Apparently, the best practices used in the past may not work well under today’s circumstances. Some problems can keep on repeating and are raised up to the management’s attention, and it is necessary for the company to find new solutions that can fix such issues in a more timely manner.
The following is an example of how a production team resolved an urgent problem through flexibility and an out-of-the-box idea.
The production team was required to make products for an urgent order from a customer. With such short notice, the production manager needed to plan for the line’s readiness and machine set-up, and to have operators who could run the production properly.
These were factors that could be controlled by the production manager. However, the main problem was an insufficient stock of raw materials.
Importing directly from the com-pany’s overseas supplier, even by air, still could not meet the production schedule. After an intensive brainstorming session, the team came up with the idea of borrowing the materials from a local competitor, and returning an equivalent amount once the ordered shipment arrived.
Here are some ideas for resolving challenging issues |creatively.
Fix a difficult problem with an easy solution: Sometimes it is worth looking for an alternative to cope with a hard problem by finding simple and easy ways to resolve it. By applying general or traditional practices to complicated issues, we may be able to find the way to fix problems easily.
Be proactively result-oriented: It is usual to see people spend so much time cracking on with the issue without any productive results. It is important for decision-makers to aim at getting the proposed solutions at the end of the discussion, so that action-plan execution can follow. With the result-oriented mindset, ideas can be generated, which might include some unexpectedly good ones.
Welcome wild ideas: When the brainstorming session based on typical ways of looking at the issue cannot go even further, it is time for the team members to start thinking of other, unusual alternatives. It is possible to find a good solution if we can abandon the normal viewpoints. For example, if a company has vacant warehouse space, can this be utilised for something other than keeping goods?
Talk to many people: To get new ideas, it is advisable to talk to people from various fields, such as people from different educational backgrounds, from different job functions or with different industry experience. By connecting with people, solutions can emerge from the conversation, which can lead to a win-win situation for all parties.
Most companies have opened up an opportunity for staff members to participate in generating ideas to deal with specific issues or problems. However, sometimes it is quite hard to be successful in the meeting-room environment.
Why don’t we change the place or time, so that people can come up with fresh ideas under changed conditions? This can be a genuine key to problem-solving success.

Dr Yanyong Thammatucharee is senior vice president for finance and accounting at Central Marketing Group. He can be reached at yanyong@cmg.co.th.