Blog - IT CSI

“People ask me questions, lost in confusion
Well – I tell them there’s no problem, only solutions”

John Lennon – “Watching the Wheels “

We at Thinking Dimensions Global have our own definition of Convergent Thinking and yes it does fit in with John Lennon’s lyrics – though he did pen the lyrics before we came up with the definition. We see convergent thinking as “reflecting a tendency to analyse relationships between several parts of a problem and to find useful links, connections or patterns.”

For those of you who are picking up this blog for the first time there are actually two previous instalments, if I can call them that! In the first instalment we examined how we should arrive at the “Problem Statement”. The second instalment looked at how we should use divergent thinking to provide our team with the information around the problem statement.

This, the third instalment is all about identifying the best sources to supply us with relevant and critical  information, if we get it right we can get to the root cause with a minimum of fuss  and bother, if we get it wrong, well we could spend some time going round in square circles!

You have probably guessed that this part is all about questioning, about asking the right questions of the right people and we will be sure to put you on the fast track towards solving the problem.

When we work through this stage at Thinking Dimensions we tend to work off a template and that ensures we don’t miss out any of the steps, we advocate that all our clients carry these templates or “crib cards” around with them. It is important that they use them whenever they get into a situation that needs the participation from team members who may not be readily at hand or even at the same location.

Some of the rules that we apply and ensure we come up with the right results every time are

•      Question to the Void
•      Record only factual information – no guessing
•      It helps to use your logic, experience and gut feel (intuition)

Over a period of time the questions have been developed and refined to allow for clarification of detail into just 7 dimensions. This allows the problem to be described in detail to obtain a clear picture of the deviation while at the same time providing a basis for testing possible causes at a later stage.

Using the above table if we take a simple example to illustrate just how it should be used you can substitute an example of your own. If I go back to a previous blog on the development of the “State the Problem” and use that as an example.http://itrcablog.thinkingdimensionsglobal.com/?p=29

The problem statement was:

The marketing workstation is unable to print colour.

Now let’s populate the table and see what we get!

What we have accomplished to date is a more detailed understanding the problem dimensions that occur in our rather simple example. Following this same track in the follow up blog we will examine WHO we should include in our team to determine the root cause.