Force Field Analysis is a team tool with lots of applications including root cause.
This is another structured brainstorming tool.
A Force Field Analysis seeks to identify forces that will
help you accomplish what you want and those that might work against you.
If you can identify the driving forces that will help your team accomplish their goal,
you might be able to leverage those forces.
If you can identify forces working against what you want to accomplish,
you may be able to minimize or mitigate them.
At the very least,
this information will help you to understand the problem better.
A common way to do this is to use a flip chart or a white board,
draw a large T-shape and label the two sides as shown here.
It's good to pair driving and restraining forces but it's not always possible.
Sometimes, your team might also identify
forces that seem to belong on both sides of the chart.
Let's say that you're leading a team that has the task of implementing
a process change or even a process improvement initiative.
You might brainstorm the forces that will help you succeed,
and those that might work against you.
The team will probably come up with many more than are shown here,
but as an example,
there may be a strong desire to improve
customer satisfaction but you may have employees or managers who are resistant.
Perhaps you have a particular manager who is supportive and wants the team to succeed,
but there may be others who feel differently.
Some employees may be eager to be involved and to help make things better,
but they also face the pressure of the production schedule.
Employees may have lots of good ideas,
but do they have the resources to implement them?
When you've identified these for and against forces,
you may be able to come up with ways to use the strong driving forces to help you,
and you may be able to head off or minimize some of the restraining forces.
You might use Force Field Analysis to identify
root causes of something like late customer orders.
The idea is that for large problems like this,
there are a number of forces that combine to produce the current situation.
If we can identify them we might be able to address the causes.
What if we have this problem with late customer orders and we want to fix that?
There are a lot of things that could cause this problem.
These are just a few.
Management's desire for getting rid of late customer orders is certainly a driving force.
Lack of capacity to do all of the work that
the organization has committed to may be a restraining force.
Employees usually want to do a good job and may be willing to do what is
necessary but perhaps management is not authorizing overtime.
Maybe poor quality is working against us as we have to
rework product or rerun some orders causing us to be late.
But we have also just begun process improvements,
so maybe we can leverage that effort to help solve the problem.
Another restraining force may be a bottleneck in the process.
Perhaps we can alleviate this bottleneck if
our employees are flexible and willing to stagger breaks and lunch.
These were just a couple of examples of the use of the Force Field Analysis.
It's usually done by a team to help them to understand a large project or problem.
Part of the attraction of this tool is it is so simple and easy to use.
All you need is a marker and a flip chart or a white board,
and a team with ideas.