None of us want problems to pop up, but worse is ignoring them when they do. Discovering and resolving problems and deficiencies are one of the best ways to grow your business. At GreenMellen, we have multiple meetings every week (with different groups) to unpack and resolve issues that come up. Each one leads to slightly better strategies and processes, and compounded over the years they add up to be pretty amazing.
In our case, these are mostly problems that bubble up and we work through. Ideally, you can take it further and actively seek out problems. In Seth Godin’s book “The Song of Significance“, he shares this story from Paul Orfalea of Kinko’s:
When Paul Orfalea was building Kinko’s, he said that his best technique for growing the business was simple: he would walk into one of their stores and ask someone there to tell him about an innovation they’d implemented that was working (and then he’d tell all the other stores about it).
If you didn’t have an innovation to share, Paul let you know you needed to do better.
The first part of that is fantastic, and is essentially what we do. However, if someone on our team comes to a meeting without any problems, we don’t worry about that either. I can see the value in what Paul was doing, and it might be worth considering, but we have enough to work through already.
Another angle here could be the size of the company and the scale of the problems. In our case, we need to actively solve pretty much every problem that comes up. In Paul’s case, I suspect he got a lot of great ideas but he was able to ignore many of them and focus on the best ones. Paul’s desire to push for more problems simple gave him better ones to sort through, and not necessarily more tasks that absolutely had to be completed.
Either way, uncovering more problems is always a good thing, and I’m curious if you have any great techniques to sniff them out. If you do, please share in the comments below!
