Three frameworks for creative problem-solving in supply chain

Supply chains face numerous risks and disruptions, from geopolitical conflict to extreme weather events, labor disputes, and beyond. More than ever, supply chain professionals need creative thinking and problem-solving to withstand these challenges and flourish in the face of future disruptions.

Creative thinking and problem-solving were critical in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. When demand for hand sanitizer outstripped supply in the early spring of 2020, for example, numerous liquor companies repurposed their equipment to manufacture it. When ventilators became dangerously scarce, researchers at institutions like Rice University used off-the-shelf products and materials to create viable emergency-use ventilators in order to plug the gap.

Supply chain professionals can and should continue to strive for creative solutions like these in an environment marked by chaos and uncertainty. Yet it’s all too easy to resort to familiar problem-solving tactics—and often difficult to know how to move beyond entrenched ways of thinking to develop novel solutions. In this article, we present three frameworks for creative problem solving that will help you to:

1. Think like a Marine (using principles from maneuver warfare);
2. Think like a customer (with design thinking); and
3. Think like an inventor (by leveraging the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving).

Each of these frameworks provides pathways for organizations and their supply chain leaders to approach a challenge from different angles, ideate potential solutions, and begin developing responses that meet the challenge or even circumvent it entirely. As we discuss these frameworks, we also provide examples of how leading organizations apply them in the context of supply chains to solve some of today’s most pressing challenges.

Think like a Marine

In response to persistent disruptions in maritime shipping, John Konrad (founder and CEO of gCaptain) believes that it’s time to call the Marines. Konrad is not suggesting that we call in troops to address supply chain crises, but instead that supply chain leaders can take a page from the U.S. Marine Corps’ playbook to think creatively in response to novel challenges in a rapidly shifting business environment.

Because they are a smaller branch of the armed services with less funding than their counterparts like the U.S. Army and Navy, the Marines have developed approaches to warfare that do not rely on overwhelming firepower or numbers to win battles. Instead, Marines leverage an approach known as maneuver warfare, which embraces chaos and uses it as a battlefield advantage. Rather than assaulting the enemy head-on, a tactic characteristic of this approach would be sneaking smaller units behind the enemy’s defensive forces, capturing the command center, and cutting off supply lines.

While organizations are not fighting a conventional war, supply chains today are strained by complex challenges and obstacles that cannot be solved by fighting a war of attrition (that is, by continuing to throw more and more resources at the problem). Instead, organizations and their supply chain leaders should focus on finding creative ways to maneuver around them.

How Coca-Cola outmaneuvered shipping challenges

Coca-Cola provides a good example of how organizations can use creative problem-solving to maneuver around significant challenges. Facing severe port congestion and rising freight costs, the organization thought outside the box (in this case, a container box) by chartering three handysize bulk carriers to ship 60,000 tons of material and keep its production lines running. Other organizations like Target made similar moves by chartering and co-managing their own ships, which made it easier to avoid delays and steer clear of the most backed-up ports.

Learning from failure helps drive success

The application of maneuver warfare in supply chain requires risk-taking in addition to creative thinking. In a military context, these critical success factors can easily be hampered by the fear of failure and risk-averse management styles. The same is true in business: failure- and risk-averse attitudes can stifle innovation, creative problem-solving, and the types of tactical thinking needed to maneuver around obstacles. Organizations that embrace the study of past failures to develop new tactics are much more likely to arrive at innovative solutions than those that continue to throw resources at the same well-worn approaches. 

Think like a customer

Design thinking is a human-centric, solutions-based approach to problem solving. It is particularly useful for addressing complex or ill-defined problems (which abound in supply chain) and enabling more effective brainstorming and prototyping. Although empathic design is at its heart, design thinking also addresses the need for experimentation, speed, and testing the viability of ideas to make them less risky. This approach also puts a premium on “failing fast” in the pursuit of effective solutions.

Design thinking is traditionally broken down into five steps or phases:

1. Empathize. Listen to customers to understand their needs and pain points 
2. Define. Scope the problem from the customer perspective
3. Ideate. Brainstorm potential solutions
4. Prototype. Develop minimally feasible models of potential solutions
5. Test. Conduct a series of assessments on the applicability of prototypes

The power of design thinking lies in its orientation toward customers or end-users. Rather than designing products or services with a “if we build it, they will come” mindset, design thinking flips the script by addressing challenges that arise from concrete customer needs and pain points.

Design thinking has a wide range of use cases in supply chain, from sourcing new enterprise technologies to improving supplier relationships and more. For example, traditional supplier relationship management approaches often mean flexing an organization’s buying power to get suppliers to concede to a list of demands (whether for price, speed, quality, or something else). Design thinking approaches, by contrast, bring suppliers, buyers, and other stakeholders together to look for common goals and strategies. In the most strategic supplier relationships, this means that the buyer and supplier work together to co-create novel solutions or approaches to challenges.

‘Walk the supply chain’ to build empathy for customers

Supply chain expert Ron Volpe notes that in the context of supply chain, design thinking includes breaking down every stage of the process, from “farm to table.” As a first step toward developing empathy with customers, Volpe recommends “walking the supply chain,” which means going from manufacturing plants to distribution centers to stores and beyond in order to understand the full journey of each product. Interviews at each touchpoint help to build a comprehensive picture (for example, a customer journey map) of preferences and pain points that help to define and scope the problem from a customer perspective.

Break down silos to innovate

The final three phases of design thinking—ideation, prototyping, and testing—are collaborative endeavors that should (ideally) break down silos and bring a wide range of voices into the conversation. As Microsoft discovered in its own grassroots innovation efforts, organizations can garner more and better ideas when they think beyond a specific function and invite employees across the enterprise to get involved. Without this cross-functional collaboration, design thinking can’t even get off the ground effectively.

Fail fast and fail forward

Design thinking requires organizations to embrace failure as a key part of the innovation process. End-users or customers provide feedback on what works and what doesn’t in an iterative feedback loop. Failing quickly means learning quickly, which in turn means a higher likelihood of arriving at more effective solutions that drive greater buy-in. These types of solutions don’t typically emerge from a first or second (or even third or fourth) round of prototyping and testing, but these attempts teach important lessons that inform the next round of design.

Invest in soft skills and deep work skills

The importance of empathy for customers, cross-functional collaboration, and experimentation in design thinking means that supply chain organizations will need to invest in the development of key soft skills and deep work skills within their teams. For example, active listening, communication (oral and written), strategic thinking, and creativity are all prerequisites for design thinking approaches. The development of these skills not only enables design thinking approaches but also helps build more resilient, agile, and customer-focused supply chains.

Think like an inventor

TRIZ, or the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving, is a systematic problem-solving approach that is often applied when approaches like traditional brainstorming fall short. It involves framing problems as contradictions, which allows for the application of 40 research-based innovative principles to expedite problem-solving and innovation. The TRIZ methodology was originally developed by Genrich Altshuller, who analyzed more than 200,000 patent files to identify patterns of innovation. TRIZ has since evolved from its engineering and new product development roots into a range of techniques and resources, many of which are available through open-source and educational outlets.

The concept of nesting provides a simple example of the TRIZ framework’s problem-solving principles in action. In scenarios where shipping containers become scarce, organizations need to spend a lot more to move the same amount of products or raw materials. However, if an organization can find a way to nest smaller objects inside of larger objects (for example, inside the hollow area of a pipe) it can ship more in the same space.

At a broad level, the application of TRIZ includes four steps:

1. Frame the problem to be solved as a contradiction. The two primary types of contradictions are technical (involving trade-offs between one factor and another, such as speed versus quality) and physical/inherent (competing requirements on the same factor, such as “the product should be durable, but not so durable that it cannot be recycled or disposed of when needed”).
2. Find the generalized TRIZ problem or contradiction. Use a TRIZ contradiction matrix to align your problem with a generalized contradiction. Many TRIZ tools, such as contradiction lists and separation principles, are available open source for this step as well as step three.
3. Identify relevant principles. Following a TRIZ Contradiction Matrix will point you to at least one, and typically more, of the 40 TRIZ principles. These principles represent research-based solutions to contradictions. Lists of the 40 principles are available online. Select the principle that is most feasible for your specific problem.
4. Apply the selected principle to your problem. Adapt the generalized solution in TRIZ to the specific problem in your organization.

In an article describing the application of TRIZ in supply chain management, Maria Stoletova describes a scenario in which the most cost-effective supplier also happens to be furthest away from an organization. While purchasing meets sourcing objectives in terms of quality and price per piece (which is good), the total cost of doing business will be higher because of increased transportation costs (which is bad). Using TRIZ, Stoletova identified a number of feasible solutions to the contradiction, including:

• Changing the supplier quote to include transportation costs as part of the piece price;
• Sharing shipping costs with another company that needs to ship goods to the same area;
• Using the space inside the product to ship smaller items (perhaps from another company) to lower transportation costs; and
• Enhancing the supplier selection process to include other criteria besides price and quality. For example, if the supplier is especially innovative or would make a good strategic partner, these additional benefits might outweigh transportation costs.

Some ideation software like the 40IP app makes applying TRIZ even easier by allowing a user to input his or her contradictions, automatically generating potential solutions, and enabling the user to simulate what the solution might look like for testing purposes. Some of these solutions also expand beyond TRIZ’s 40 principles—for example, Innovation Workbench draws from 400 patterns of invention to help users develop solutions to challenges.

Key takeaways

Maneuver warfare, design thinking, and TRIZ all offer frameworks for creative thinking and problem-solving that can help your organization develop novel solutions for today’s supply chain challenges. Applying them requires time and collaboration, but these investments pay generous dividends by enabling new approaches, revealing new opportunities, and perhaps most importantly, providing the impetus to move beyond ingrained ways of thinking to try something new. Surviving and thriving in the face of today’s supply chain challenges requires nothing less.

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