Ask the Right Questions!

Mind Tools Newsletter 70 - 20th March 2007 This newsletter is published by Mind Tools Ltd of 2nd Floor, 145-157 St John Street, London, EC1V 4PY, UK. You have received it because you have subscribed to our double opt-in newsletter. To subscribe or unsubscribe, just click the links at the bottom of this email.

Contents: What's New? CATWOE A Final Note

When it comes to solving problems, sometimes it's best to look for even deeper problems before you start looking for solutions.

By thinking more broadly about the problem, you can often identify more fundamental problems than the ones you're looking at. By understanding this wider set of problems, you are more likely to find the real root causes of the situation, and so solve the problem first time, fully and sustainably.

CATWOE is a useful technique for doing this.

The CATWOE mnemonic defines a set of ‘parties’ that we should consider when we're defining a problem (from customers to the environment.) By thinking about how the situation affects these parties, we can broaden our perspective of the problem, and so make sure that we're asking the right questions. Today’s article discusses CATWOE, and how to use it.

What's New?

Another recent article offers an interesting insight into your country as well as your company: Porter’s Diamond helps you shape your strategy (both business and personal) to reflect the strengths and weaknesses of the country you live in.

Meanwhile at the Mind Tools Career Excellence Club, we’re enjoying an array of great new personal development resources, and members’ discussions too in the club forums. Members have recently been considering, among other topics, the power of persuasion; we’ve been asking “Am I making the right choices?”; we've honed our written communications skills; and listened to the latest podcast interview with Marci Alboher, about managing multiple careers.

By diving in once or twice a week, members get a great chance to develop new skills and bounce problems and ideas around with like-minded professionals. So, if you’re looking for the next step in your career development, you can try it for a first month price of just US$1. Why not give it a go?

Enjoy Mind Tools and have an excellent week! 

  

James & Rachel

James Manktelow and Rachel Thompson
MindTools.com
Mind Tools – Essential skills for an excellent career!

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New Article
CATWOE
Understanding the different elements that contribute to a problem

What do you do when you’re faced with a really big business problem? (Maybe your employee retention is low, and you are looking for the reasons why.) Perhaps your first step is to brainstorm the possible reasons, and maybe then you apply a range of different problem-solving skills. But what if you've focused on the wrong problem, or you're just looking at a symptom of a larger problem?

By focusing on one specific problem, you tend to stop looking for other problems. And that’s when you risk missing something that’s potentially more fundamental than the problem you first decided to investigate. This is where CATWOE can help you avoid making a serious mistake.

Understanding CATWOE

In the 1960s Peter Checkland, a Systems Professor, developed a problem-solving methodology called Soft Systems Methodology (SSM), which sought to apply the systems principles of engineering to business problems. As part of this, Checkland recommended that before you define your problem, you first identify all of the parties involved. By looking at how people and systems interact to affect the situation, you can more easily identify the key problems to solve.

He used the mnemonic CATWOE as a checklist for the people and elements that contribute to a situation, issue, or problem that you need to analyze.

CATWOE stands for:

Customers	Who are they, and how does the issue affect them?
Actors	Who is involved in the situation? Who will be involved in implementing solutions? And what will impact their success?
Transformation Process	What processes or systems are affected by the issue?
World View	What is the big picture? And what are the wider impacts of the issue?
Owner	Who owns the process or situation you are investigating? And what role will they play in the solution?
Environmental Constraints	What are the constraints and limitations that will impact the solution and its success?

When you look at all six of these elements, and consider the situation from all of these perspectives, you open your thinking beyond the issue that sits directly in front of you. By using CATWOE, the output of your brainstorming and problem solving should be much more comprehensive, because you have considered the issue from these six, very different, perspectives.

Using CATWOE

Before you try to solve an important problem, use the CATWOE checklist to brainstorm the various people and elements that are affected.

Taking the example of low employee retention rates that we used at the start of this article, start your thinking not with reasons why it is happening or by trying to identify solutions, but by using CATWOE to expand your thinking about the situation in general.

Step One: Define what you are thinking about. Remember, this is not a problem statement; It is merely a statement describing the situation.

“Thinking about ways to improve employee retention”

Step Two: Brainstorm ideas around the various CATWOE elements.

C: Customers	Who is being served and what problems are they experiencing? Organization as a whole: Lower productivity because not enough people High costs of retraining High costs of losing customers Teams/Employees: More work with lots of vacancies Stress because of increased workload Low moral with the high turnover Organization’s Customers: Low production and inexperienced staff affects quality and supply Higher levels of dissatisfaction
A: Actors	Who will implement the solution? HR department: Must look at recruiting techniques Must look at internal systems that may be affecting employee leaving rates Organization wide: Must look at how employees are treated How are employees trained and supported? How can we keep people happy? Impacts: Lots more work for everyone, may trigger cultural changes
T: Transformation Process	What is being affected? The system of recruiting and selecting employees including advertising, resumé screening, interviewing, testing, reference checking Other systems: Performance evaluation Rewards and recognition Training and development Mentoring and coaching
W: World View	What is the larger picture? Is our company culture driving people away? Or are we not hiring the right employees? Or are we driving the right employees away? Do people feel that they - or we - are making a positive contribution to the world?
O: Owner	Who owns the process currently? Individual managers across the organization HR Department Must be aware of resistance to change. Have to show value in terms of money and satisfaction.
E: Environmental Constraints	What constraints must you work under? A culture that is traditional and change resistant Time and money – we need lots of both Employees’ market – it's hard to find staff

Step Three: Analyze your “answers” to the CATWOE questions. Look for underlying processes that are having the greatest impact on the issue you are investigating.

Corporate culture
Employee training

Step Four: From these processes, separate out the problems that you can identify and then begin your process of problem solving. Notice that you will have a larger number of problems, and presumably more root problems, than you would otherwise have started out with.

Our company culture isn’t people-oriented – new people are left to “sink or swim”
There's no orientation training
The rewards we give aren't motivating and engaging people

Key points:

CATWOE is a method for expanding your thinking about a problem or situation before you zero in on a specific problem that you want to solve.

By analyzing the CATWOE factors (Customers, Actors, Transformation process, World view, Owner, Environmental constraints) that are influencing an issue of concern, you keep your perspective broad and are able to see the issue from many angles. This is a great tool to keep in mind, especially when you first start thinking about a problem.

The Mind Tools Store:

• The Career Excellence Club (The Mind Tools members area): Make career development and every-day part of your life with member-only discussion forums, the Mind Tools Extended Toolkit, downloadable MP3-based Book Insights and Interviews, regular coaching, training, and much, much more. More >>
  
  
• Make Time for Success: If you feel overloaded and out of control, you'll love Make Time for Success! Learn the 39 essential personal effectiveness techniques that help you bring your workload under control and maximize your productivity, so that you can make the most of the opportunities open to you. More >>
  
  
• How to Lead: Discover the Leader Within You: Learn the 48 simple but essential skills you need to create an inspiring vision of the future, get the very best from your team, and become a top leader in your industry. More >>

A Final Note From James

We’re always searching for new tools and techniques to enhance your career skills, and I hope you enjoyed this week’s – it’s a great addition to the Mind Tools problem solving toolset!

We have much more on problem solving and other career enhancing techniques in the Mind Tools Career Excellence Club: if you’d like to explore these further, please do join me, the team and our many members – you’ll be very welcome indeed!

In next week's Showcase, we're looking at a really life-changing skill, Goal Setting. If you don't already use this technique, you absolutely need to know about it! And in the next newsletter, we look at the important new-to-Mind-Tools subjects of Thinking on Your Feet, and Facilitation: The art of managing meetings in such a way that you get the best from all participants.

Until then, have a truly excellent week!

James

James Manktelow

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