What is the best way to approach problem-solving in a team context heading into 2022?

By John Portch

Coaches and practitioners will have their own thoughts on the matter but an increasing number of teams are following the practices of the business world in empowering their athletes – their people – to find their own solutions.

With more people engaged in their own problem-solving, more options and, therefore, more creative solutions, are likely to emerge across a team.

In October, the Leaders Performance Institute hosted a Virtual Roundtable for members titled ‘Approaching Complex Problem-Solving’, which underlined the trend for allowing practitioners to develop as individuals by affording them the opportunity to problem-solve, reflect and refine their practice.

At one point, a participant highlighted their use of David J Snowden’s Cynefin Framework. The framework, which is based on concepts of knowledge management and organisational strategy, enables people to place situations into one of five domains: ‘complex’, ‘complicated’, ‘chaotic’, ‘obvious’ and ‘disorder’. Where your problem fits depends on assessing its cause-and-effect relationships.

Perhaps the most common situation in both the business world and sport is ‘complicated’, where a problem may have several suitable solutions, though the relationship between cause and effect is evident only to a limited number of individuals.

The Cynefin Framework recommends that complicated situations be assessed, then analysed with the help of experts before deciding on the best response using good practice. One caveat is that leaders can be over-reliant on experts in complicated situations when others may be able to provide creative solutions. This thinking is also central to beliefs in the value of cognitive diversity.

Moreover, people like to solve their own problems, as Kim Wylie, the Global Director of People Development at the online luxury fashion platform Farfetch, told an audience at Leaders Meet: Total High Performance in 2020.

“When people solve problems themselves, they get this nice little bump of dopamine, which is a positive legal high and people feel really good about themselves and it brings really positive energy to the group and to the individual,” she says. “The point here that’s really useful to make is that by solving other people’s problems for them, we’re robbing them of this opportunity to feel good.

“Even if, as a leader, you do know the answers to things as a manager or a coach, getting people to solve their own problems is a really good thing to do. Obviously not all of the time, you need to work out the right situation, but not being the problem-solver for everything; get people to solve their own problems – it will do them the world of good and bring some positive experience to what’s going on.”

This approach to problem-solving underpinned Jayne Ludlow’s work with the Wales women’s national team, whom she coached between 2014 and 2021. Both staff and players, she believes, have the capacity to find their own solutions.

“There’s lots of collaboration between staff and players or between the players themselves,” she told the Leaders Performance Institute in April. “There was a focus within our national team camps to make sure the players could check their understanding with each other and our thought processes.”

Often, this was easier for the younger players coming into the national setup. “I’m not sure if this is because we were working with them as youngsters and we had a specific style and way of working,” said Ludlow, who also served as Wales’ under-17s and under-19s Manager. “If I think about the group of 17, 18 year olds I had with the seniors, in the last few camps, they’re growth mindset players. They want to step on the pitch and learn. It is OK if they make a mistake, they’ll adapt and they’ll learn from it.”

Why was it different for some of the older players? “That’s to do with the environments they’ve been in. How over many years and generations we weren’t coached that way. I hardly had any feedback and they were similar, whether they were in pro or semi-pro clubs. Then suddenly you were bringing them into our environment and every day they’d have a development area.

“You’d notice in presentations. The majority of our younger ones are very different in their approach. They look at training and games as a learning opportunity, whereas the older ones were still defensive in learning moments.”

How can you lower those defences? “My general approach to feedback is: goal, then highlight what you’ve done well, then highlight what the next step is to develop it. There’s the positive aspect but then there’s a development moment. With some players, I’d take a slightly different approach. It’s a bit of sandwich approach at times so there’s more positives than development; but then you’ve always got to be careful, do they actually take the development information from you?”

Ludlow observed that older players needed more support in her social constructivist approach to problem-solving. Often, it is a question of providing the right environment for athletes to feel safe to explore a problem in a safe environment with the attendant opportunities for collaboration and developing a shared language.

Matthew Mott, the Head Coach of the Australia women’s national cricket team came to a similar realisation after taking control in 2017, particularly during the post-match debriefs.

“I do think that’s probably the thing I’ve learnt the most with this team,” he told the Leaders Performance Institute in January. He found an environment that diverged in significant ways from those found at the male teams where he had previously played and coached.

“I’ve come from a male environment where you tend to be able to just debrief the games straight after. They get quite emotional about the games and call it out for what it was.” He took this approach to the women’s team and, like coaches who work with both female and male teams, realised things needed to change. “Certainly, throughout our journey, we went into team meetings where it was basically only the coaching staff talking and I quickly realise that it wasn’t a safe space and players needed smaller groups.

“So we got into smaller groups and we gave them tasks to feed back into the main group to create that safe space. But it’s interesting that we’ve gone through that and we have that complete trust in each other that you can now say things without fear of upsetting people and looking at it objectively and dissecting the game for its good parts and the areas to improve.”

He admitted that it is still a work in progress but the difference these days is profound. “Now that we’re actually in our full group meetings, the players are the ones talking all the time now and coaches are directing and starting and facilitating but, essentially, the players are the ones talking about the game and I think that’s a great space.”

Download the latest Performance Special Report – Winning With Nutrition

Long relegated to the side lines, nutrition is finally getting the attention it deserves when it comes to helping athletes achieve peak performance. Download our latest Special Report, produced in partnership with Science in Sport and featuring NBA champions the Milwaukee Bucks, the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys, and English Premier League club Aston Aston Villa.

Download Report

Recommended reading

Understanding Team Effectiveness at Google: Tips & Tools

Cynefin Framework

A Leaders Framework for Decision-Making

How Design Thinking Can Influence Decision-Making

What Google Can Teach Your Team About Problem-Solving

Framing the topic

Google’s Global Head of Creative Capability Kirk Vallis once said at one of our events that ‘creativity and problem solving is still one of the most underrated skills for leaders and the reality of creativity is that it is just about creating more options. And with more options you can make better decisions’.

You’d probably agree if you operate in high performance sport, with the complexity and agility required, that problem-solving is a pretty critical skill. For this virtual roundtable we wanted to chat about problem-solving and, more importantly, how we are thinking about it and approaching it.

Discussion points

1. When looking at the theme of problem-solving, where is your current thinking and what are some of the things you and your teams are trying to do to positively influence it?

• We are looking at how we get our practitioners to understand and grow in the problem-solving space through reflecting on how you deal with problems. As leaders, how do we facilitate someone understanding how they problem-solve, and how to extend that ability further?
• It’s important to understand the environments you are in and trying to put in place systems so that people can learn from their practical experiences. Our philosophy means we place an emphasis on the idea that the biggest learnings you are going to take are from your day-to-day experience, so reflecting on those is important.
• Understand what the problem really is and define it. Sometimes it can be difficult to identify what the actual issue is. Use quality questioning to define and tackle the problem. To dovetail this, have an environment where you can creatively brainstorm and have a safe space to experiment with ideas. Don’t jump to the end until you have been through the process.
• We have been utilising roundtables outside of specific disciplines – one of the big things with problem-solving in a discipline or particular department is that it can create a conflict with another discipline. The approach has to be collective.
• We’re also looking at the relationship between how we recruit and solve problems. There is a focus on recruiting and developing from within but we also want the balance of bringing in fresh perspectives to challenge current processes.
• We are working on bringing a coaching approach to our problem-solving across the organisation. A large number of staff have gone through some performance coach training so rather than solving problems for people we’re trying to coach people to solve the problems for themselves. This approach is more sustainable and people become better at resolving issues themselves – we’re finding people are starting to perform better in their roles as well with those ‘grow type’ questions.
• With good questioning focused on ‘growth’ it allows the individual to think more clearly and resolve it for themselves – they solve it the way they want to solve something rather than someone else solving it and imposing their way of doing it. We want to get ourselves in a position where people are coming to us with ideas and not problems.
• We talk about ‘grow conversations’ as formal coaching but there is also informal as well – you don’t have to sit down with someone in a one-to-one and talk at length about a problem. Consider the impact of ‘big chats (formal) and little chats (informal)’. When we see the ‘little chats’ going on, that’s when we know it’s becoming part of the culture.
• We are really looking for our people and staff to be empowered to guide conversations.
• It’s important to have a strategy to solving problems and there is a balance of the short-term in having quick wins around the problem, and then the longer-term approach.
• Ask yourself, do you have a safe space across your environment for people to bring and solve problems?
• We are taking a look into The Cynefin Framework – this is a framework to help understand problems and whether it might be is a clear problem with a solution, a complicated one that can have a complicated answer, or is it a complex problem? The framework considers ‘probing’, making sense of the space and then responding.
• Problems can mutate – if you are working within a team, everybody brings with them their own journey and information, and the influence within the group can change the outcomes.

2. What next? Where are the opportunities and ongoing challenges we are facing?

• There remains a huge opportunity around collaboration, particularly in situations where a problem maybe held by one person but affect other people. We need to continue to exploring ways to bring people together in the environment to share that problem and help to open the eyes of everyone. Often we don’t see the same issues with multiple disciplines.
• A consistent coaching approach is something that can add huge value. We use a very simple term called RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) approach to communication to ensure everyone is considering who they need to speak to regarding any issue.
• We can often underestimate what people would like to know and what they want to know about what you’re dealing with – often we hold problems in our own space because we potentially feel like others aren’t interested, but this tends to limit the options for solving a problem when you close off the collaboration.
• Another big opportunity we see if seeking out solutions from other areas of the organisation or business – people who might be dealing with different types of problems in different contexts and they could provide a different lens. What can we learn from a sales team in how they sell premium tickets or hospitality if we are struggling to sell places for coaching courses and accreditation as an example? We can often get groupthink around what we see and think.
• Try and take the emotion out of this process – if there is too much emotion, there is almost no way of resolving the problem.
• An improvement for us going forward is how we best distil inputs from the collaboration and ideas that are generated around problem-solving – how do we effectively evaluate the issues and really progress the extended ideas moving forward.
• Establish if the problem a global problem or is it unique to one particular individual or area? This drives you in a direction of how you solve the problem, whether it requires collaboration or just individual support. Probe around where the actual problem is and dig a bit further into that, so when the collaboration element comes in you can pick the relevant parts to move forward. When you come through the problem-solving process with the decision, have you then investigated those enough to decide and confirm what are the challenges? We’ve talked about the problem mutating. Coming up with a solution is good but have you fully attached yourself to the journey that it is the right one for all – is there clarity around how the solution will be embedded?
• An idea we’ve toyed with is the ‘day in the life of a discipline’. Provide an idea of what others go through in their working day so there is a more holistic understanding of how interactions and communications can work more efficiently around decision-making and problem-solving.
• Diversity in this process remains a huge opportunity to get a more rounded understanding of the problem through a multitude of lenses. It broadens the way your perspective when looking at a problem or issue.

Download the latest Performance Special Report – Winning With Nutrition

Long relegated to the side lines, nutrition is finally getting the attention it deserves when it comes to helping athletes achieve peak performance. Download our latest Special Report, produced in partnership with Science in Sport and featuring NBA champions the Milwaukee Bucks, the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys, and English Premier League club Aston Aston Villa.

Download Report

A Leaders Performance Podcast brought to you by our Main Partners

“Sometimes you can listen to advice and it might be wrong for you, so you’ve got to figure out what is good and what is bad for you – who’s your angel and who’s your devil,” says Asha Philip.

By John Portch

The British sprinter – a two-time Olympic 4x100m bronze medallist – is speaking to the Leaders Performance Podcast as part of the Keiser Athlete Optimisation series.

Asha won bronze with her teammates in Tokyo and talks about some of the steps that enabled her to go again after winning a medal in Rio in 2016.

Also on the conversational agenda are:

• The mental strength that defines elite sprinters [10:00];
• Asha’s need to be comfortable being uncomfortable [14:30];
• The importance of self-reflection and positive affirmations [15:30];
• Why she is increasingly taking care of her mental health [22:00].

John Portch: Twitter | LinkedIn

Further listening:

Leaders Performance Podcast – Leadership & Culture Special

Listen above and subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher and Overcast, or your chosen podcast platform.