Can-if: How to find solutions to constraint-driven problems
Colin Kelly is the Director of Research and Development at Warburton’s, a Bolton-based British bakery that has grown from a regional challenger twenty years ago to the UK’s brand leader in bread and baked goods; it is one of the most remarkable and unsung success stories in European business. Kelly and his team are quietly reinventing a 50-year-old baking process that the rest of the industry no longer questions.
Kelly emphasizes the importance of the flow in problem-solving, by which he means keeping the conversation focused on movement toward possible solutions, unchecked by the presentation of potential problems. His views about how to maintain this flow were strongly influenced by his experience leading a team in Russia in 2006. In the conservative culture of the time, the potentially strong solutions his team proposed were frequently blocked by others explaining that “we can’t do this because. ...” The nature of the “can’t because” varied. Sometimes it had to do with cost or capability, sometimes impact on other processes, sometimes simply the sheer degree of difficulty involved. But the effect was the same: every time someone introduced a “can’t because,” Kelly noted, the conversation reached a dead end. The flow had stopped.
Kelly couldn’t change the nature of the organization, but he could change the nature of the conversation, particularly the beginning of each sentence in the problem-solving process. He didn’t let people start with “We can’t because.” He forced them to start with “We can if.” So, for example, instead of saying “We can’t use that type of new packaging because it will slow the line down,” the person would be forced to say “We can use that kind of new packaging if we run it on someone else’s line.” The flow is maintained, and the group moves on to the next question in the chain (in this case, how to find the right line).
As Kelly notes, “can’t because” is an understandable reaction to a difficult challenge. People are used to putting up their hands to solve a problem they know how to solve; what is much harder, and more unusual, is putting up their hands to solve a problem they don’t know how to solve. And yet that is precisely what is required in constraint-driven problem solving. Without a positive construct to guide the team, the inability to have a ready answer to a difficult question kills the momentum and the flow of exploration.
Let’s unpack why can-if is so powerful as a frame for our conversations in answering a propelling question, and finding the potential in an apparently challenging constraint:
It keeps the conversation on the right question. It keeps the conversation about how something could be possible, rather than whether it would be possible.
It keeps the oxygen of optimism continually in the process. It keeps optimism and inquisitiveness alive at the same time.
It forces everyone involved in the conversation to take responsibility for finding answers, rather than identifying barriers. It doesn’t allow someone to identify obstacles, without looking for a solution to that obstacle in the same sentence.
The story it tells us about ourselves is that we are people who look for solutions, rather than a group of people who find problems and obstacles. It builds and reinforces our thinking about ourselves as a culture of potential transformers, rather than impotent victims of insuperable circumstance.
It is a method that maintains a mindset. The failure to generate an answer with one line of enquiry simply leads to another can-if, another how.