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What is a Problem Solving Workshop And How It Can Help Your Team Achieve Goals Easily

Problems arise within any company or startup and in many forms. Whether in production, services, implementation or within teams, problems not addressed only get bigger. Problem solving is designed to target a problem’s root causes and move toward a solution while improving the solving process skills of a team.

What is a Problem Solving Workshop And How It Can Help Your Team Achieve Goals Easily

The advantages for teams in this workshop are obvious. Not only will they learn new problem solving methods for future use and actually solve a problem, the team building aspect is considerable. Communication through group brainstorming and co-development of the solution include everyone, making for closer-knit members and higher morale through achievement.

What is problem solving workshop?

Problem solving workshops are managed discussion, in which a neutral facilitator, with no stake in the outcome, helps participants to achieve an agreed goal. It is structured process of using Lean Six Sigma techniques and approach and ensure a team-based discussion, commitment of participants and buy-in to the outcome.

It has been proven that Facilitation is the most effective and productive way of achieving results while having matured and goal aiming communication. More and more organisations achieve success by collaboration, interaction and teamwork through Problem solving workshops/facilitation.

Challenges you can resolve together at NextRetreat

What is a Problem Solving Workshop And How It Can Help Your Team Achieve Goals Easily
  • Create Strategy / Business Plan

Would you like to expand your business? Explore the best ideas how to get more clients or find new segments. Looking for improving your marketing strategy? Do you need to set a new product or service while maintaining your quality? Set the priorities for the next period or stage of your business.

  • Improvements / Innovation

Would you like to set up faster delivery? Decrease error rate and failures? Get ideas on how to make internal processes more effective? Define what the most critical quality factor for your customer and how to improve it? Improve operational efficiencies?

  • Problem solving

Do you know that something is wrong but you don´t know exactly what is it? Do you feel like number of customer complaints is going up? Do you feel lack of engagement and / or misunderstanding at your firm?

  • Set up new processes

Set up processes for new products, services, applications or changes in cooperation with third parties.

  • Decomposition of key management goals

Would you like to define specific actions, metrics, KPI for teams/processes? How to effectively gather requirements and make important decisions.

Why workshops and facilitation

During usual discussions, most of ideas are lost or not recorded; people switch from one idea to another, turn away from the main topic and sometimes develop ideas, that doesn’t have high added value. Sometimes they follow up with actions that are not accurate and people assume that “somebody” will do the the necessary execution, but the result is often waste of time and money.

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Problem solving workshops are..

  • An effective, structured and managed way of communication
  • Focusing on the goal while giving everyone the necessary space & time for explaining opinions and co-developing solutions
  • Stop turning away, external disturbances and developing non productive topics/ideas
  • Only ideas that have the biggest value and lowest cost are developed
  • Building consensus, better understanding,  avoiding disagreements, assumptions, directivity and dissatisfaction

How it works

  • All participants develop ideas together, get and share all the information, see how the ideas are developed, the benefits, possibilities and limitations
  • The workshop benefits result in participants building on each other’s ideas and gaining a better understanding of each other’s viewpoints, all while reducing paradigm effect and misunderstanding as everything is visually recorded
  • An opportunity for participants to discuss issues and problems, and reach a consensus on important decisions in a safe environment managed by the facilitator

What we do

  • Buy-in from all stakeholders – participants feel engaged, involved and committed to the result, contributing to both content and decisions that will be made
  • Task list with specific actions points (who-when-what) is developed in order to achieve the goal after workshop
  • Team work and cooperation– spend effective time together as a team, with one common and agreed upon target

Tools and techniques used during workshops

Facilitation, tools of Lean Six Sigma and project management will be used exactly according to your needs and specific challenges.

  • Brainstorming as many ideas as possible ( different types of managed brainstorming/brainwriting, discussion,…), visually recorded and grouped (affinity diagram)
  • Filtering and reducing the list of ideas in order to ensure important ones are developed and time is not wasted (impact/effort matrix, voting, 1-3-9 evaluation, …)
  • Developing selected ideas in mind map
  • Project management (task list creation, Who-when-what do, tracking)
  • Assessing waste (value stream map, 8 wastes of lean, Added Value/not added value analyses); Risk analysis (Failure Mode and Effect Analysis); Root causes analyses of problem (5 why, fishbone); mapping process/change, sipoc
Brainstorming is one of the techniques used at a problem solving workshop.


Martin Studencan
Martin Studencan
Chief Executive Officer