Problem solving is THE key business skill

Nothing runs smoothly in business. No matter what the industry all businesses will experience problems whether that's from those that are self created to those that are generated by external stakeholders, problems can come in all shapes and sizes from small problems that might make things uncomfortable to those that can stop the business in their tracks. The art to business is how you deal with them. Facing the task We all know the feeling - it's Monday morning and before you've even had chance to have that first coffee you meet your first crisis, you have a missed delivery and the assembly line is on stop. Dealing with difficult suppliers is a common enough problem that many businesses face daily. Your faced with either sticking your head in the sand and hope either that someone else will pick it up or to systematically investigate the problem and attempt to either mitigate it (alternative delivery from a different supplier) or fix the problem (talk to the supplier and get the supply chain moving again). The aptitude and attitude of a business faced with these situations can make or break them - those with an agile well equipped team team (with process and tools/data) with a can do attitude will be better positioned to swiftly deal with the problem and move onto the day job - ignore issues at your peril as they are more likely to snowball and become much worse. Spotting your challenge early Half the battle is being risk aware - knowing what problems you may face and having a plan in place to deal with them should stand you in good stead. Having appropriate strategies in place to with common issues is a must and should be part of your everyday business planning. Think about our example of our missed delivery - if your strategy monitored suppliers performance and you selected suppliers with a high percentage of on time delivery what chance would you have of the problem appearing in the first place. Learning lessons So you've experienced a problem and you've sorted it in one way or another - what you do next can make a huge difference. Do you simply move onto the next challenge or do you learn from your problem and build the lessons you've learned into your business processes or even try and eradicate the likelihood of it happening again