Connected Concepts - Business Management Consulting Services

A Cloud Example: How a Business Solves Problems

Story Line: We want to achieve success in the operation of our business. One of the keys to business success is quickly solving business problems. Business problems generate undesirable effects, which will continue to exist, until the business problem is resolved. We understand our business better than anyone, and we are constantly trying to identify and solve our problems. We meet with mixed success. Sometimes we get good results and sometimes not. Most of the time we see improvements but not to the degree that we really expect. In almost all cases getting solutions takes too long. We may not be attacking the right problems or we may not be applying the best solutions, or both. We express the problem in the form of a cloud.

To surface the hidden assumptions underlying the core conflict only requires that we fill in the logical blank. For relationship arrows in the cloud, "In order to (have the tip of the arrow), We must (have the tail of the arrow), because...[logical blank]." For the conflict arrow, "There is a conflict because...[logical blank]." The "because" surfaces the hidden assumption(s). For example, to raise assumptions in our cloud: (see Fig 3, below)

Finding a way out of the conflict is to find an injection(s) based on the surfaced assumptions. Ask yourself what would you have to put in place in order to cause each assumption to be no longer valid or operative. For example: The conflict is based on the following assumption:
" It takes time to free up existing resources or to recruit or train new resources and wasted time is costing us significant amounts of our profits or potential profits. "

Injection 1:
We know our business better than anyone else, but we aren’t as expert in the application of effective problem solving techniques as we feel is needed, or we have the expertise but it is tied up on equally important problem solving projects. Therefore an injection, that when implemented will eliminate our conflict, would be:

" We will extend our organization’s expertise by utilizing expert consultants. "

Injection 2:
Eventually, we would prefer to have the combined expertise in-house or we feel we want to add to our internal resource capacity. So, we add a second injection:

" We will expand our organization's future expertise by acquiring training for our managers by utilizing our consulting resource as a source of training and knowledge transfer. "

If we succeed to take actions to break at least one of the assumptions underlying the cloud logic (so that the conflict no longer exists), it's associated arrow breaks - the conflict evaporates. Rather than continued compromise (pendulum effect) along the conflict arrow, we can have both necessary conditions fulfilled while achieving more of our objective. This is an example of the logical win-win. The cloud can be broken along any relationship arrow, although the best solutions usually come when we can break the cloud along the conflict arrow. Fig (4) shows the injections added to the diagram.