Problem Solving Communities

Realising the value of the biggest resource of all:

the questions people ask

Some key points from the Discussion Paper:

Problem Solving Communities operate according to the following core principles:

Problems – the questions people want answers to – are an invaluable resource because:

• For the individual, answering the question is a sure-fire way of helping to deliver the right value to the right person at the right time
• For the organisation, the questions people ask effectively tell them ‘these are the issues you should be focusing your efforts on’.

In most areas of life, most people come across problems/questions which are new to them but which have already been answered by someone else. Most of the time, however, they end up having to reinvent the wheel because the answer is inaccessible. Either it remains stuck in someone else’s head or they don’t know how or where to find it. For example, when buying a digital camera for the first time, Mrs Smith from Scunthorpe has to climb a steep learning curve: what is a pixel? how much memory do I need?; how do I get prints? But whatever she learns is of no help to Mr Jones in Skegness who is in a similar situation, because there is no way that Mrs Smith can transfer her learnings to Mr Jones.

For most problems – the challenge of being a school leader, or of buying a digital camera for the first time, or of facing up to the implications of a long term illness – there are a finite number of questions that will be asked and that need to be answered.

If the ‘problem area’ is tightly defined with clear limits, the same basic questions will be asked many times over by many different people, so the cost of answering these questions will fall quickly. If the ‘problem area’ is not tightly defined however, very few people will ask the same question and the cost of providing answers will quickly balloon out of control. This is critical to the economics of Problem Solving Communities (PSCs).

If and when conditions 1, 2 and 3 hold true, the Problem Solving Community has the fundamental ingredients of a ‘perfect’ business model or module. It is a service that improves with use - the more it is used the lower its costs and the better its quality (in this case, its answers).

PSCs are an innovation that is set to sweep through every customer-facing service in most services industries (health, education, retail, financial services etc) and most workplaces. They will change how individuals interact with organisations and what they expect organisations to deliver, in turn changing what value organisations provide and how they provide it.

PSCs will also transform how organisations do their work and relate to their employees (in one sense, the job of every organisation is to answer their employees ever-changing work-related questions).