Business Strategy: Problem Solving – Identify, Isolate, and Eliminate

Is your business strategy now backfiring on you? Do all of your plans suddenly turn upside down and everything becomes messed up?

Here are a few tips to get a grip on the situation. While specific strategies vary on case by case basis, these tips would help you generally in getting a grip on the situation.

Remember – Identify, Isolate, and Eliminate

1 – Stay calm and conduct Root Cause Analysis to identify the problem. RCAs can be a quick mental exercise or a detailed written analysis of each event and happening, it all depends on the magnitude of the crisis. This exercise will help you in determining the exact cause or reason of the issue, crisis, or situation.

2 – Once you have identified a (or series of) reason(s) or cause(s) you should work on minimizing the damage, this is known as isolation of the problem. This would provide some safe guard in ensuring that the issue would not escalate into unaffected areas of your business.

3 – Eliminate the problem by removing the reasons that caused the issue in the first place. This step may or may not be easy depending on the situation itself, and may also have a financial impact on the business. For instance if the situation was caused by defective product recalling or replacing the product would have a financial impact.

Other things to consider.

Communications – Open two-way communication is of extreme importance. This restores customer and employee confidence.

Financial Planning – to remedy a situation there may be a financial impact. So incorporate a mini-financial plan is also important. Generally, when developing a business plan it is a good idea to have to cash funds no matter how small for deploying a contingency strategy.