Consulting
If you’re looking for help solving your problem, whether as a sounding board for your analysis or as a lead for designing and conducting your solution process, please contact me.
Training
If you have the luxury to think longer term, you might prefer a training approach to a consulting one. A typical consulting engagement helps you solve a particular problem. But the core of the effort is on solving that problem, not on transmitting the problem-solving capability to your organization.
In contrast, training a team within your organization to solve problems based on a solid, hypothesis-driven approach has an excellent return on investment: by investing a few hours in the training of key personnel, you can significantly improve their performance on every project they will work on subsequently.
We offer various training opportunities, ranging from a one-hour webinar—to cover the basic theoretical concepts—to a 40h workshop, where participants bring in their actual problem and get personalized coaching on resolving it.
An ideal configuration is to have at a group of 5 to 20 participants meet for four times, one day each time, over at least four weeks. This setup allows the group to cover the theory but spend most of our time on solving the participants’ actual problems. Each participant brings one problem that is causing them significant stress, and we use these as case studies, reviewing each several times over the workshop.
This setup is ideal for various reasons: having at least five participants enriches the feedback that each participant gets, helps develop a culture in the organization, and develops an ‘internal consultancy task force’.
Meeting for four days or a total time of 30h to 40h provides plenty of time to cover the material as it applies to the problems that the participants bring. We don’t cover the theory in a vacuum, rather, we apply it straight to an issue that is causing your organization significant effort.
Having at least one week between each session allows participants to work on their problem independently in between. That way, they have time to conduct the analysis and can get guidance along the entire problem resolution process.
In this configuration your organization has both long-term benefits—a core team that is trained in problem solving—and short-term ones: each participant has already solved one problem.
Please contact me to discuss options.
Tutorials and more
Analytical Problem Solving Slides – $20
This 40-slide presentation is a summary of our problem-solving approach. It explains how to 1. define the correct problem and its environment and 2. solve the problem using issue trees. Central themes include: how to create problem identification cards, how to develop issue trees, and how to improve trees, among other themes.
This is a fully editable PowerPoint file.