In the post titled “Four kinds of strategy,” I said that a differentiation strategy is a kind of competitive strategy, a competitive strategy is a kind of growth strategy, and a growth strategy is a kind of problem-solving strategy, which means that all strategies are problem-solving strategies. This applies most obviously to the usual approach to strategic planning, where the process is to establish the organization’s objectives, identify the external and internal challenges that stand in the way of achieving the objectives, and devise ways to overcome the challenges. (Sounds like problem-solving, doesn’t it?)

But the fact is that most organizations lack the resources to implement more than one or two strategic initiatives at a time, so the strategic planning process should focus on identifying the organization’s most critical challenge—say, the challenge that most threatens its ability to survive and thrive. In his book titled The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists, Richard Rumelt describes a process for doing this. The steps are to collect, cluster, and filter. (The electronic brainstorming technology I use to support strategic planning workshops—with its brainstorming, categorizing, and multi-criteria voting tools—is ideally suited to implementing this process as a group.)

• Collect: Make a list of all the problems, issues, and opportunities you face. (Rather than a problem, the challenge may be how to take advantage of an opportunity.)

• Cluster: Use a category name to place the problems and opportunities into groups.

• Filter: Identify the problems that are the most immediate. Then rate each of these using the criteria of importance (the degree to which the challenge threatens your ability to survive or thrive) and addressability (the degree to which the challenge appears to be solvable.).

The collecting, clustering, and filtering process is consistent with the creative problem-solving process of diverging, clustering, and converging depicted below. One way to identify the category name for each cluster is to complete the sentence, “These go together because _____.” Once you’ve developed the name of the category, you can use it to identify problems and opportunities that should be added to the category. In some cases, the filtered/converged challenge may be a combination of challenges.

Once the most critical challenge is identified, you need to figure out how to solve the problem or take advantage of the opportunity. In simple terms, a problem exists when something is happening that shouldn’t be happening, or something is not happening that should be happening. In even simpler terms, a problem exists when there is an undesired state. Examples of an undesired state are a failing school system, a decline in sales, an increase in employee turnover, and a social program that isn’t having the desired impact.

Moving from left to right in the following diagram (from my book Differentiation Strategy: Winning Customers by Being Different), the first step in solving a problem is to understand what’s causing the undesired state. The next step is to use creative thinking to generate ways to act on the causes that will transform them into causes of the desired state. The three basic types of creative thinking are:

1. Expertise: Using the MECE method and other methods to mine your memory or multiple memories for solutions or parts of a solution that can be pieced together to create a whole solution,

2. Logic: Using inductive, deductive, and abductive logic to reason your way to a solution, and

3. Analogy: Finding analogous situations and mining them for solutions that can be adapted to your problem.

Causal analysis and creative thinking are explained at length in chapter 11 of my book.

The foregoing sounds simple enough. In truth, it’s not. Strategic challenges are almost always complex, making them difficult to identify, define, and solve. That said, successfully surmounting a challenge is made easier by using the problem solving process described above.

Kevin W. Holt, the founder of Co.Innovation Consulting, is a strategic planning consultant and meeting facilitator based in Phoenix, Arizona. He works with commercial, government, and nonprofit organizations to develop innovative strategies and solutions. His strategy consulting and meeting facilitation practice centers on the use of proven processes mapped to collaboration technologies (e.g., electronic brainstorming) and specialized software tools (e.g., the Blue Ocean strategy canvas). The technologies enable him to serve as both an offsite meeting facilitator and a virtual meeting facilitator for strategic planning workshops, innovation labs, brainstorming sessions, feedback sessions, and other types of meetings. Kevin is the author of Differentiation Strategy: Winning Customers by Being Different, published by Routledge in June 2022, and an e-learning course that serves as a field guide to the book.