Solution-Building™: The Rules, Part 1

Starting with this entry, I will be describing Solution-Building much more directly. The last several posts have provided some of the background thinking that led to the formulation of a series of guidelines, or rules, for using Solution-Building as a framework for better decision-making and problem-solving. 

There are nine of these guidelines. Some are attitudinal, some behavioral. Taken as a group, they reflect the principles of commitment, objectivity, and courtesy that I have discussed earlier. My partner authors and I spent a great deal of time discussing them and how they fit together into a system that can result in more effective decisions and solutions. 

My goal in this series of posts will be to introduce, describe, and make some suggestions about implementing each of the guidelines.

Guideline Number One: Everyone plays by the same rules

You may look at this one and think “But we do play by the same rules.” And then, if you think further about your own experiences working with groups to make decisions or solve problems, you may realize that this isn’t always the case. Group participants each have their own personalities and their own internal rules and expectations of what is going to happen and who in the group they can work with. When you have a group of, say, nine people, you are likely to have nine different sets of these personalized rules, personalities, attitudes, likes and dislikes, and expectations. 

Any group tasked with making a decision, a recommendation, a plan, or solving a problem or issue is actually a team. Teams work together to come up with the best result. In sports, the result you are after is to win. For team sports like baseball, soccer, etc., the team has to work together with the team goal in mind rather than personal goals. 

Additionally, both teams need to be playing by the same rules. What would happen, for instance, if you had Manchester United (for those not soccer fans, this is one of the premier teams in the UK – no slight to any other team anywhere else in the world, by the way!) playing a game with the All Blacks, New Zealand’s National Rugby Union team? Or maybe I should say trying to play a game with them. The result would be chaos, even though each team is tops in its sport. 

I will add a personal experience of mine related to this point. When my wife and I were living in Australia many years ago, we were playing football with a pickup group on a beach near Adelaide one sunny afternoon. Australian rules football and US gridiron football use a ball of essentially the same size and shape and the aim is the same: to move the ball up and down the field, carrying and occasionally throwing the ball, to cross a goal line. At one point, I threw a standard gridiron football forward spiral pass. The game came to an immediate halt with all the Aussies yelling at me: “You can’t do that!” It turns out that forward passes are not legal in Aussie rules footie; they can only throw lateral and backward and instead of spirals the ball is basically tossed underhanded and it tumbles through the air. I caused a bit of chaos, but we finished friends and I spent the rest of the afternoon giving lessons in how to throw a forward spiral pass!

This also applies to what we generally consider to be single-player sports: tennis, golf, boxing car racing, even gymnastics. There is a team behind each of these players and athletes (or drivers or gymnasts) and, with no disrespect to the talents of the athlete, without the team they would not be anywhere near as ready and able to win. These trainers, coaches, caddies, pit crews, and heaven only knows how many others, are the team who support, encourage, and prepare the athlete for the competition. And the entire team knows and plays by the same rules.

One last example. What would happen if you are a chess player and sit down to your standard 8 by 8 board, with your pieces in place and your opponent sat down opposite you and set up rows of checkers? Neither of you can succeed (win) since you are not even playing close to the same game. Not playing by the same rules means no positive result for anyone.

In a business situation, success is defined a bit differently than in sports, though the practical result is quite similar. You have a goal to achieve and the purpose of any team is to reach it. In sports, the goal is the highest (or lowest in, for example, golf) score; a better score than your opponent and, thus, a win. In business, the goal is success in reaching company goals, whatever they may be.

In Solution-Building, we define the purpose of the group, it’s reason for existence, at the outset of the process, whether it is decision-making or problem-solving, and make certain every member of the group, the team, understands what the problem is, why it needs to be dealt with, and therefore what the goal of the process is to be. That agreement is critical to success. In current parlance, we all need to be on the same page. 

Going back to sports, everyone on the team works to get the win. This means that they put their own personal goals aside so that the team wins. In baseball that may mean a sacrifice fly instead of reaching for the home run. In business, this may mean putting personal ambition on the back burner to get the best solution to the issue. In other words, the best solution for the team.

In Solution-Building, the entire team has their eyes on the same horizon, which is the best possible result of the discussion and debate.

“But,” you may also think, “what are the rules?” We will start there next time.