What are the questions you don't have an answer for right now?

Summer is over. The holidays are over.

And if we did not get sufficient R&R during our vacations then too bad, because with the ever worsening economy, and the pressures to survive, let alone grow and prosper, mounting, we are being confronted with more and more questions we simply do not have answers for.

The other evening I was talking with an executive who is accountable for the Americas for his global corporation. Here are just a few themes from the conversation: acquisitions and mergers have left us with fewer larger customers who are putting us under huge price and performance pressures; competitors have also merged so we have one big competitor in most markets; and suppliers have merged so we have fewer sources for raw materials and, in any case raw materials have sky rocketed. We have never had these conditions to deal with before. What are we to do to retain customers and win new ones? My people and I have never experienced a business environment like this before. We are struggling trying to work out what to do.

Well one first step is to come clean, give up the pretense we do know what to do, or "should" know what to do. I know, most of us did not get into our leadership positions by announcing we don't know how to deal with the demands of our jobs, or the competitive conditions at hand. Yet the truth is we can't engage everyone in the major challenges confronting most of us today - whether the challenges are inside our organization or outside - if we cannot acknowledge we don't have all the solutions, and we need help.

Here is just one recent example from a pair of executives who were willing to acknowledge they were stumped and needed help. First, a component vendor who needed a price increase to survive, and second his customer who needed a cost reduction for the same reason. Neither knew how to come up with a win-win answer. Their story is standard fare in the best run companies - they identified the problem to solve, with all the conditions that a satisfactory solution needed to have. Then they included a slew of people with different perspectives to help invent a solution - which they did.

I frequently ask leaders to show me the list of their "problems to solve". Problems that they don't have the answers for. Too often I discover they don't have such a list - except scattered around the organization in individual's heads. And those that do have a list don't have it on visible display for all to see. And, they don't have a set of practices or processes to continually engage people in addressing the list and solving their problems.

So here is a simple process:

1. Gather every problem to be solved that needs more than two people to solve it into a master list: a) What's the problem? b) What conditions does a solution need to meet? c) By when to we need the solution?
2. Display the master list, and categorized sub-lists, in an "ops room" - a physical and virtual room - so that everyone can see them
3. Designate a person to be accountable to solve the problem
4. Train the problem-solving accountability holders in networking, ideation, conversation management - real-time and virtual, surfacing and dealing with conflict, ...
5. Create a virtual work space - a wiki or other community board and communication practices and disciplines
6. Build in problem solving space into peoples schedules - inviolate time that nothing will displace
7. Nurture organizational energy, mood and morale - and celebrate wins
8. And remember problems are not to be avoided, they are THE access to innovation and breakthrough, satisfaction and accomplishment.