OUT OF THE BOX THINKING
One thing we all have in common is the fact that we encounter problems in our personal and our professional lives. Our education, our conditioning and our biases impacts how we tackle these problems. Often times we put in temporary fixes only to find to our consternation that the problems have resurfaced. Many times, we don’t even understand what was wrong and end up putting in a fix for something we thought was wrong. This is quite common in industry where companies invest millions of dollars in doing root cause analysis to understand what is wrong. Defining the problem itself is a significant task and most often companies and individuals often fail to so. There is no better example to illustrate this than the one shared below.
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This is a story, I have heard and repeated several times. Not really sure of the source so I will leave the names of the companies’ generic. A large consumer goods manufacturer was dealing with a strange problem on their packaging line. The line manager noticed that they were shipping empty boxes. Boxes were coming down the line without any products inside, getting sealed and being moved to shipping. You can imagine the embarrassment that would be caused if a customer discovered upon delivery that they received an empty box. A few months ago, this did happen to one of my Amazon orders. I opened the box to discovered it to empty. I did contact customer service at Amazon and they apologize and agreed to ship the product to me.
The line manager decided to engage his maintenance and troubleshooting team staffed with smart engineers to diagnose what was going on and recommend a solution. As is often the case, the engineers come with their tool kit. After observing the issues for a period of days they could not identify what the cause could be. So, they decided to install some cameras to assist them with diagnosis of the problem. After watching hours of video over a period of months they still couldn’t figure what was causing the problem. The line manager was getting frustrated and the shipping and logistics team had to spend extra time in identifying the empty boxes and ensuring they were not shipping them. The line manager arranged a meeting with troubleshooting team to inform them of his disappointment. In the meeting, someone suggested that they try and seek help from the Japanese automotive manufacturer who had a plant across town. He/she had heard a lot about their engineering prowess and their ability to fix problems.
Based on the suggestion, someone on the team was tasked to engage with the auto manufacturer and seek their help.After a few weeks, a SWAT team shows up from the auto manufacturer and is taken to the line where this problem was occurring.After being given the background of the problem and observing the line in operation.One of the engineers on the team request for a big fan.The host company people are perplexed by the request, but go ahead and find one for the SWAT team.The fan is then positioned to blow air across the conveyor built that empty boxes are coming through.After a few adjustments on positioning they were able to make sure that when a box came through empty it was blown of the conveyor. Voila !!!, the problem was solved or rather eliminated.
The hundreds of thousands of dollars that the company team had invested in troubleshooting had not led them anywhere. Bringing in a SWAT team from a Japanese auto manufacturer across town had solved the issue by just positioning a fan blowing air across the conveyor. Clearly the teams framed the problem very differently. One team spent precious time and money on diagnosis, whilst the other team was able to think out of the box and solve the issue expeditiously at minimal cost. It is critical when we attempt to solve issues at home or at work, to get a diverse set of opinions so we can quickly arrive at a quick and effective solution.
