Within the last week I have had two conversations representing two sides of the same challenge. I first conversed with an engineer who recently became a member of his company’s process improvement team. He lamented that he sometimes missed the relative simplicity of engineering challenges compared to those in business improvement.

The second conversation was with a leader who felt he needed to recruit someone to drive business and process improvement, but was having trouble finding someone he could trust. The strange thing was that my responses in both conversations sounded similar.

The problems we solve to improve business and process performance don’t require skills any different than those we already know. In the most basic sense, we are simply solving problems.

The human process for solving problems is the same no matter what the problem is. We first determine what the problem is and how we want things to be different. Then we consider the resources and options we have available. After that we must get creative about using those resources and skills to invent a solution. Oftentimes the best solutions require fewer resources yet optimize performance and address risks better.

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