The million-dollar hack: The art of fish-boning a problem and NOT jump to a solution

Photo by Daria Nepriakhina on Unsplash

I have had the good opportunity to gain admission to the Harvard Kennedy School for a Public Leadership Course ( I get to pursue it while being at my work, and I get to implement a lot of what I learn every day — so it’s all Jubi/happy :) ).

While the pedagogy, group-discussion, interaction with peers etc. is all-transformational and uplifting — there’s a specific tool I discovered on the way. It is immensely helpful to avoid one of the most frequent reasons why most ideas, solutions or project-work fails … jumping to solutions. When we jump to solutions without a proper diagnosis of the problem, we’re inevitably committing unalterable ideation, solution-ing and execution mistakes that cost a loss of money, energy and motivation.

Turns out the lack of proper problem-diagnosis is the single biggest reason why billions of dollars are wasted in terms of unrealized ROIs and failures -both in the world of public policy-making or private businesses and projects.

Enter the humble Ishikawa Fishbone Diagram ( named after its founding father, Kaoru Ishikawa) that helps you create meditative diagrams rooted in deep research only to slice & dice and layout potential causes of a problem at hand.

Here’s a Diagram that I had researched and created to diagnose the job-problem in India:

Here’s another that our team created recently to detail out the perception problem of structured investment products such as MF that reflects in its %ge penetration

The Ishikawa diagram helps you to layout all possible root-causes of a situation that needs addressing … a problem that you want to solve. And, in subsequent steps, it will help you frame experiments as potential solutions with an over-weightage on one/few bones that have been researched, designated, debated and discussed as a root contributor to the problem.

The key is to remember that not all bones are equal in terms of its impact-potential … so the depth of thinking and the focus eventually on over-optimizing the outlier of a contributor is the key🗝

Here’re, to me, the top 3 tricks that will allow you to create better fish-bones in your journey of solving problems in life, business or public services:

1. A truly meditative quality to resist all urges of jumping onto solutions and getting more immersed in the problem itself
2. Quality of research that feeds into making better-quality fish-bones
3. Effective multi-disciplinary team-work that involves multiple interested parties and help visualize the problem at hand from multiple versions of the truth

And here are 5 ways to use fish-bones to accelerate group-performances

1. Use it as a mapping tool to get different teams working on a problem together & aligned on what’s being addressed. For e.g. in our business -getting the tech, product, design and consumer-behaviour teams together & aligned is a key task
2. Use it as a tool to better communicate with clients and conduct empirically impactful RCA of existing issues
3. Use it as a tool to involve different parties across the client and service-provider side to see a problem from various vantage points
4. Use it as an effective tool to co-create solutions with your customers and customers of your customers
5. “God lies in the details”. Use this a tool to just understand problems better and keep digging deeper & avoid the billion-dollar mistake — landing on a solution too soon

May not be the best but the video below gives a good overview of the Fishbone technique nonetheless. (I am happy to answer questions and explain more details of this technique over private conversations to ones who are curious )

To happy deep-divings.

Subhadeep. On behalf of team JubiAI