“Thinking Outside The Box” Is This A Cliché Or Really Working?

Mar 25, 2015 4:25:00 PM


creativitydemandsextraeffort

If you want to put fear in the hearts of IT Professionals, ask them to “think out of the box.” It is not that they cannot do it rather than the fact that they are not used to doing that in dealing with IT problems and Incidents.


I’ve been involved in many sessions with IT teams in Incident Investigation situations and I’ve come to the following conclusions as to why this is a problem with IT personnel:

  1. Most people do not associate “thinking outside the box” with that of incident investigation. This function is normally associate with trying to identify the truth and not to be creative about the situation. That is a basic pitfall, as I will explain later.

  2. IT Professionals are used to working with hard facts at all times; proving and disproving theories based on logic as it is known at that point in time. Effective problem solving is normally a combination of rational and intuitive thinking, which when combined will give you a quick and effective way of arriving at certain hypotheses.


Is this a cliché? No it is not and it is really working very well.
The aim is to get a quick factual snapshot of what is really happening and then to use SME intuition and gut feel to generate possible answers. We’ve found over many years of doing this that in 99% of cases the IT professional would have an idea of what could be causing the incident or what would be the best way to restore a service. The problem is that you might have at least six different suggestions and you do not know which is correct in this case. 

So, we would like to “tap” this intuition of the SME more effectively during incident investigations and that is why we need them to be “thinking outside the box.” The clinical fact is that if we do get to the stage where we need to do a formal analysis it means that the SME’s could not provide a solution for the problem. If this has been going on for atleast 6 hours or more we could make a fair assumption that all the resident theories have been exhausted.

Therefore, at this juncture we need to ask the SME to dig deep into their experience and their own knowledge base to come up with “out of the box” suggestions. We now ask them the following questions to “jumpstart their thinking:”

  1. Outside of your own function, what do you think could have happened that could have influenced this situation? For example: Did anybody change a code or certificate?

  2. What other system, process, hardware, software or something similar could have had an influence on your situation? Maybe there was an integration problem, maybe someone cleared their disc and deleted your driver?

When set-up correctly; we normally do not have a problem getting the SME to be prolific in contributing theories. You must however, create an environment where this is OKAY and the SME must feel they are encouraged to do this and that there is no suggestion that any outcomes would be held against them.

The key is to get them to be “creative” in this way and then to allow them to test these theories against their collective logic in order for them to arrive at an answer that eluded them up to this point. You can imagine the pride and excitement when they arrive at new highly probable causes to be verified.

 Download the Free Ebook: Quality Information Generation

Mat-thys Fourie

Written by Mat-thys Fourie

Washington, DC, United States | Founder & Chairman of Thinking Dimensions Global
Mr. Fourie is a thought leader on how IT professionals apply Incident Investigation techniques on a repeatable and sustainable basis within their organizations. His strength lies in customizing and embedding the various techniques within existing CSI, Incident and Problem Management practices.

SIGN UP TO OUR NEWSLETTER

Sign up for our newsletter and receive updates that will help your business to grow. Do not waste time, we're here for you.