Got a serious, urgent, complex and contentious problem in your world that desperately needs a solution? You think that Collaborative Solution-Discovery (CSD) might be helpful but you don’t have time to dig through the Muddlebuster website and master the intricacies?
Then go with Quick Overview. Reading here will give you the top-level image of CSD philosophy and general principles. If you need all the details – the What? Why? and How? to set up and carry out a CSD project to address a real issue – then delve into the various branches of this site.
Essential Features of CSD
- Participants in a CSD project function as a collaborative team, regardless of their differences, working together to find an equitable solution that best satisfies the aggregate needs of the stakeholders. They do this because they need a good solution and realize that collaboration is a better way than fighting, stonewalling or running away.
- All stakeholders are engaged and empowered as participants in the process, from start-up to conclusion.
- The solution-discovery process is based on a Solution Search Path (SSP) that moves forward via logically defined steps, incrementally building consensus for the selected final solution.
- Leadership engages and empowers stakeholders, manages the process, and upholds the vision of collaboration, while remaining neutral regarding whatever solution may emerge.
The Solution Search Path
The Solution Search Path is established by answering four questions, each answered with stakeholder concurrence.
- Who are the stakeholders (individually or in common-interest groups)? What are their interests, concerns, needs and desires, fears and aspirations, priorities and values with regard to the problem or issue under consideration?
- Based on that stakeholder input, what is the Definition of Success in terms of qualities of outcome considered important by each of the stakeholders?
- How will a menu of solution options be created with high assurance that at least one good one is on the list? “Good solution” means: effective in solving the problem, flexible so its flaws can be corrected and it adapts to change, and endures because it enjoys consensus acceptance of the stakeholders.
- What method will be used to refine and evaluate solution options, arriving at selection of a good one?
The CSD Project
CSD is best applied in a project scenario, typically running through three phases.
- Phase 1: Project startup and gearing up to do process development in Phase 2.
- Phase 2: Developing the Solution-Discovery process to be employed in Phase 3
- Phase 3: Discovering the solution to the original problem or issue.
The SSP is the core of the method used in the solution-discovery process in each phase to arrive at the final product of that phase.
!Caution!
As you do the CSD project phase sequence, you will discover the CSD layered structure – problem within a problem within a problem – and this makes it kinda complicated. The outer layer (Phase 3) is solving your serious-yada-yada PROBLEM A that got this whole thing started. The next layer in (Phase 2) is figuring out how to work PROBLEM A. And if you are starting from scratch with no supporting organization in place, the layer below that (Phase 1) is how to bootstrap the startup team from nothing and set up a methodology for building problem-solving processes.
Be very clear on which layer of phase you are in as you go through the project steps from initial problem awareness to solution in hand. If you need to do Phase 1, stay with that until it is solved before moving on to Phase 2. Likewise, stick with Phase 2 until it is done before moving on to solving PROBLEM A in Phase 3.