Solution-Building™: An Introduction, Part 1

At the end of the last post, I said that I would be introducing Solution-Building in the first of a series of posts discussing this process as an alternative to standard compromise for making decisions and solving problems. In this post I will start by giving some background about Solution-Building and discuss the basic philosophy of this approach to decision-making and problem-solving.

Solution-Building is structured around a series of nine principles, or rules, that help guide the behaviors and attitudes of the members of a group whose purpose is to make a decision, or decisions, and/or to solve problems, and then implement them. In this series of posts I will be describing these principles and discussing their rationales as well as making suggestions as to how to actually apply them. 

In the last several posts I have discussed the drawbacks to compromise as it is currently practiced. I remind you that I did not say that compromise is “bad” or that it does not ever work; just that the problems I discussed present opportunities for the process to fail to ultimately deliver the results originally desired. 

The structure of Solution-Building is designed to provide ways to overcome those drawbacks and significantly increase the likelihood of a successful result. However, as with any process there are still caveats. 

The first caveat is commitment. The group must be committed to arriving at a workable solution, not just something they cobble together and hope will work if everyone tries. This means being willing to put in the necessary effort to arrive at a workable solution. 

Part of being committed and willing is not letting our relationships with other members of the group, both positive and negative, get in the way of getting to the solution. How many times have you seen colleagues reject an idea put forth by a group member they do not like? Have you ever found yourself doing that? What about the reverse: supporting an idea just because a person you like is proposing it? 

This leads to another caveat: objectivity. Just because your friend puts forth an idea does not mean you have any obligation to support it. Conversely, just because someone you do not like puts their idea forward does not mean you should ignore or put it down. 

This applies to your own ideas as well. Just because it is your idea doesn’t mean it is automatically superior to others or the best on offer. Face it; we can be blind to the flaws in our own ideas, sometimes profoundly. Objectivity requires that we understand that blindness and set it aside. 

In other words, objectivity means looking at the idea, not the source, and considering it only on its merits. This means all ideas that are part of the discussion, no matter who they come from.

A part of objectivity is dealing with ego, a topic mentioned in the previous post. Ego is, in and of itself, not a bad thing since it helps us work to the best of our capacity to participate in our tasks and to believe we can do those tasks with a degree of excellence. But ego that goes beyond that, to the point that we believe we are better, smarter, quicker than others, is too often a roadblock to objectivity. 

It is much easier to recognize that the ego of another person is a problem than to see the same in ourselves. Suppressing the negative side of ego is a part not only of objectivity but also the commitment to the task. 

Another caveat is courtesy. This is an essential component of human interactions. That statement may seem obvious but think for a bit about times you have been working with a group of people and someone got unhappy, or perhaps downright angry and nasty, and began to throw bad language and insults around the group. Did anything positive come out of the meeting? Did everyone, or nearly everyone, also get angry? Some would most likely have shut down but others may have risen (or descended?) to the same level and joined in the nastiness. This effectively destroys the ability to function effectively and also affects all aspects of working relationships.

Discourtesy leads to enmity and enmity is the assassin of objectivity. 

I said above that courtesy is an essential component of human interactions. The group dynamic of the interplay of the variations of people’s personalities, work styles, ambitions, goals, aspirations, interests, and biases, to name just a few, is complex and can be a minefield that requires careful negotiation when working together to reach decisions. Courtesy is the glue that helps bind a group together irrespective of all those various factors; without it the group will spend more time butting heads than doing the business that is needed.

As we all know, it can be very difficult to deal with people we do not like or even actively dislike. Courtesy must extend to those as well, or it will be difficult to work as a group. We will start the next posting talking about this topic.