Action planning

and encourages colleagues to look for new ideas, challenging his or her views may be difficult if not impossible in many organizational and national cultures. This is one more reason why managers in both consulting firms and in client organizations should refrain from expressing a preference for one solution if the search for the best solution is to continue.

Success can be a serious barrier to creativity. In a successful company, management can easily become locked into methods and practices that have been its strong points, and may be unwilling to recognize that there can be an even better approach, or that owing to its success the company has stopped working on further improvements.

Excessive individualism and the failure to use teamwork is another serious barrier. If people work in a team examining a complex problem from various angles, a new idea put forward by one team member usually helps other members to widen their outlook, and to come up with other new ideas. Members of a team can not only help but also emulate each other.

The solution-after-next principle

This principle of breakthrough thinking7 suggests developing alternative solutions that take into consideration future needs. The principle states that the change or system you install now should be based on what the solution might be next time you work on the problem.

This implies anticipating future changes: in the environment, in demand for the client’s services or products, in competition and within the client organization itself. An obvious requirement is that, by adopting a new solution, the way is not blocked to further solutions that may become necessary in the future (e.g. by building a production capacity or a database that cannot be expanded). Viewing the problem and the solution from a future perspective helps to arrive at the best possible current solution. It may be useful to visualize an ideal future system. Even if such a system cannot be implemented immediately, certain elements will be usable and the vision of the future will improve the quality of the solution that will be adopted. Box 9.3 gives three checklists as pointers when searching for an ideal solution.

9.2Developing and evaluating alternatives

Preselecting ideas to be pursued

As mentioned in the previous section, in the search for innovative ideas judgement has to be deferred to avoid blocking the process of creative thinking. There comes a moment, however, when new ideas have to be sorted out, reviewed, discussed and assessed (e.g. very interesting; interesting; trivial; useless; not clear). Since it would be impossible to pursue a large number of ideas, a preselection must be made, e.g. only ideas classed as “very interesting” will be followed up.

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Box 9.3 Searching for an ideal solution – three checklists

A. To inspire group creativity you might:

(1)Prohibit any criticism when ideas are being generated, allowing a later time for judgement and assessment.

(2)Encourage free-wheeling, however wild the ideas that may emerge.

(3)Involve someone who is not a stakeholder in the project.

(4)Record all ideas so that each receives due consideration.

(5)Pose questions that stimulate or motivate creativity:

(a)What system or value-added services and outcomes would make us an acknowledged world leader?

(b)What would the solution be if we faced no constraints?

(c)What would the ideal system look like if we could achieve all the purposes larger than the one we selected?

(d)What would the solution look like if we started all over again (clean slate, green field, blank piece of paper)?

(6)Focus discussions on how to make suggested solutions work, rather than on why they won’t work. Play the believing game.

(7)In using all of these tools, have fun with humorous activities that stimulate imagination. In generating ideas, humour is a serious matter.

B. Here are some “red flags” to watch out for on your solution-finding journey:

●“We can’t go beyond our scope.”

●“Stay on your own turf.”

●“Don’t exceed the local budget.”

●“Let’s get on to the next problem.”

●“There’s only one correct solution for this problem.”

●“That’s totally unrealistic.”

●“Let’s get real here.”

●“In our department (group, organization) that’s not possible.”

●“That’s just not done in our industry (profession).”

●“It won’t work. Ten per cent of our customers want rhubarb pie.”

●“We can’t go back to zero.”

C. Always ask yourself these specific questions:

–Have I generated many solutions-after-next or ideal systems?

–How should we achieve these purposes if we had to start all over again?

–How do I see this purpose and each bigger purpose being accomplished ten years from now?

–What regular occurrences can help us develop the best ideal solution?

–What today is impossible to do but, if we could, would fundamentally change the business?

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–Am I seeing the right targets toward which our recommendations should lead?

–Have I looked for a second right answer? A third? A fourth?

Source: Excerpts from Ch. 6 (“The solution-after-next principle”), in G. Nadler and S. Hibino: Breakthrough thinking: The seven principles of creative problem solving (Rocklin, CA, Prima Publishing, 1994).

How many ideas should stay on a shortlist and what criteria to use in classifying certain ideas as “very interesting” are questions of judgement. The selection should be made in close collaboration with the client. The client may feel that several ideas could lead to acceptable solutions, but should also realize that parallel work on several solutions will probably increase the length and the cost of the assignment.

Working on alternatives

After the preliminary screening of ideas, the detailed design, systems development and planning work should in theory be started on all alternatives shortlisted. In practice a pragmatic attitude is needed since there may be insufficient resources for working on a number of possibilities simultaneously, and detailed design and planning of several alternatives may be inefficient if only one is to be retained.

A phased approach may help. For example, work may be started on two or three alternatives, but carried only to a pre-project or sketch-plan level. This will make it possible to collect more data, including tentative figures on potential costs and benefits. The pre-projects can then be evaluated with the conclusion that only one will be pursued further or, on the contrary, that the client wishes the design of two or more alternatives to be completed.

Another possibility is to start by developing the idea that received the highest preliminary rating. This alternative may be pursued as long as the facts show that it would provide a satisfying solution. It would be dropped, and work started on a second alternative, only if assessment revealed that the course of action taken was incorrect, or that the cost–benefit was not satisfactory.

It is true that these (and similar) approaches do not give a 100 per cent guarantee that the ideal solution will be found and applied. However, the solutions are being developed in real life, within given time, financial, human and other constraints. The ideal solution may be within the consultant’s and the client’s reach – but the time or cost required could be prohibitive.

Evaluating alternatives

It is clear that the evaluation of alternatives is not a one-off action to be undertaken at a defined point in time in the assignment. When data are collected and analysed, due regard should be given to the forthcoming evaluation

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exercises. At the beginning of the assignment, the consultant should define the reference period during which data will be collected for use in comparing new solutions with the existing ones. When action planning has started, a preliminary evaluation may be made in several steps to eliminate ideas and reduce the number of alternatives on which the consultant and the client will do detailed work. A comprehensive evaluation is required when the client finally opts for one particular alternative.

Some comments on the evaluation criteria may be useful. There are some comparatively easy cases, such as the choice between two or three machine tools (of different technical level, productivity, service and maintenance requirements, and price) for the same production operation. The criteria are limited in number and can be quantified, especially if production records are reasonably good. In contrast, there are complex cases, such as a major reorganization in a manufacturing company, an acquisition of another company or a new marketing strategy, which are very “open-ended”. There may be several alternatives. Personnel and training measures will be involved, and so on. In these cases some criteria lend themselves to fairly exact calculation of costs and benefits (e.g. the cost of training needed). Others do not (e.g. the greater effectiveness of decision-making following decentralization of authority and responsibility in marketing and product-policy matters, or the improved image of the company following a merger with a well-chosen partner).

In consulting on management and business issues, the following situations prevail:

–alternatives that are ideal by all criteria used are rare, and in most cases there is a need to compare positive and negative consequences of several alternatives;

–the number of criteria is high: certain basic criteria are met by all alternatives and further criteria have to be examined;

–some important criteria (especially environmental, social, cultural and political criteria) are difficult, if not impossible, to quantify;

–the evaluation involves different criteria that are not directly comparable (e.g. financial and political criteria);

–there is a strong subjective element in the evaluation: somebody has to decide how important various criteria are in the given case, and make the evaluation using the “soft” criteria in addition to hard data.

To overcome this last difficulty, and to increase the element of objectivity in subjective evaluations, various attempts have been made to associate numerical values with adjectival scales. The principle is to use a group of experts (from the client organization, the consulting firm or elsewhere) to assign points to particular criteria. The values thus obtained are then used in an evaluation model, e.g. in decision analysis. The scale may be as follows:

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