You’ve identified the actual problem, congratulations! Now you need to solve it. This involves several steps: generate potential answers to your key question, organize them, prioritize their analysis, conduct the analysis and conclude on your findings.

Generating potential answers requires creativity: identifying the mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive (MECE) solutions to your problem. These will be the different causes of your problem, if you are answer a “why” key question, or the possible actions you can take to solve it—if you have a “how” key question.

Structuring the potential solutions is finding a organization that helps you understand better your potential solutions. You will do this using issue trees, and these will be MECE and perspicacious.

Once you have identified all the solutions or causes of your problem, you must then select which ones you want to analyze first. That you’ll do in the “prioritize the analysis” step.

Then, you will conduct the actual analysis.

Finally you will draw conclusions out of your analysis. This might lead you to identify new potential answers, sending you back in the loop. If that’s the case, iterate as needed.