16. Practice Blameless Problem-Solving.

Apply your creativity and enthusiasm to developing solutions, rather than pointing fingers and dwelling on problems. Identify lessons learned and use those teachable/ learnable moments to improve our processes so we don’t make the same error again. Get smarter with every mistake. Learn from every experience.

Tara's Message:

For me, this fundamental has always been intriguing. In the course of business, adverse situations happen. When they inevitably do, placing blame doesn’t solve the issue or prevent it from happening again. I always try to remember, what is the lesson here? We learn from mistakes, and blame isn’t part of the lesson. Rather than blaming, it’s more positive and valuable to take action to correct and prevent the problem from occurring again.

I had an experience some time ago that demonstrates this fundamental in action. As will inevitably happen in our business, we were having supply issues with a certain vendor. Mike Dakes, Bill Shultz and I work closely together to alleviate as many future back order situations as possible. It is a tiring process, but blaming the vendor would get us nowhere. So, we dig in our heels and do what is needed to be done to resolve the issues and work to try to prevent our backorders from continuing.

Always keeping a positive attitude helps to confidently manage the challenges that go along with finding a positive resolution. Sometimes the road to solving the problem has its bumps. In the end, what is important is that we resolved the problems without placing blame.

“If I had an hour to solve a problem I’d spent 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about the solutions.” Albert Einstein

Tara