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The Help Desk
Techniques, tools, and tips to help you improve
quality and enhance participation
The Power of Negative Evidence
Most of us have spent considerable time facilitating
and coaching problem-solving teams. Although this
role is extremely rewarding and often fun, too, it
also involves several challenges that seem to occur
in a majority of teams.
When team members begin their problem-solving
journey, they usually are brimming with ideas on
solutions that might be implemented. One of the first
tasks that facilitators/coaches often face is to
explain the difference between remedies and
preventive solutions. Once this point is made, team
members are asked to set their ideas aside and begin
a methodical analysis that includes defining the
problem in measurable terms, gathering data about the
current situation, and determining the root cause.
Only after the root cause is identified are team
members allowed to turn their energies toward
creative solutions.
The Tuckman model of team development tells us
that teams go through four growth stages:
- “Forming,” where team members are
asking: Why are we here? What are the other people
like? Will they like me?
- “Storming,” where team members
begin to test how much power and control they
personally have over the group.
- “Norming,” where the team settles
down and begins to focus on how it
functions.
- “Performing,” when team members
have developed smooth working relationships and
focus on how to best accomplish the
task.
Generally, these stages are associated with the
development of group dynamics and interpersonal
relationships, but it is interesting to note that the
“storming” stage usually coincides with
the teams’ efforts shifting away from solutions
and toward the data gathering and analysis steps
associated with root cause determination. Similarly,
team members frequently begin to
“perform” after the root cause has been
identified and solution proposals are invited. It
seems clear, therefore, that any methods that can be
used to speed up the analytical steps of the
problem-solving process are likely to increase the
pace of team development, too.
One way that seems to help teams move more
energetically through the steps involves
“flipping the perspective” of the
analysis. Instead of systematically building a
positive trail of evidence that leads directly toward
the root cause, the team is encouraged to prove what
causes are not at the root of the problem. For some
reason, many team members find it more exciting to
jump around disproving causes than to follow the
scientific method!
 To put this approach to
work, the team defines its problem and then
immediately brainstorms a comprehensive list of
potential causes that are shown on a cause-and-effect
diagram. The figure at right shows a simplistic
diagram for the problem, “the car won’t
start.”
Then the team members review each cause and divide
it into one of four groups, as follows:
- Easy to disprove—causes that can be
eliminated with a cursory inspection and virtually
no analysis (e.g., no key, not in park or
neutral).
- Fairly easy to disprove—causes that
require the collection and simple analysis of
readily available facts and data (shown in italics
on the diagram).
- Not so easy to disprove—causes that
require the collection and analysis of facts and
data that may require tests or experiments to
disprove (shown in bold on the diagram).
- Somewhat difficult to disprove—causes
that require the collection and analysis of facts
and data that may require complex tests or
experiments and the assistance of outside resources
to disprove (e.g., starter, alternator).
The team members bounce around in their data
collection and analysis efforts, disproving the
potential causes in order of increasing
difficulty—until they find a cause that
can’t be disproved. At that point, they switch
to collecting positive evidence to prove the
potential cause.
In the example, simple causes such as the absence
of a key or the car being in the wrong gear are
quickly ruled out—or discovered to be true,
resulting in a rapid solution of the problem. As the
causes move up in level of difficulty, more data are
required to disprove the cause absolutely. For
instance, the cause “out of gasoline” may
seem obvious, but it takes a controlled experiment
where a measured amount of fuel is placed in the tank
to prove that the gauge is calibrated properly. The
causes “starter” and
“alternator” take specialty-testing
equipment that generally requires a
repairperson’s intervention.
Try this approach the next time you facilitate/
coach a problem-solving team, and see if the team
members grow a beautiful garden without a long stormy
season.
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