Now that we’ve discussed (1) a framework to identify the key problems on which you need to spend your time during any given period; and (2) how to allocate time and focus to attack those problems; we’ll now turn our attention to a practical methodology for actually solving them.

The Power of Diverse Teams

Just as problems and opportunities are often created by human imperfection, those same problems are solved, and opportunities leveraged, through the innovation, creativity and insights of people. That may sound old fashioned with the well-deserved excitement currently focused on technology like Artificial Intelligence and the high volume of work that has been effectively automated. These trends will continue and will doubtlessly enhance organizations’ capabilities. Just as certainly, though, there will continue to be a need for people in highly functioning organizations to use their creativity and problem-solving skills to leverage the next generation of tools and technology.

To do that, those people will be working in teams. As it turns out, the more varied background experience you can bring to a team, the more effective that team will be in solving problems.

II. Problem-Solving Approach

Once you’ve assembled your team, it’s time to get to work. But many project teams run into difficulties wrestling with issues like how to get started; ensuring they have framed the problem correctly; holding one another accountable; and keeping track of the progress and status of the project. Using the DMAIC problem-solving approach organized and tracked by an A3 report can help relieve all these potential pain points.

III. Using Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) Loops to Avoid Entropy

Over time, things tend to fall apart. Whether engineered machines like a car, living beings (like us), complex systems like a group of friends, or the avocado in your dorm fridge— things left unattended tend to decline in effectiveness. If there are physics majors in the class, they may know of this phenomenon as entropy— which (I’m told) is a measure of randomness. More commonly, the term is sometimes used by non-physics students to describe a tendency for things to break down— or for orderly systems to devolve toward randomness. In this section, we learn a simple process to intended to ward off entropy.