How to Start a Problem Solving Meeting

The Key to Developing Solutions Your Customers Will Love

As a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt, I have had the opportunity to facilitate hundreds of team problem-solving meetings. When I began my journey as a meeting facilitator, I started like most folks. I understood the importance of having an agenda and a focus for my meeting. My techniques mostly worked, and no one on my teams complained.

I think meetings are like most things we encounter in life: we don’t understand how good it can be when we are consistently exposed to the mediocre (the average). This is how I would describe most meetings. What made me stop and think more about my meetings was a pattern I started noticing. The teams would come up with some pretty good stuff. But when we began vetting the solutions with other stakeholders (or implementing the solutions), the team would encounter all kinds of resistance.

This took me in the direction of learning more about change management and team facilitation. I eventually became a certified change practitioner and received extensive training on communications and meeting facilitation. As I learned more, I started to recognize just how bad my meetings were. Today, I want to share with you a tool that I discovered. I think this tool has been the biggest factor in improving the outcomes of my meetings.