August round up

So here we are in September already, hasn’t the year flown by?

As we all return from our summer holidays all brim full of enthusiasm for the rest of the year ahead we thought we’d dedicate this month’s round-up to the importance of problem-solving within business.

There is no doubt that problem-solving in business is complex and requires a robust process, tools and of course ongoing training to enable the workforce.

Long term readers will be well aware that we hold problem-solving as a key business differentiator and one that can either cripple or fast track your business. Problems need to be dealt with rapidly and with a level of confidence that the solution is not only appropriate but can be effectively implemented. In too many businesses problems fester causing long term damage.

So let’s take a look at some of these issues in our August round up.

Problem solving in health care

Over at healtheuropa , they have a great piece on how AI is likely to shape healthcare and assist with complex problem solving “optimizing workflows and expanding precision medicine”. The example given on data is staggering. “by 2020 medical data will be doubling every 73 days”. Most organizations have huge amounts of data but few put it to practice use. Consider how your own organization uses its data to resolve complex problems, and how this is automated into your process workflow? It’s not? I didn’t think so! 

Remembering that your organization’s data is one of your primary assets and is highly effective in enabling problem resolution, how can you use your data in complex problem-solving? And how do you go about implementing it swiftly and seamlessly?

Expanding problem-solving skills

There’s a great article in the Irish Times about how other skills can be bought into play with problem-solving. While analysis and statistics are at the heart of many elements of problem-solving utilizing raw maths is perhaps not. The article goes on to state that problem solving often “needs some maths beyond the standard methods”. The lesson here is to look beyond the traditional tools and consider how you can optimize your process.

Problem-solving in aerospace

As with Healthcare, you’ll find most Aerospace firms cognisant of Kaizen and most organizations will have some form of 8d process to help determine root causes and aide corrective actions on problems. Why is it that for many organizations problem solving remains elusive.

https://www.aero-mag.com/editors-comment-slave-to-the-algorithm/ has an excellent article on how robotics and AI will drive Aerospace manufacture soon to help solve the industries ever-complex problems, it expands that it means the skills market will need to upskill – “Machine tool operators will require ‘digital-ready’ skills to interact with robotics and programming”. This drives an interesting discussion. With technological innovation driving ever improved performance – what does this mean for the industries problem solving and continuous improvement skills (many of which have been derived from systems like Toyota’s) what innovations are required here? For further reading check out …which covers the changes required in skills across diverse industries seeing the introduction of AI and technology as being a sea change which “means that many traditional jobs are morphing into something different or disappearing altogether.”

Problem-solving is driven by great learning.

Over at https://www.trainingzone.co.uk/lead/culture/why-a-learning-culture-is-inherently-agile, there’s a great piece on the need to develop learning cultures in organizations to develop soft ‘skills. The piece leans heavily on agile organizations and the belief that agile drives greater speed to market and innovation. It’s certainly worth thinking about how you can deploy great problem-solving skills in your organization and how they can be sustained.

New content

OK, so we’ve been fairly busy over July and August – here’s our round up of new articles on the site: