When we have big problems to discuss our team gets sidetracked with short-term solutions. Help!

I was with a client the other day and a group of us were pondering a tough question about the ongoing direction of the business.

Despite being seasoned business professionals we all, at some point, strayed away from contributing to the big hard question and journeyed into the much easier realm of nutting out basic tactics.

My guess is that you too are familiar with this scenario. Commonly we get our key people together to work through some really tough challenges facing the business and at the day’s end are delighted to have a long list of action items. But when we come to review them later we realise that they are little more than housekeeping ideas, and certainly aren’t going to fundamentally change our business.

I think it’s helpful in these situations to distinguish between ‘big thoughts’ and ‘little thoughts’. ‘Big thoughts’ are the unpolished ideas that could be the impetus of a fundamental change in the business. ‘Little thoughts’ are the minor improvements that make incremental changes to the business. Both are relevant and important but we are inclined to spend more time coming up with little thoughts, not only because they are so much easier on the old brain cells but also because they are immediately actionable and accordingly provide a sense of satisfaction. But it’s short-term satisfaction and rarely provides a solid solution.

I suggest, when working through tough challenges in a group situation, that someone in the team is charged with assigning the ideas as ‘big thoughts’ or ‘little thoughts’ as soon as they are verbalised. Doing this will highlight the overemphasis on the little thoughts and encourage participants to offer up more ‘big thoughts’.

I think it’s also useful to give teams examples of ‘big thoughts’ versus ‘little thoughts’. Two such stories that I use are:

• The cash strapped business that had as a ‘little thought’ to hire an accounts receivable clerk and had as a ‘big thought’ to change the billing model to upfront deposits and to change the target market to customers who would accept those payment terms.
• The gross-margin challenged business that had as a ‘little thought’ to renegotiate terms with suppliers (which saved about 0.5% on the gross margin) and had as a ‘big thought’ to slash the customer list and serve only the 20 best customers (which improved the margin by a whopping 10%).

So when you next have a difficult problem to chew over, try giving your solutions the ‘big thought, little thought’ treatment.

Julia Bickerstaff’s expertise is in helping businesses grow profitably. She runs two businesses:Butterfly Coaching, a small advisory firm with a unique approach to assisting SMEs with profitable growth; and The Business Bakery, which helps kitchen table tycoons build their best businesses. Julia is the author of “How to Bake a Business”  and was previously a partner at Deloitte. She is a chartered accountant and has a degree in economics from The London School of Economics (London University).