Could this meeting have been an email?
Being mindful about how you use your colleagues’ time is important in any job. At the same time, teams are stronger through collaboration and working together. To decide how best to balance working styles and the needs of a task, it makes sense to take a step back and explore your options.
Complex problems are often vague and have many possible solutions. The Meta-Problem Method may lead you far away from the dilemma that started your quest. That’s because the method forces you to clarify what you really want and what you are willing to give up. It enables you to compare objectively the possible pathways and their trade offs. It prevents you locking into solutions mode too early and then doubling down on solving a low-yield problem that does not serve your goals as well as the alternatives. At the end of this process, you will have a better understanding of your priorities and how to achieve them.
Steps in the Meta-Problem Method
Dilemma
The high-level issue you are trying to address
Design the best way to structure collaboration in a team.
Goal
The changes you want to make to address the dilemma. There are usually many options.
Supporting goals:
- People have time to do focused work
- The right people are included in a decision
Other goals could include improved collaboration skills, greater team satisfaction, and greater decisiveness.
Problem Space
The set of problems you could chose to solve to advance your goals, plus the constraints that hold you back.
Example Problems:
- How can people have enough time to do focused work? Maybe the problem to solve is “Which tasks can be handled strictly by email?”
- How can we ensure the right people are included in a decision? Maybe the problem to solve is “Who are the stakeholders for this decision and how can they best work together to make a choice?”
There are many other potential problems to solve related to team collaboration. Each goal has many possible problems we could link to it. Are there other problems linked to these first two goals? Which options come to mind for the other goals?
High-Yield Problems
Sometimes solving one problem helps make progress towards several goals. In this step, we identify these “two-for-the-price-of-one” problems.
Which options will advance more than one goal?
- Creating structured guides for when to send an email and when to schedule a meeting is likely to reduce meetings and could improve collaboration skills and increase team satisfaction. However, in some environments a structured approach would create new inefficiencies.
- Trainings on stakeholder management can help ensure all members of the team know how to recognize who should be in a meeting and when a meeting is needed. However, this strategy may lower team satisfaction if it is introduced poorly and may not improve the meeting quality.
There are many potential solutions that will have varying effects on the set of goals. Which alternatives improve the most important goals? How might the unknown change the right path forward? What other possible solutions are there to address the dilemma?
Problem Selection
Which of the many possible options in the high-yield problem step is the best set to address the dilemma?
- Which solutions make the most sense as a colleague?
- Which solutions will best address the dilemma?
- Which solutions will deliver the best outcome for the least amount of time, effort and money?
Implement, Learn and Adapt
Check continuously that you are still solving the best problem, as new information emerges.
Observe and learn as you go. As new information reveals itself, check continuously that you’re still solving the right problem.