Businesses encounter occasional hiccoughs. It is not bad though. It is often a stress test or a test of the depth of the intellectual capital available per time within a business system.
The capacity to absorb and solve problems that surface in a business determines how well the operating model of such an enterprise would be able to withstand shocks at the point of scaling.
A problem is defined as any harmful, unwanted situation that must be trashed out to make quick progress. As in life, a problem spells trouble where it surfaces within a commercial system.
Meanwhile, problems are distinguished by the degrees of impact. Faulty product extension, misconstrued brand strategy, negative environmental impact, and a breakdown of internal relations are issues that could throw curveballs at the wheel of progress in any organization.
This is because minor internal and external problems, if they are not checked on time, are most likely to snowball into major product crises which often lead to reputational damage for a business brand.
Peninsula, Manchester-based news network, captured some of the problems that crop up internally in a business: As workplaces have unique sets of personalities, complete with different opinions and varying approaches to working life, it can cause conflict and friction. You can also create issues if your processes aren’t up to a good business-standard. So, it’s a good idea to address outstanding issues to establish policies that ensure a problem-free day-to-day working life.
External issues can be as lethal as internal wrangling for any business. Citing how a misaligned business approach to external issues could lead to a major market crisis where it is not quickly addressed, Provoke Media, an agency that reports PR intelligence and insights from around the world, recalled events that dampened the image of Facebook Inc. in 2018.
It reported, “It was particularly disheartening to learn that Facebook public relations and public affairs execs, rather than warning company leadership about what would happen when the smear campaign inevitably came to light, were active participants in the campaign. Indeed, within days Facebook communications VP Elliott Schrage had taken the fall for the company’s actions, losing his job.”
A business must establish proactive frameworks for dissecting, discussing, and derailing problems as quickly as they are noticed. Here are the four (4) approaches:
- Dissect the problems – Knowledge is a strong comparative advantage. It works when solving problems. The advice to any business battling internal or external problems is, ‘Don’t sleep on the wheel of problems, it may turn into a major crisis as reported at Facebook Inc. in 2018’. The first approach is to quickly dissect the problems to understand the nature of issues.
- Go for data – It is unlikely a problem could be solved without combing for data or info that describe the problem, how it surfaced, who is connected, and the level of the present impact.
- Track history – There isn’t anything new under the earth. After obtaining the necessary info about the problem it is time to lean on proven solutions before the problems escalate any further. It means to find out if other businesses have had such problems and how they overcame such problems.
- Apply only proven solutions – Once the data have been gathered and analyzed to gain enough understanding of the present problems. The next thing to do is find out which organizations have confronted the same problem in the past. Armed with insights, it is time to fix the problems through quality applying application of proven solutions.
