME’s marketing team. Together they spend 20 minutes talking about Sam’s experience. The marketing rep asks: how did you hear about us? What problem were you trying to solve? What else did you consider before deciding to go with ACME? and a host of similar questions. Of course, the call is recorded. At the end, the marketing rep thanks Sam for his time and promises to send a copy of the case study for him to review before it’s published.

This case study becomes a central piece of content in the new marketing campaign approved earlier by ACME’s board.

The ACME marketing team interviews Sam about his experience with their products for a case study.

One year later and it’s time to renew ABC’s contract. The working relationship between the two companies remains strong, so there’s little doubt that ABC will renew. Esme expects to work with Sam again on this contract, but Sam has news. ABC has just hired a new head of procurement, and she has lots of questions for Esme before they sign anything. Esme shoots the leadership team a heads-up, and settles in for a challenging meeting.

Sam tells Esme she’ll need to renew the contract with the new head of procurement. Esme gets ready.

Phew! What a journey.

We’ve talked about why it’s important to get specific about the kind of meeting you’re in, and then we looked at our taxonomy for classifying those meetings. Then, we explored how different types of meetings all work together to keep people connected and move work forward in the story of ACME and ABC.

In many ways, the story of Gary and Sam and Esme and the gang is just a story of people doing their jobs. A lot of people work on projects that run like the one described here. Sometimes everything works fine, other times they freak out; nothing unusual there. What you may not have paid much attention to before, and what the story works to highlight, is how often what happens on that journey is determined by the outcome of a meeting. The other thing we can see is that, while those guys on the implementation team may have thought the few meetings they attended were a waste of time, their contributions during meetings that helped make the ABC project a success ended up having a major impact on the direction of the company. When we show up and participate in meetings, we connect with people who will then go on to different types of meetings with other people, connecting the dots across our organization and beyond.

With that in mind, let’s close by revisiting Simon Jenkins’ gripping headline:

Crushing morale, killing productivity – why do offices put up with meetings? There’s no proof that organisations benefit from the endless cycle of these charades, but they can’t stop it. We’re addicted.

Is it possible to run meetings that crush morale and kill productivity? Yes, of course it is. That doesn’t mean, however, that meetings are simply a useless addiction we can’t kick.

It means that some people are running the wrong kind of meetings, and others are running the right meetings in the wrong way. Not everyone does everything well. Have you ever eaten a sandwich from a vending machine? If so, you know that people are capable of producing all kinds of crap that does not reflect well–neither on them nor on the larger body of work their offering represents.

In the working world, meetings are where the action is. Run the right meeting well, and you can engage people in meaningful work and drive productivity.

Seems like a pretty nice benefit to me, and hopefully this taxonomy helps us all get there. 

General FAQ

Why do meeting types matter.

In the working world, meetings are where the action is. Run the right meeting well, and you can engage people in meaningful work and drive productivity. But if you’re running the wrong meeting, you’re pushing a heavy rock up a tall mountain.

What are the three main categories of meetings?

• Cadence Meetings – the regularly repeated meetings that make up the vast majority of the meetings held in the modern workplace.
• Catalyst Meetings – scheduled as needed, and include the people the organizers feel to be best suited for achieving the meeting goals.
• Learn and Influence Meetings – designed to transfer information and intention from one person or group to another.

What are examples of Cadence Meetings?

• Team cadence meetings
• Progress check meetings
• One-on-One meetings
• Action review meetings
• Governance cadence meetings

What are examples of Catalyst Meetings?

• Idea generation meetings
• Planning meetings
• Problem solving meetings
• Decision making meetings

What are examples of Learn and Influence Meetings?

• Sensemaking meetings
• Issue resolution meetings
• Community of Practice meetings
• Training meetings
• Broadcast meetings

To explore each of the 16 Meeting Types in more detail, visit our Interactive Chart of Meeting Types

Want More? Check out our Online Meeting  School!

Categories: meeting design

Elise Keith

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Kaizen is about changing the way things are. If you assume that things are all right the way they are, you can’t do kaizen. So change something! —Taiichi Ohno

Inspect and Adapt

Inspect & adapt: overview.

The Inspect and Adapt (I&A) is a significant event held at the end of each PI, where the current state of the Solution is demonstrated and evaluated. Teams then reflect and identify improvement backlog items via a structured problem-solving workshop.

The Agile Manifesto emphasizes the importance of continuous improvement through the following principle: “At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.”

In addition, SAFe includes ‘relentless improvement’ as one of the four SAFe Core Values as well as a dimension of the Continuous Learning Culture core competency. While opportunities to improve can and should occur continuously throughout the PI (e.g., Iteration Retrospectives ), applying some structure, cadence, and synchronization helps ensure that there is also time set aside to identify improvements across multiple teams and Agile Release Trains .

All ART stakeholders participate along with the Agile Teams in the I&A event. The result is a set of improvement backlog items that go into the ART Backlog for the next PI Planning event. In this way, every ART improves every PI. A similar I&A event is held by Solution Trains .

The I&A event consists of three parts:

PI System Demo

• Quantitative and qualitative measurement
• Retrospective and problem-solving workshop

Participants in the I&A should be, wherever possible, all the people involved in building the solution. For an ART, this includes:

• The Agile teams
• Release Train Engineer (RTE)
• System and Solution Architects
• Product Management ,  Business Owners , and other stakeholders

Additionally, Solution Train stakeholders may also attend this event.

The PI System Demo is the first part of the I&A, and it’s a little different from the regular system demos after every iteration. This demo shows all the Features the ART has developed during the PI. Typically the audience is broader; for example, Customers or Portfolio representatives are more likely to attend this demo. Therefore, the PI system demo tends to be a little more formal, and extra preparation and setup are usually required. But like any other system demo, it should be timeboxed to an hour or less, with the level of abstraction high enough to keep stakeholders actively engaged and providing feedback.

Before or as part of the PI system demo, Business Owners collaborate with each Agile Team to score the actual business value achieved for each of their Team PI Objectives , as illustrated in Figure 1.

The achievement score is calculated by separately totaling the business value for the plan and actual columns. The uncommitted objectives are not included in the total plan. However, they are part of the total actual. Then divide the actual total by the planned total to calculate the achievement score illustrated in Figure 1.

Quantitative and Qualitative Measurement

In the second part of the I&A event, teams collectively review any quantitative and qualitative metrics they have agreed to collect, then discuss the data and trends. In preparation for this, the RTE and the Solution Train Engineer are often responsible for gathering the information, analyzing it to identify potential issues, and facilitating the presentation of the findings to the ART.

Each team’s planned vs. actual business value is rolled up to create the ART predictability measure, as shown in Figure 2.

Reliable trains should operate in the 80–100 percent range; this allows the business and its external stakeholders to plan effectively. (Note: Uncommitted objectives are excluded from the planned commitment. However, they are included in the actual business value achievement, as can also be seen in Figure 1.)

Retrospective

The teams then run a brief (30 minutes or less) retrospective to identify a few significant issues they would like to address during the problem-solving workshop . There is no one way to do this; several different Agile retrospective formats can be used [3].

Based on the retrospective and the nature of the problems identified, the facilitator helps the group decide which issues they want to tackle. Each team may work on a problem, or, more typically, new groups are formed from individuals across different teams who wish to work on the same issue. This self-selection helps provide cross-functional and differing views of the problem and brings together those impacted and those best motivated to address the issue.

Key ART stakeholders—including Business Owners, customers, and management—join the retrospective and problem-solving workshop teams. The Business Owners can often unblock the impediments outside the team’s control.

Problem-Solving Workshop

The ART holds a structured, root-cause problem-solving workshop to address systemic problems. Root cause analysis provides a set of problem-solving tools used to identify the actual causes of a problem rather than just fixing the symptoms. The RTE typically facilitates the session in a timebox of two hours or less.

Figure 3 illustrates the steps in the problem-solving workshop.

The following sections describe each step of the process.

Agree on the Problem(s) to Solve

American inventor Charles Kettering is credited with saying that “a problem well stated is a problem half solved.” At this point, the teams have self-selected the problem they want to address. But do they agree on the details of the problem, or is it more likely that they have differing perspectives? To this end, the teams should spend a few minutes clearly stating the problem, highlighting the ‘what,’ ‘where,’ ‘when,’ and ‘impact’ as concisely as possible. Figure 4 illustrates a well-written problem statement.

Perform Root Cause Analysis

Effective problem-solving tools include the fishbone diagram and the ‘5 Whys.’ Also known as an Ishikawa Diagram , a fishbone diagram is a visual tool to explore the causes of specific events or sources of variation in a process. Figure 5 illustrates the fishbone diagram with a summary of the previous problem statement written at the head of the ‘fish.’

For our problem-solving workshop, the main bones often start with the default categories of people, processes, tools, program, and environment. However, these categories should be adapted as appropriate.

Team members then brainstorm causes that they think contribute to solving the problem and group them into these categories. Once a potential cause is identified, its root cause is explored with the 5 Whys technique. By asking ‘why’ five times, the cause of the previous cause is uncovered and added to the diagram. The process stops once a suitable root cause has been identified, and the same process is then applied to the next cause.

Identify the Biggest Root Cause

Pareto Analysis, also known as the 80/20 rule, is used to narrow down the number of actions that produce the most significant overall effect. It uses the principle that 20 percent of the causes are responsible for 80 percent of the problem. It’s beneficial when many possible courses of action compete for attention, which is almost always the case with complex, systemic issues.

Once all the possible causes-of-causes are identified, team members then cumulatively vote on the item they think is the most significant factor contributing to the original problem. They can do this by dot voting. For example, each person gets five votes to choose one or more causes they think are most problematic. The team then summarizes the votes in a Pareto chart, such as the example in Figure 6, which illustrates their collective consensus on the most significant root cause.

Restate the New Problem

The next step is to pick the cause with the most votes and restate it clearly as a problem. Restating it should take only a few minutes, as the teams clearly understand the root cause.

Brainstorm Solutions

At this point, the restated problem will start to imply some potential solutions. The team brainstorms as many possible corrective actions as possible within a fixed timebox (about 15–30 minutes). The rules of brainstorming apply here:

• Generate as many ideas as possible
• Do not allow criticism or debate
• Let the imagination soar
• Explore and combine ideas

Create Improvement Backlog Items

The team then cumulatively votes on up to three most viable solutions. These potential solutions are written as improvement stories and features, planned in the following PI Planning event. During that event, the RTE helps ensure that the relevant work needed to deliver the identified improvements is planned. This approach closes the loop, thus ensuring that action will be taken and that people and resources are dedicated as necessary to improve the current state.

Following this practice, problem-solving becomes routine and systematic, and team members and ART stakeholders can ensure that the train is solidly on its journey of relentless improvement.

Inspect and Adapt for Solution Trains

The above describes a rigorous approach to problem-solving in the context of a single ART. If the ART is part of a Solution Train, the I&A event will often include key stakeholders from the Solution Train. In larger value streams, however, an additional Solution Train I&A event may be required, following the same format.

Due to the number of people in a Solution Train, attendees at the large solution I&A event cannot include everyone, so stakeholders are selected that are best suited to address the problems. This subset of people consists of the Solution Train’s primary stakeholders and representatives from the various ARTs and Suppliers .

Last update: 22 January 2023

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16 Types of Customer Needs (and How to Solve for Them)

Published: March 24, 2023

Companies want to stay relevant and innovative and often look at other successful companies, hot industry trends, or new shiny products for inspiration.

However, a vital component to growth is at every business's fingertips — it's customers. Honing in on customer needs can improve the longevity and progress of your business. Happy customers result in higher retention rates, lifetime value, and brand reach as they spread the word in their social circles.

The first step toward creating the types of customer experiences that result in happy customers is by understanding and meeting customer needs.

In this article, you'll learn:

• The Definition of Customer Needs
• The Types of Customer Needs

How to Identify Customer Needs

• What a Customer Needs Analysis Is
• How to Solve for Your Customers' Needs

Types of Customer Service

What are customer needs.

A customer need is a motive that prompts a customer to buy a product or service. Ultimately, the need is the driver of the customer's purchase decision. Companies often look at the customer need as an opportunity to resolve or contribute surplus value back to the original motive.

An example of customer need takes place every day around 12:00 p.m. This is when people begin to experience hunger (need) and decide to purchase lunch. The type of food, the location of the restaurant, and the amount of time the service will take are all factors to how individuals decide to satisfy the need.

Customer-centric companies know that solving for customer needs and exceeding expectations along the way is how to drive healthy business growth and foster good relationships with the people your company serves.

Although customer centricity is not a new concept, the right steps to achieve a customer service focus are still hazy.

Why are customer needs important?

Anticipating customer needs will help you cater to customers before they feel the need to put in a request for a new feature, product, or solution for you. If companies can begin to make changes before their customers' needs aren't fulfilled, this can ultimately lead to growth, innovation, and retention.

Creating a customer-centric company that truly listens to customer needs can be daunting, and there's a steep learning curve if you haven't paid close attention to customers before.

Below are the most common types of customer needs — most of which work in tandem with one another to drive a purchasing decision.

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Fill out the form to better understand your customer needs., 16 most common types of customer needs.

The types of product needs can be split into two categories: product and service.

Product Needs

1. functionality.

Customers need your product or service to function the way they need in order to solve their problem or desire.

Customers have unique budgets with which they can purchase a product or service.

3. Convenience

Your product or service needs to be a convenient solution to the function your customers are trying to meet.

4. Experience

The experience using your product or service needs to be easy — or at least clear — so as not to create more work for your customers.

Along the lines of experience, the product or service needs a slick design to make it relatively easy and intuitive to use.

6. Reliability

The product or service needs to reliably function as advertised every time the customer wants to use it.

7. Performance

The product or service needs to perform correctly so the customer can achieve their goals.

8. Efficiency

The product or service needs to be efficient for the customer by streamlining an otherwise time-consuming process.

9. Compatibility

The product or service needs to be compatible with other products your customer is already using.

Service Needs

10. empathy.

When your customers get in touch with customer service, they want empathy and understanding from the people assisting them.

11. Fairness

From pricing to terms of service to contract length, customers expect fairness from a company.

12. Transparency

Customers expect transparency from a company they're doing business with. Service outages, pricing changes, and things breaking happen, and customers deserve openness from the businesses they give money to.

13. Control

Customers need to feel like they're in control of the business interaction from start to finish and beyond, and customer empowerment shouldn't end with the sale. Make it easy for them to return products, change subscriptions, adjust terms, etc.

14. Options

Customers need options when they're getting ready to make a purchase from a company. Offer a variety of product, subscription, and payment options to provide that freedom of choice.

15. Information

Customers need information, from the moment they start interacting with your brand to days and months after making a purchase. Businesses should invest in educational blog content, instructional knowledge base content, and regular communication so customers have the information they need to successfully use a product or service.

16. Accessibility

Customers need to be able to access your service and support teams. This means providing multiple channels for customer service. We'll talk a little more about these options later.

With so many types of customer needs, how do you understand which ones apply to your customers specifically? Next, we'll dig into how to identify them.

• Use Existing Data
• Solicit Customer Feedback
• Customer Journey Mapping
• Input from Service Team
• Study Competitors
• Social Media Listening
• Keyword Research

"You've got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology," Steve Jobs notably stated . "You cannot start with the technology and try to figure out where you are going to sell it."

Whether you sell technology or some other product or service, the underlying message he's saying here rings true.

This means understanding where they're coming from when they've chosen to make a purchase, what expectations they're bringing to the table, and what bumps they'll encounter along the way.

Identifying Customer Needs

You can gain more knowledge about what your customers want using a few different strategies.

1. Use Existing Data

Most likely you have some customer data already, especially if you’re using a CRM. This is the best place to start your search. Are there pain points or issues you can glean from just looking at this customer data? Are there any patterns you can identify? Taking note of who your current customers are and their past interactions with your brand to get a better idea of where customers are coming from and if you’re meeting their needs.

2. Solicit Customer Feedback

When trying to identify consumer needs, go straight to the source. This can be done using surveys that live on your site, or sent via email. Additionally you could conduct focus groups to gain more in depth insight to customer needs and their overall experience with your product or service.

3. Customer Journey Mapping

To better understand and assist customers, you’ll need to first know what phase of the customer journey they are in and what they’re looking for. This is where customer journey mapping can help, giving a visual representation of how customers interact with your brand. This exercise will help you create a more proactive customer service approach and improve retention.

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4. Input from Service Team

In addition to getting customer feedback, it’s important to consult those who work with them most — your service team. They’ll often have insights you may not be privy to and can help you anticipate the needs of your customers as well as solve existing issues. They’ll also be able to explain how customers are currently using your product or service and can identify any hiccups in the process.

5. Study Competitors

It’s common to study competitors when conducting market research, but you should also consider them when identifying customer needs. There might be overlap in your target audience, meaning your brand could benefit from reviewing any issues competitors are experiencing and gain insight on how they went about fixing it. You might find that some of their strategies would be worth implementing at your company, or discover gaps in service that your company can fill.

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6. Use Social Media

Chances are, your customers use a variety of social media platforms in their day to day. Take advantage of that by using it as a way to listen in on what customers are saying about your products and your competitors. Are people asking questions under your posts? What sorts of comments are they making? Are they giving praise, asking for assistance, or do they want new features? Using a social media monitoring tool like Hootsuite will help you identify trends, mentions, and hashtags relevant to your brand to better inform your strategy.

7. Keyword Research

People turn to the internet for most things, so Google is an excellent resource for figuring out customer needs. How are customers finding your brand online and what are they typing into the search box to find it? Doing keyword research can give you a broad overview of what your customers need based on search data. Keyword research will also help you optimize your site for search engines by aligning the content of your site with what customers are searching for.

If you design your process with these things in mind, you'll be able to uncover consumer needs at any stage of their lifecycle. You can take a deeper dive into their needs by conducting a customer needs analysis.

What is a customer needs analysis?

A customer needs analysis is used in product development and branding to provide an in-depth analysis of the customer to ensure that the product or message offers the benefits, attributes, and features needed to provide the customer with value.

To conduct a customer needs analysis successfully, you need to do the following:

1. Customer Needs Analysis Survey

The customer needs analysis is typically conducted by running surveys that help companies figure out their position in their respective competitive markets and how they stack up in terms of meeting their target customers' needs.

The survey should primarily ask questions about your brand and competitors, as well as customers' product awareness and brand attitudes in general.

Questions can include:

• Questions about positive and negative word associations with your brand
• Questions asking customers to group your brand in with similar and/or competing brands
• Questions comparing and sorting brands according to their preferences for usage

You can learn more about which questions to ask in this survey in our guide and this guide from dummies.

2. Means-End Analysis

Once you've conducted the customer needs analysis survey, you can use the answers to get a fuller picture of the reasons why your customers purchase from you, and what makes your product or service stand apart from your competitors.

A means-end analysis analyzes those answers to determine the primary reasons why a customer would buy your product. Those buyer reasons can be divided into three main groups:

1. Features: A customer buys a product or service because of the features included in the purchase. If the customer were buying a computer, for example, they might buy it because it's smaller and more lightweight than other options.

2. Benefits: A customer buys a product or service because of a benefit, real or perceived, they believe it will offer them. The customer might also buy the computer because it syncs easily with their other devices wirelessly.

3. Values: A customer buys a product or service for unique, individual values, real or perceived, they believe it will help them fulfill. The customer might think the computer will help them to be more creative or artistic and unlock other personal or professional artistic opportunities.

As you might imagine, these reasons for purchasing something can vary from customer to customer, so it's important to conduct these customer surveys, collect the answers, and group them into these three categories. From there, you can identify which of those motivating factors you're solving for, and which you can improve on to make your product or service even more competitive in the market.

3. Customer Feedback

If you want to know what your customers think about the experience of working with your company, ask them. Interviewing your customers and members of your service team can contribute to a customer needs analysis and improvements to your customer lifecycle .

As you gather data from your customer needs analysis, it's important to identify the points of friction that your customers experience and the moments in their journey that provide unexpected delight.

• What can your company change?
• What are the elements that you can build from?
• What parts of the experience needs to be worked on?

Asking these questions can lead you to valuable insights as you work to solve for your customers.

How to Solve for Customer Needs

The first step to solving for your customers is to put yourself in their shoes: If you were the customer when we purchase your goods, use your technology, or sign up for your services, what would prevent you from achieving ultimate value?

Your customer needs analysis is a good starting point for getting in the mind of your customer, especially when it comes to identifying common pain points. From there, you can build a proactive plan to implement your customer-first values throughout the customer lifecycle. Here are some tips for doing so:

1. Offer consistent company-wide messaging.

Too often customers get caught up in the "he said, she said" game of being told a product can do one thing from sales and another from support and product. Ultimately, customers become confused and are left with the perception that the company is disorganized.

Consistent internal communications across all departments is one of the best steps toward a customer-focused mindset. If the entire company understands its goals, values, product, and service capabilities, then the messages will easily translate to meet the customers’ needs.

To get everyone on the same page, organize sales and customer service meetings, send out new product emails, provide robust new employee onboarding, and require quarterly training and seminars or staff-hosted webinars to share important projects.

2. Provide instructions for easy adoption.

Customers purchase a product because they believe it will meet their needs and solve their problem. However, adoption setup stages are not always clear. If best practices aren't specified at the start and they don't see value right away, it's an uphill battle to gain back their trust and undo bad habits.

A well-thought-out post-purchase strategy will enable your products or services to be usable and useful.

One way companies gain their customers' attention is providing in-product and email walkthroughs and instructions as soon as the customer receives a payment confirmation. This limits the confusion, technical questions, and distractions from the immediate post-purchase euphoria.

A customer education guide or knowledge base is essential to deliver proper customer adoption and avoid the ‘floundering effect' when customers are stuck. Other companies provide new customer onboarding services, host live demos and webinars and include events and promotions in their email signatures .

3. Build feedback loops into every stage of the process.

Lean into customer complaints and suggestions, and it will change the way you operate your business. Criticism often has negative connotations. However, if you flip problems to opportunities you can easily improve your business to fit the customer's needs.

Just as you solicited customer feedback in your needs analysis, you can keep a pulse on how your customers feel at scale with customer satisfaction scores , customer surveys , exploration customer interviews, social media polls, or personal customer feedback emails.

If you're able to incorporate this into a repeatable process, you'll never be in the dark about the state of the customer experience in your organization, and you'll be enabled to continue improving it.

Take customer suggestions seriously and act on those recommendations to improve design, product, and system glitches. Most customer support success metrics are paramount to the customer experience and this mentality should trickle down to every aspect of the organization.

4. Nurture customer relationships.

When a customer buys a product or service, they want to use it right away and fulfill their immediate need. Whether they are delighted within the first hour, week, or a month, it's important to constantly think about their future needs.

Proactive relationship-building is essential to prevent customers from losing their post-purchase excitement and ultimately churning. If customers stop hearing from you and you don't hear from them this can be a bad sign that they are about to churn .

Companies solve for customer relationships with a combination of customer service structure and communication strategies. Solve for the long-term customer need and create a customer service team dedicated to check-ins and customer retention , show appreciation with rewards and gifts to loyal customers, host local events, highlight employees that go above and beyond and communicate product updates and new features.

5. Solve for the right customer needs.

Excluding customers from your cohort of business can seem counterintuitive to solve for your customers' needs. However, understanding whose needs you can fulfill and whose you cannot is a major step toward solving the right problems. All customers' needs can't be treated equally and a company must recognize which problems they can solve and ones that aren't aligned with their vision.

To find the right customer priorities, create buyer personas and uncover consumer trends, look at customer's long-term retention patterns, establish a clear company vision, provide premier customer service to valuable customers and communicate with your ideal customer in their preferred social media space to capture questions, comments, and suggestions.

Successful startups, brick-and-mortar shops, and Fortune 500 companies solve and prioritize customer needs to stay ahead and establish industry trends.

6. Provide great customer service.

If a problem arises, your customers want to get it resolved and feel heard in the process. This starts with being able to meet their needs with empathy, but along the way, the process for obtaining support should be easy and on a channel that's convenient for them.

Some customer needs are time-sensitive and require immediate interaction via phone or chat. Others are less critical and can be resolved at a more casual pace. Let's break down the types of customer service and how each optimizes your team's ability to fulfill customer needs.

• Social Media
• Call Back Service
• Customer Self-Service
• Interactive Virtual Assistant
• Integrated Customer Service

Email is one of the most fundamental forms of customer service. It allows customers to fully describe their problems, and it automatically records the conversation into a resourceful thread. Customers only have to explain their issue once, while reps can reference important case details without having to request additional information.

Email is best used with customer needs that don't need to be resolved right away. Customers can ask their question, go back to work, and return to the case once the service rep has found a solution. Unlike phones or chat, they don't have to wait idly while a rep finds them an answer.

One limitation of email is the potential lack of clarity. Some customers have trouble describing their problem, and some service reps struggle to explain solutions. This creates time-consuming roadblocks when the issue is overly complex. To be safe, use email for simple problems that require a brief explanation or solution.

When customers have problems that need to be answered immediately, phones are the best medium to use. Phones connect customers directly to reps and create a human interaction between the customer and the business. Both parties hear each other's tone and can gauge the severity of the situation. This human element is a major factor in creating delightful customer experiences.

Phones come in handy most when there's a frustrated or angry customer. These customers are most likely to churn and require your team to provide a personalized solution. Your team can use soft communication skills to appease the customer and prevent costly escalations. These responses appear more genuine on the phone because reps have less time to formulate an answer.

The most common flaw with phone support is the wait time. Strive for shorter wait times as 33% of customers are frustrated by being waiting on hold. Customers hate being put on hold, and it's a determining factor for customer churn .

Chat is one of the most flexible customer service channels. It can solve a high volume of simple problems or provide detailed support for complex ones. Businesses continue to adopt chat because of its versatility as well as the improvement in efficiency it provides for customer service reps.

When it comes to solving customer needs, chat can be used to solve almost any problem. Simple and common questions can be answered with chatbots that automate the customer service process. For more advanced roadblocks, reps can integrate customer service tools into their chat software to help them diagnose and resolve issues.

The limitations of chat are similar to those of email. However, since the interaction is live, any lack of clarity between the two parties can drastically impact troubleshooting. As a former chat rep, there were plenty of times where I struggled to get on the same page as my customer. Even though we resolved the issue, that miscommunication negatively impacted the customer's experience.

4. Social Media

Social media is a relatively new customer service channel. While it's been around for over a decade, businesses are now beginning to adopt it as a viable service option. That's because social media lets customers immediately report an issue. And since that report is public, customer service teams are more motivated to resolve the customer's problem.

Social media is an excellent channel for mass communication, which is particularly useful during a business crisis. When a crisis occurs, your customers' product and service needs become the primary concern of your organization. Social media is an effective tool for communicating with your customers in bulk. With a social media crisis management plan , your team can continue to fulfill customer needs during critical situations.

Social media is different from other types of customer service because it empowers the customer the most. Customers tend to have more urgent needs and expect instant responses from your accounts. While this type of service presents an enormous opportunity, it also places tremendous pressure on your reps to fulfill customer demand. Be sure your team is equipped with proper social media management tools before you offer routine support.

5. In Person

As the oldest form of customer service, you're probably familiar with working in person with customers. Brands who have brick-and-mortar stores must offer this service for customers living near their locations. This fulfills a convenience need as customers can purchase and return a product without having to ship it back to the company through an online service.

In-person customer service is great for businesses with strong service personnel. Without dedicated employees, your customer service team won't be able to fulfill your customers' product or service needs. Successful teams have reps who are determined to provide above-and-beyond customer service .

5. Call Back Service

Sometimes it's not about how quickly your business can provide a solution, but rather how efficient you can make the service experience. For example, say a customer has a simple question about pricing that should only take a few minutes to answer, but their expected wait time for phone service is over 15 minutes. Rather than making this customer spend more time on hold than actually speaking with a representative, you can offer a call back service where your team reaches out to the customer as soon as the next rep is available.

Another situation where this type of service comes in handy is with text-based mediums like email and live chat. In some cases, these channels aren't ideal for troubleshooting and can lead to friction if the case isn't transferred to another platform. Having a call back service available allows customers to schedule time to speak directly with reps, particularly when they feel like they aren't gaining progress on their case. Instead of having to create a completely new support ticket , call backs seamlessly transition the conversation to a more effective channel.

6. Customer Self-Service

Self-service teaches your customers how to solve problems independently from your support team. Rather than calling or emailing your business whenever they need assistance, customers can navigate to your knowledge base and access resources that help them troubleshoot issues on their own. Not only does this get customers faster solutions, but it also saves them from having to open a ticket with your team. This makes the experience feel much less like a formal support case and more like a quick roadblock that your customers can handle on their own.

Self-service is advantageous for your team's productivity as well. If more customers use your knowledge base, less will call or email your team for help. This will free your reps up more to focus on complex service cases that require a longer time commitment.

7. Interactive Virtual Assistant

Chatbots are no longer novelties that customer service teams use to show off their technological prowess. Now, they're integral pieces of support strategies as they act more like interactive virtual assistants than simple, question-and-answer bots. Today's chatbots are powered by innovative AI technology that interprets customer needs and can walk people through step-by-step solutions.

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The image above shows a perfect example of how useful today's virtual assistants can be. In this situation, the customer is learning how to use their new car — a product that typically offers a lot of unique features and an extensive operator's manual. To help new users navigate the car's basic features, this brand offers an augmented reality tour hosted by a virtual assistant. The user simply has to scroll their camera over different parts of the car and the chatbot will tell them everything they need to know.

Interactive features like this show that you're investing in more than just product development. You're thinking about how you'll support customers and what services you can adopt that will make their lives easier. Customers pay attention to this type of customer service and it can often be a reason why many will return to your business.

8. Integrated Customer Service

Integrated service can be described as all of the little things your brand does to remove pain points from the customer experience. Some of this is proactive, like sending customers an automated newsletter that informs them about major updates or announcements, and some of it is reactive, like pinging a customer success manager whenever someone submits negative feedback to your team.

Even though these pain points may seem small, they add up over time if left unchecked. The best way to remove most of these points of friction is to adopt automation as you grow your customer base. Automated customer service tools like ticketing systems, help desks, and workflows help your team keep pace with increasing customer demand. This technology lets you maintain that same level of personalized customer service even as more people reach out to your business for support.

There's no "best" type of customer service. Each medium complements the other and optimizes your overall performance when used together. This creates an omni-channel experience for your customers which will keep them coming back for more.

What do customers want from a typical customer service situation?

It’s important to note that customer service is reactive. That said, there are a few things to keep in mind to ensure you’re providing excellent customer service.

• Listen : While it’s normal to want to quickly get customers in and out of your service queue, it’s important to actually listen to what their issue is before giving them a solution. They may have a more nuanced issue that a boilerplate response can’t provide. There’s nothing more frustrating than providing customers with a canned response that doesn’t actually solve their issue. Automation is great, but just ensure that it is helping customers.
• Don’t Make Customers Repeat Information: No one wants to answer or submit the same questions repeatedly . Not only is it inconvenient, it shows the customer that no one is listening or paying attention. If you have a ticketing system, review the customer’s history or profile to get familiar with their situation before responding.
• Be Pleasant: Tone is much harder to convey over written communication and can unintentionally come across as cold. To convey some warmth you could introduce phrases like “I’d be happy to help with that,” or “Hope your day/week is going well.”
• Be Responsive : Not only do customers want their problem solved, but they prefer it’s resolved quickly. If you can’t solve their issue easily when they first contact you, set expectations around when it will be resolved (24hrs, 2 business days?) and keep them in the loop. Don’t ghost them.

What Customers Want

• Simple Solutions
• Personalization
• Transparency
• Accessibility

Each customer has their own unique needs, but there are a few that are universal.

1. Simple Solutions

While your product or service may run using a complex set of algorithms and procedures, customers don’t need to know that. They simply want a solution that resolves their issue with as little fuss as possible. Keep your messaging simple and focus on how your brand will solve the customer’s problem.

2. Personalization

Treat your customers like people and not numbers on a spreadsheet. Zendesk found that 54% of customers expect all experiences to be personalized. Use their name in communications and tailor your messaging to the buyer persona they most closely align with. Adding a personal touch when it comes to marketing lets customers know that their needs are at the forefront of your brand’s mission.

Does your product or service outperform the competition or provide a more cost effective solution for consumers? If so, drive that point home in your messaging. Explain how and why they should choose your product or service over others on the market. How will customers benefit when they choose your brand?

4. Transparency

One of the easiest ways to build trust with consumers is to be transparent. No one wants to feel duped by disingenuous, bait-and-switch advertising. Be honest about your product or service’s capabilities and pricing whenever possible.

5. Accessibility

While it is always encouraged to empower customers to help themselves with features like a knowledge base, getting extra assistance when they need it shouldn’t be difficult. Whether it’s phone, email, or chat support, it’s important to be responsive to consumer needs. At the beginning of this article we identified accessibility as one of the most common types of customer needs. If your team is unresponsive to their needs, customers will trade your brand in for a competitor that fills the gap.

Understanding Customer Needs and Expectations

One of the best things you can do is continue learning based on the types of issues that come up so that you can proactively address consumer needs and continue improving on the experience.

While the process requires quite a bit of legwork, the results will be instrumental in the success of your brand. Once you understand customer needs and expectations, you can work towards delighting them with your product.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in September 2020 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

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Your Meetings Need to Be Trauma-Informed

Put physical safety, psychological well-being, and empowerment on your agenda.

Posted May 15, 2024 | Reviewed by Davia Sills

• What Is Trauma?
• Find counselling to heal from trauma
• Up to 90 percent of Americans will have experienced a traumatic event by the time they reach 65.
• Meetings need to be trauma-informed to achieve their goals without inadvertently causing re-harm.
• Meetings should prioritize physical safety, psychological well-being, and participant empowerment.

This post was co-authored by Shelley Rood Wernick, MBA, Managing Director of the Jewish Federations’ Center on Holocaust Survivor Care and Institute on Aging and Trauma.

Every day in the United States, 11 million meetings are held , which is over 4 billion meetings per year. If you’re the one planning the meeting, you’re likely thinking about the schedule, the agenda, the stakeholders, and, of course, the food. However, if participants don’t feel safe to attend and engage due to past trauma, the meeting goals may not be achieved.

Considering that up to 90 percent of Americans will have experienced a traumatic event by the time they reach 65, your meetings need to be trauma-informed if you are to achieve the goals of the meeting without inadvertently causing re-harm.

Meetings can’t be successful if someone’s heart races because they must recall their difficult childhood during an icebreaker prompt. They can’t be successful if someone is forced to sit next to a workplace bully . They can’t be successful if someone is worried that the picture taken in this meeting will end up posted on social media without their consent.

What is trauma?

Trauma results from an event that has a lasting impact on the individual. It can stem from a serious injury or illness, a natural disaster, terrorism, sexual assault , domestic abuse, incarceration, war, witnessing a death, systemic discrimination , incidents in the workplace , vicarious trauma in the helping professions, and even institutional betrayal, among other instances.

The same event can be traumatic for one person but not for another. And while we can’t always know who will be impacted, we can know that trauma shatters a person’s sense of safety and sense of control .

From years of working with Holocaust survivors, the Jewish Federations’ Center on Holocaust Survivor Care and Institute on Aging and Trauma has championed person-centered, trauma-informed (PCTI) approaches beyond older adult care to extend to meetings and gatherings. The PCTI framework infuses knowledge about trauma into organizational programs, policies, and procedures.

Here are some steps you can take to increase the likelihood of creating a safe, inclusive environment that achieves your meeting goals while avoiding unintentional harm. Some steps may work better for regular staff meetings, while others may be more applicable to meetings in new or unfamiliar settings.

Reinforce physical safety

Because trauma ruptures a person’s sense of safety , it is important to restore the sense of physical safety in a meeting. One way to do this is by letting participants know exactly what the procedure will be if there is a drill or real emergency. For example, you might show people where the emergency exits are or have a diagram available in the meeting materials. This might feel like a waste of time to some participants, but for those who have experienced a traumatic event, it can mitigate anxiety .

Another consideration is to ensure adequate spacing between seats so that participants have personal space and don’t feel closed in. Social distancing became important during the COVID-19 pandemic, and personal space remains a factor for people who are concerned about communicable diseases. While it may be tempting to assign seats to encourage people to “mix it up,” letting people choose their seats empowers them to avoid unsafe situations, such as sitting next to someone who has harassed them or being seated far away from the nearest exit.  

For Deborah, who witnessed the second plane fly into the Twin Towers on 9/11 from her office window, sitting near the door feels critical to her sense of physical safety. She needs to know that she can escape the room as quickly as possible.

Other ways to boost physical safety include ensuring adequate lighting, enforcing security measures such as not propping doors open, not letting people follow someone in through a locked door, and creating groups of walkers to bus or subway stops. If physical safety measures impede on a person’s autonomy and choices—such as limiting the number of entrance points to the meeting room—communicate how and why these decisions were made.

Promote psychological safety

Safety isn’t just about physical protection. If someone has been betrayed by a person or institution they trust , their sense of psychological safety may be violated. They may be worried that their contributions to the meeting may be rejected, ridiculed, reprimanded—or even retaliated against. 

One way to address this is to adopt ground rules that everyone agrees to. These may include “speak from your own personal experience,” “assume positive intent,” or “be curious rather than judgmental.” Then, ask the meeting participants to share what else they might need to feel comfortable and build that in. You can follow up after a meeting with an affirmative comment such as “I appreciated what you said because I think a lot of staff feel that way.”

Transparency can promote trust, so consider ways of delivering on that. For example, let people know how meeting notes will be used. Ask for permission before taking photos and let them know how photos will be used. Let attendees know if the schedule has changed—and why. Be proactive in communicating the meeting’s goals and sharing the process for feedback. Show how prior feedback resulted in changes, so participants gain confidence that feedback will be taken seriously.

And while many of us use the term “safe space” to invite participants to share openly, this still might not feel safe enough for people whose sense of safety has been violated. With that in mind, have clearly communicated protocols should there be an incident or breach of trust—and then make it easy for people to follow those protocols.

Empower participants

Trauma shatters a person’s sense of control over their destiny. It renders their needs unimportant or irrelevant. Whether someone is a survivor of domestic violence or of a life-threatening illness, that person has faced threats beyond their control. When participants are empowered with a sense of control, they are more likely to be invested in the outcomes of the meeting and do their best work.

This can be as simple as giving participants permission to take care of their physical and psychological needs. For example, say, “Some of this information may be difficult to hear, so if you need to leave the room, please do so.” Or, “We’ll be taking a break at 11:30, but you’re welcome to take care of your needs at any time.” By empowering people to protect and care for their bodies and minds, they won’t feel like they’re “breaking the rules” to do what they need.

Another way to reduce the likelihood of unintentionally causing a trauma response is to offer choices where possible and give participants a say in the goals and agenda. Solicit participants to contribute to the agenda via email, in one-on-one conversations, or at the end of a previous meeting’s agenda. Share the agenda in advance so people feel prepared to contribute. Build upon an individual’s strengths or experiences by inviting them to lead a section of the agenda, facilitate a breakout session, or present a group project.

Give participants language to advocate for how much or little they want to participate. Deborah offers participants the opportunity to “play” (meaning they want to speak up), “pause” (they might want to share something later), and “pass” (they don’t want to respond). She also asks other participants not to read into those requests.

A Universal Approach

You’re not going to know all the traumatic events that have happened to the people in your meetings, and that’s OK. But by prioritizing physical safety, psychological well-being, and participant empowerment, you are more likely to achieve your meeting’s goals. You will show attendees that their participation is valuable, and you will actively resist re-harming someone who has experienced trauma.

Deborah Grayson Riegel, MSW, is a keynote speaker, executive coach, and corporate leadership communication consultant

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How to Talk to an Employee Who Isn’t Meeting Expectations

• Jenny Fernandez

It’s an opportunity to address the gap between the work they’re delivering and the company’s goals.

Approaching a conversation about improving an employee’s performance requires preparation, empathy, and a focus on collaboration. Even though hearing the truth about their current performance will be tough and potentially hurtful, it’s a teaching moment managers must embrace to help them become more resilient and adept at problem-solving and developing professional relationships. The author offers several strategies for treating difficult performance conversations not as fault-finding missions, but instead as opportunities to work collaboratively to define a shared commitment to growth and development.

As a leadership and team coach, I frequently encounter situations where managers feel ill-equipped to give their team members negative performance feedback. These conversations can be particularly challenging because the stakes are high for both sides. Unfavorable performance reviews and ratings come with tangible consequences for an employee’s compensation and career progression. Further, if the negative feedback is a surprise to them, it might prompt them to start looking for a new job.

• Jenny Fernandez , MBA, is an executive and team coach, Columbia and NYU faculty, and future of work and brand strategist. She works with senior leaders and their teams to become more collaborative, innovative, and resilient. Her work spans Fortune 500 companies, startups, and higher education. Jenny has been recognized by LinkedIn as a “Top Voice in Executive Coaching, Leadership Development, and Personal Branding” and was invited to join the prestigious Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches community. She is a Gen Z advocate. Connect with her on LinkedIn .

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• Hillsborough County Declares May 2024 as Problem-Solving Court Month

Thirteenth Judicial Circuit's Problem-Solving Courts honored for hard work and commitment to the safety of the community.

During its May 15 meeting , the Hillsborough County Board of County Commissioners presented a proclamation declaring May 2024 as Problem-Solving Court Month . Katherine Essrig, circuit court judge of the Thirteenth Judicial Circuit, accepted the recognition.

Problem-Solving Court Month recognizes the practitioners and participants who helped in the success of problem-solving courts and the significant contributions they have made, and continue to make, in reducing drug usage and crime in Florida and throughout the nation. In 2023, the Thirteenth Judicial Circuit's Problem-Solving Courts served 946 participants, including 103 children, either directly or through services provided to their parents through the dependency system.

After accepting the proclamation, Essrig thanked the Board and said that Hillsborough County has been an integral partner in helping the Thirteenth Judicial Circuit's Problem-Solving Courts thrive.

"We appreciate [the County] bringing to light the fact that this is a special month, and that it does recognize problem-solving courts," she said. "We do things differently. We need to look at people who come before us as individuals and we need to recognize why they might be there and what problems underlie them."

Other proclamations

The Board also presented a proclamation declaring May 2024 as Community Action Month .

Meeting recap

Interested in all the details about the latest BOCC meeting? Here is a full recap .

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