21 posts
A small team knowledge base usually starts as a folder of how-to documents. It describes how things should work, and nobody opens it when something breaks. This guide shows a different shape: a knowledge base built…
If you need to track work problems without a ticket system, you are probably keeping them in your inbox, a chat thread and your head. That works until a problem you thought was fixed comes back and nobody remembers what…
A fishbone diagram example is easier to learn from when the problem is small enough to hold in your head. The tool comes from industry, where teams use it in manufacturing, healthcare and service. This one uses an…
A team retrospective is the meeting where a team looks back at a stretch of work and agrees what to change. The meeting is usually the easy part. The hard part is that by the next retrospective, half the lessons are…
Hansei is the lean practice of honest self-reflection: looking back at what happened and asking how a process, or your own part in it, could be better. It is most useful at the moment most people want to move on, right…
A problem log template gives every problem the same short set of fields, so you can see what you tried, what happened, and what to do next without starting from memory. Most logs fail because each entry is written…
In a small business, problems rarely stay solved. The morning shift finds out that the dishwasher only needs its filter cleaned, and the evening shift spends twenty minutes on the same fault two days later. A shared…
Most guides to the A3 come from factories, with charts of defect rates and machine downtime. If you run a team of four or five, that can make the method feel too big for you. It is not. This A3 problem solving example…
If you have ever tried to fix something and found yourself arguing about what the problem even is, the trouble started with the first sentence. Learning to write a problem statement in one line is the cheapest skill in…
A good study session can crack a question nobody could do alone. Then a week later, the same question turns up on a past paper and nobody remembers how it was done. Study group problem solving works better when the group…
You have fixed this before. You know you have. But you cannot remember how, so you spend the same half hour working it out again. If you want to stop solving the same problem twice, a good memory will not save you. A…
Most guides to a personal knowledge graph are about notes: books you read, ideas you had, links between them. This one is about something smaller and more useful on a bad week. A personal knowledge graph of your problems…
Every family has a few problems that come back week after week: the dishes, the school bags, the fight over whose turn it is. Most families talk about them, agree on something, and forget what they agreed. Family problem…
Plan, do, check, act is easy to recite and surprisingly hard to use. Most explanations stay abstract, or use a factory line you have never stood on. This PDCA example takes one small, everyday problem and runs it through…
If a problem keeps coming back, you have probably tried more fixes than you remember. You try something, it seems to help, life moves on, and a month later you are standing in front of the same problem trying the same…
Look up the steps of problem solving and you will find many lists. The useful ones cover the same ground: find out what is really happening, decide what good looks like, find the cause, try a fix, and check it. This…
Most teams solve the same problem twice. The fix lived in one person's head, or in a chat thread nobody can find, and when the problem comes back the team starts over. This guide shows you how to share problems and…
When a problem feels too big to start, the fix is rarely more willpower. It is to break a big problem into smaller problems, each one small enough that you can try something this week and see if it worked. This guide…
A lessons learned log is a running record of the problems your team hit, what you tried, and what actually happened. Done well, it stops the next person from repeating a mistake you already paid for. Done badly, it is a…
Looking for a 5 whys example you can use on your own life, not a factory line? This guide gives you two. First the classic one the method comes from, then a personal problem taken step by step down to a cause you can…
A problem solving journal is a notebook for one job: writing down the problems you carry, what you try for each one, and what happened. It is not a diary of your day. It is a record of attempts, so you stop repeating the…