Debra Chantry-Taylor: How To Do IDS Properly and Stop Talking About the Same Issues Every Week

Debra Chantry-Taylor  00:00 

Because if you misidentify the issue, every solution you build afterwards will be wrong and you can't fix what you haven't actually understood. When you identify properly, the solution almost always reveals itself. The more your business grows, the more issues you'll have, because growth creates complexity. But you have to think as issues, as being opportunities asking the next layer of why, why is this happening? And you'll often discover that what you thought was the real issue was really just a symptom. 

Debra Chantry-Taylor  00:36 

Hi there, and welcome back to better business, Better Life. I'm your host, Debra Chantry-Taylor, business leadership coach, EOS implementer, family business advisor and passionate believer that you can build a better business and a better life. I'd like to ask a question of you today. Have you ever sat in a meeting and thought, hang on, haven't we talked about this before and the week before and the week before? Week after week, the same person brings up the same issue and it never quite gets fixed. Well, today we're going to look to change that. We're talking about the issues solving track. This is the fourth component in the Eos model, the issues component, and the issues solving track is, is the issues solving track is the IDS component, which stands for identify, discuss and solve. It's a really simple but powerful track that helps you tackle the real issues in your business. But here's the thing, so most teams don't actually do IDs properly. They skip ahead, they rush, they jump straight to fixing before they even know what's broken. So in this episode, I'm going to slow it right down for you. We'll unpack what IDs actually is. We'll work out how to use it properly, where people go wrong, and how to master the identify step, because that's where 80 to 85% your time should really be spent. We'll also take a look at the five wires, a fantastic root cause technique used by Toyota and taught at Harvard, and how to weave that into your solve step. So grab yourself a drink, grab your notebook, settle in, and let's get into it. So the reality is that every business has issues. It's perfectly normal. In fact, the more your business grows, the more issues you'll have, because growth creates complexity, but you have to think as issues, as being opportunities. I think Gino says that every single business will have about 137 issues that it goes through. You just need to think of these as opportunities to improve your business. What separates the high performing leadership teams from the rest is how they deal with those issues. So the truth is, most teams are pretty terrible at solving problems. They spend time on the wrong things, or they get stuck in circles, or they leave the meeting feeling really good, but nothing actually changes, and that's why we use the issue solving track in EOS or IDs. It's a rhythm for problem solving. So here's what you need to do in IDs. You take your issues list, all those things getting in the way of achieving your goals or all those opportunities, and for each one, you run it through three steps. The first is identify what is the real issue. What is the real root cause of what is going on. Step two is discuss what is really going on here, but also discuss all the possible options. And then step three is solve what's the action we're taking. Who owns it and when will it be done. So sounds pretty simple, right, as everything in the US does, but simple doesn't mean easy, and the trick is that most teams rush with the identify and the discuss and then wonder why their solutions don't stick. So today we're going to go deep on identify, how to do it properly, why it matters so much, and the specific questions that will really help you nail it all right. Step One Eye for identify, and honestly, this is where 80 to 85% of your problem solving time should be spent. Why is that? Because if you misidentify the issue, every solution you build afterwards will be wrong, and you can't fix what you haven't actually understood. So let me give you an example. A team might say something along these lines, our customer satisfaction has dropped. We need to train the team better. And that's where I would stop them and jump in and say, Hey, hang on. Is that the real issue? Or are you jumping to an answer? Because train the team better is already a solution, and we haven't even identified the real problem yet. So we need to frame the issue properly, and here's how to do it. Start with a clear, short statement, one or two sentences, and then turn it into a question. For example, our customer satisfaction has dropped. What is driving the drop in customer satisfaction? Do you see the difference? You've stated what's happening, but you've already kept your mind open. The question stops you from locking into an eye. Are too early, and that's the mindset we want and identify curious child, open, exploratory thinking about trying to get to the real root cause without jumping to a solution. Why does it even matter? When you start with a statement like we need to train the team, you've already assumed the cause, you've actually skipped straight to the solved part of the IDs. 

Debra Chantry-Taylor  05:22 

When you start with a question, what's driving the drop, you're telling your brain and your team. We don't actually know yet what the real issue is. Let's figure it out together. And that's where the real gold is. Now, the person who brings the issue to the table. We like to think of them as the issue champion, not the culprit. So it's really important that we assign an owner, but not in the way that people usually think. The owner is not the person who caused the issue. They're not necessarily the person who can solve it either. They're simply the champion, the one who takes responsibility for shepherding the issue through the process. They're bringing it to the table. They're going to ensure we actually come up with an answer at the end of it, they're also going to make sure it doesn't fall through the cracks. They gather the information, they keep the conversation alive, and they hold the team accountable, which means it's not about blame, it's about ownership and momentum. So once you've got that owner, the owner brings the issue to the table. They state it in one or two sentences, they frame it in a question. Now is the time for the team to start asking clarifying questions. And this should be where you should spend most of your time, and go really deep. So I always tell teams we're going to sit in identify until we're absolutely sure we're working on the right thing, and that means asking lots of clarifying questions, not just one or two, I mean, dozens of questions. Let me walk you through some of my favourites. One of them is, what exactly is happening, what's the specific gap or deviation? What does good look like, and how far off are we? When did it start? Is this a new issue or an old one resurfacing? Has it been getting better or worse, who is affected, which customers, departments, products or regions, are actually being affected by the issue? Where is the issue showing up? Is it isolated? Is it widespread? Which part of the process or customer journey does it appear in? Why might this be happening? What's changed recently? People, systems, priorities, expectations, and what's the consequence of that? What's it costing us, time, money, morale, reputation, and what happens if we don't fix it? What's not happening that should be which process, policy or behaviour isn't being followed? Are there any exceptions, where does this issue not occur, and what's different there. So you can see, when someone asks one of those questions, you don't move on too fast. It gives you the opportunity to get curious again and say, Tell me more about that. Asking the next layer of why, why is this happening? And you'll often discover that what you thought was the real issue was really just a symptom. So let me give you a client example, the not enough leads story. And I'm sure you've all heard this in your own business, a client once said to me, we don't have enough leads, classic surface issue. So we reframed it as a question, our lead numbers are down. What's driving the drop in leads? And then we asked clarifying questions. When did it start? Turns out, three months ago. What changed around that time we updated the website. What specifically changed was the contact form. What's the conversion rate now versus before? Turns out it dropped by 20% here's the real aha moment. The real issue wasn't not enough leads. It was that the website form changed and reduced the conversion rate. So now we're looking at a completely different fix, and one that saved them 1000s in unnecessary ad spend. Because, in reality, they could have spent a whole lot more money saying, We haven't got enough leads that pump up the Google ads, that pump more leads into the system. But it was something specific that had changed, and that's the real power of identify. If you're really getting to the root cause, you are then looking for the right solution to the root cause. I have an 80 to 85% rule. I think this is the part you should be spending 80 to 85% in your in your IDs. I would say 80 to 85% in the identify part of it, maybe 10 to 15% in discuss, which we'll come to in a moment, and then the last five to set 10% in solve, because when you identify properly, the solution almost always reveals itself. So once you've nailed the identify stage, you've got a clear, agreed issue framed as a question with context and data, and you've asked all the clarifying questions, then you move into discuss. And the trick with discuss is real discipline. It's not a free for all conversation. It's a focused exploration. The goal isn't to have everyone agree, it's to really uncover what the correct solution is. So good discussion sounds like, you know, here's what I'm seeing in the data, here's what I can. Customers said, I wonder if this process step is a bottleneck, and then you can start to think about what the potential solutions might be. And the whole point of the discussion part is to just discuss all the possible options. So again, we're not jumping directly to a solve what we're saying. If we now know what the real issue is, what are all the possible ways of actually solving this, and we've got to make sure we keep it factual, respectful and concise. We're not We're not confirming any more root issues. We're just trying to think about, how do we solve that root cause issue that we've come up with? And here's that other key thing with the discuss part, sometimes people think the person championing the issue, the person who brought the issue to the table is the person that actually has to come up the solution. And that's not the point at all. Because if it's a sales issue, and maybe the sales leader has brought it to the table, the reason they brought it to the table is because they can't solve it themselves, and so we don't need them to solve it. We just need them to own it, facilitate the discussion and actually help all of us think about ways to actually solve that. And I always say sometimes the person who's on a completely different department, a completely different function of the business, might well be the best person to come with a soul, because they will actually be thinking about it through a different lens. They haven't got their blinkers on. They're not stuck always thinking about things in the same way, they can actually approach it in a slightly different way. So discussing all the possible options means getting everybody involved in having a discussion about how we solve that issue. And then once you've got clarity, you move into the solve stage. And solve must mean action, not ideas. Not, let's talk about it again next week. Not. Let's talk a bit more about what's going on. It's about what we're actually going to do. Who owns it and when will it be done? And the solve has to be an action point that's going to be done the next seven days. So you've got to make sure that you have got something that will move the needle forward on this particular issue. It doesn't have to solve the entire issue. It just has to be a step forward that we can take in the next seven days. And this is how you solve more complex issues. Is you take a small bite sized chunk, you talk about what the real issue is, you talk about all the possible options, and then you just choose a small solve part, which is something you can do in the next seven days, so you can then bring it back in the next meeting, and then continue to solve it. I also mentioned the five whys technique, which is a thing from Toyota that is actually taught at Harvard, and this is where the five whys technique may also come in. So if you think about what the issue is, the issue is we might, might be we keep missing project deadlines. Why is that because our teams aren't updating the progress? Why is that because the project management tool isn't being used? Why is that because the new staff weren't trained? Why is that because the onboarding doesn't include tool training, and why is that because HR and ops never aligned on onboarding responsibilities? So when you start to use this five whys technique, you're questioning. What is the real root cause of it? It wasn't just about teams updating progress or not updating progress. It went right the way back to HR and ops never aligning on the onboarding responsibilities. So the root cause isn't lazy staff. It's no cross functional onboarding process, and that's what we've got to fix. And you fix it by creating one specific action. So we need to design and implement a joint HR ops onboarding checklist, including tool training by the end of the month. But that's not a seven day action item. So we need to make sure what is the first thing we can do? We agree that's the overall solution. What is the first thing we can do in the next seven days that will actually help us with that, and then we give ourselves a to do point that somebody owns, that they will actually do in the next seven days. That is a proper solve. Let me share another real world story. So a service based company I was working with was struggling with onboarding. Their target was 30 days, but it was taking 45 days, and they came into the meeting saying, we need to hire another person. And as always, I smiled and said, Okay, that's great, but first, what's the real issue? Because I always find that teams look for they need more people. They need more capacity. That's the first easy thing to go to. But what is the real issue? So I asked them to reframe it, and I asked them to state it in a sentence, and then to also ask the question. So the question that they gave was, our Client Onboarding is taking too long. What is driving the delay in onboarding? And then came the clarifying questions. So when did it start? Six months ago. Where's the delay happening collecting client documents? Why is that? Because clients get confused by multiple emails. What's the consequence? Revenue's delay. We've got unhappy clients by the end of the identifying asking all these clarifying questions, the team had total clarity. The discuss really confirmed. The bottleneck was inconsistent communication and the client being confused by their. Multiple emails, and the solve was creating a single online portal with a standard checklist and due dates. The result from really working through the IDS process properly was onboarding dropped from 45 days down to 28 days. That led to revenue improvement, the morale lifted, and no one had to hire extra staff. And that is the beauty of IDs done properly. So to recap, three parts to IDs, the issue solving track number one, identify, state the issue clearly, one or two sentences, ideally as a question. Then spend 80 to 85% of your time asking clarifying questions. Be really curious, not certain, and remember that the onia is the champion, not the culprit, and not the person who has to solve the issue. Discuss it. Keep it factual. Keep it focused. Keep it brief. Don't chase tangents. But at the same time, think about all the possible options that could solve the real root cause of the issue. 

Debra Chantry-Taylor  15:58 

And finally, the solve is acting on the root cause, breaking it down into bite size chunks, seven day action items, one owner, one action, one deadline. And it may not solve the entire issue, but it's a step towards solving it. So you can move forward in the next seven days, when you slow down and identify everything else speeds up. Your meetings get shorter, your issues get smaller, and your team gets stronger. And the key thing is these things don't keep coming back time and time again. So my challenge for you this week is at your next level 10, pick one recurring issue, that thing that just keeps popping up week after week. Write it down, firstly as a one sentence, then as a question, and then ask at least 10 clarifying questions before anyone proposes a solution. See how different that conversation really feels. And if you'd like help running great issues, solving tracks, or want your leadership team to solve problems like pros come and chat with me. All the details are at www.business action.com.au, just flick us an email. You can even do debra@business action.com.au. I'd be happy to help. I've got some great tools that can really help with this. But until next time, I'm Debra Chantry-Taylor, this is better business, better life. Please go build a business you love and the life you deserve.