The Problem Analysis Worksheet
Job Relations has no breakdown sheet. Its working tool is the Problem Analysis Worksheet — the four-step method on a single page, built to make you deliberate instead of letting you jump to conclusions.
Job Instruction has its Job Breakdown Sheet, and Job Methods has its breakdown and proposal sheets. Job Relations has no breakdown sheet at all. Its working tool is the Problem Analysis Worksheet — the four-step method laid out as a single page you fill in for the problem in front of you: state the objective, get the facts, weigh and decide, take action, and check results. A supervisor who puts a problem on paper this way handles it better than one who tries to carry it all in their head — because the sheet is built to make you deliberate.
By the end of this section, you should understand:
- why Job Relations has no breakdown sheet, and what it uses instead,
- how the Problem Analysis Worksheet walks the four steps and forces you to be deliberate,
- how to state the objective and gather a complete set of facts,
- how the sheet loops back to the foundations to prevent the next problem,
- how to draw out opinions and feelings without breaking the relationship, shown in the Tom case.
1Why there is no breakdown sheet
It is fair to ask why Job Relations does not have a breakdown sheet like Job Instruction. The answer is that a job and a person are different things. You can break a job down once, file the sheet, and reach for it every time you teach that job, because the job does not change between learners. A person and a relationship are not like that. Every problem is a little different, every person is a little different, and the facts of one situation rarely carry over to the next.
Job Relations has no breakdown sheet. Its working tool is the Problem Analysis Worksheet — the four-step method on one page, filled in for the problem in front of you.
So the working tool is the four-step method itself, used as a worksheet for the problem in front of you. Writing it down does three things. It slows you down enough to get the facts before you decide. It lays the facts out where you can see the gaps and the contradictions. And it keeps the objective in view, so the action you choose is measured against what you were actually trying to accomplish — not against your irritation in the moment.
The worksheet is for the supervisor, not for the worker. Like the Job Breakdown Sheet, it is a private note from you to yourself. You would never hand it to the person, and you keep what you learn — especially anything personal — confidential.
2The Job Relations Problem Analysis Worksheet
The working tool of Job Relations is the Problem Analysis Worksheet — the four-step method laid out as a single page you fill in for the problem in front of you. It is not extra paperwork. Its whole purpose is to make you deliberate: to get the facts before you decide, to weigh more than one action, and to keep the objective in view instead of acting on the irritation of the moment. The cautions printed on it — be sure you have the whole story, don't jump to conclusions, don't pass the buck, did your action help production — are the four steps' hardest lessons, put where you cannot miss them.
The Problem Analysis Worksheet is the four-step method as a worksheet — one sheet per problem, filled in by the supervisor, that forces the facts and the options into the open before any action is taken.
Read down the sheet and it walks the four steps in order.
Heading — frame the problem. First, how the problem came up — were you tipped off by a change, did you size it up before it happened, did it come to you, or did you run into it — and, above all, the objective: just what are you trying to accomplish? In the Tom case it was "make Tom a safe worker and get production back to normal." Everything below is measured against that.
Step 1 — Get the facts. There are five places to look, and the ones most often skipped are at the bottom: the record; the rules and customs, written and unwritten; the individuals concerned; their opinions and feelings — which, right or wrong, are facts to the person and must be treated as facts by you; and any actions already taken. The caution is the whole of Step 1: be sure you have the whole story.
Step 2 — Weigh and decide. This is the heart of the sheet, and the part a hurried supervisor skips. You list the possible actions — more than one, always — fit the facts together, and look for gaps and contradictions. Then you weigh each action across the row: does it fit policies and practices, does it serve the objective, and what is its probable effect on the individual, the group, and production? Marking every candidate action against those columns is what stops you seizing the first conclusion that comes to mind.
Step 3 — Take action. Decide whether the action is yours to handle (your responsibility), whether someone else has the ability to help, or whether it belongs with your boss (their authority) — and get the timing right. The caution: don't pass the buck.
Step 4 — Check results. Set times to check, and watch the three things that tell you whether the objective was really met: output, attitudes, and relationships. A problem is closed only when the results come back the way you intended — and the sheet asks it plainly: did you accomplish your objective?
Then the sheet does something the pocket card alone does not: it loops back to the foundations. Could this problem have been prevented, or caught while it was still small? Which foundation, used in time, would have headed it off? That last block is where the reactive method turns proactive — every problem you handle becomes a lesson in which foundation you let slip.
| Step 1 · Get the facts — be sure you have the whole story | |
|---|---|
| Review the record | |
| Rules and customs | |
| Individuals concerned | |
| Opinions and feelings | |
| Actions taken | |
| Step 2 · Weigh and decide — don't jump to conclusions · mark ✓ take action, ✗ no action | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Possible action | ✓ / ✗ | Policies & practices | Objective | Individual | Group | Production |
| Step 3 · Take action — don't pass the buck | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| No. | Self · responsibility | Others · ability | Supervisor · authority | Timing of action |
| Step 4 · Check results — did your action help production? | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Check timing | Day / time | Day / time | Day / time | Day / time |
| Output | ||||
| Attitudes | ||||
| Relationships | ||||
| Did you accomplish your objective? | Yes / No — if not, which item on the card was handled poorly? |
|---|---|
| Foundations used in this action | |
| Foundations that could have prevented this problem |
The actual TWI worksheet, shown blank. It walks the four steps in order — frame the problem and the objective, get the facts, weigh and decide across the columns, take action, check results — and closes by asking which foundations could have prevented the problem.
What to notice: the sheet is built to slow you down. Step 2 will not let you record a single action without weighing it against the objective and its effect on the individual, the group, and production — which is precisely how it keeps you from jumping to conclusions.
3The hardest facts to get — opinions and feelings
Records and rules are easy to gather. The fourth source of facts — what the person thinks and feels — is the one supervisors most often miss, and it is frequently the one that explains everything else. A worker who is suddenly careless, or short-tempered, or off their usual standard is telling you something; the facts that explain it are often feelings the person has not said out loud.
The trouble is that opinions and feelings do not come out on demand. You cannot order someone to tell you what is bothering them. They come out only when the person feels free to talk, and that is a skill the supervisor has to develop. The Tom case is the clearest illustration of it.
A supervisor out in the shop notices Tom reaching into a machine with the guard off — something he has warned Tom about before. He says so, sharply. Tom snaps back: "If you want to get rid of me, why don't you just do it instead of getting on my case all the time!"
Here is the first decision the supervisor makes, and it is a good one. He does not argue it out on the floor with Tom angry. He says they will get together that afternoon, and he arranges relief so Tom can leave the line. Nothing useful is settled in an argument, and nothing useful is settled while a person is too angry to talk.
That afternoon, in the office, the supervisor does the patient work. He acknowledges that he has been on Tom lately and explains why — the safety chances, the slipped quality — and then he turns to the obvious thing first: is something wrong with the machine? Tom is still combative. He complains that shutting the machine off would cost him production; he turns bitter about money and the company. The supervisor could have cut in to correct him — it would not take half a day to shut the machine down — but he does not. He lets Tom talk.
The bitterness about money is a clue, and the supervisor follows it gently rather than pouncing on it. He mentions the land Tom was going to build on after he got married. And the story comes out: Tom has lost his girl, the half-built house means nothing now, and he feels nobody cares what happens to him. That is why he has been careless. Only after the supervisor has listened all the way through does Tom volunteer the other fact that matters: the parts are coming through with a burr, a piece keeps breaking off into the machine, and Tom has to reach in to clear it — which is why the guard keeps coming off.
So the supervisor walked in with a safety problem and came out with the whole story: a careless worker (the visible fact), a personal loss behind the carelessness (a feeling he had to draw out), and a real bad-parts problem behind the safety violation (a fact he would never have gotten by arguing). Three of the most important facts in the case came out only because he talked with Tom and let Tom's opinions and feelings surface.
When the supervisor took the bad-parts problem up the line to his own boss, he said, "I have a good operator down here and bad parts are interfering with his work." He did not say a word about Tom's personal trouble. Getting a person to open up obligates you to protect what they tell you. Confidentiality is not optional.
4The six tips — how to get opinions and feelings
The Tom case yields six plain tips. They are not techniques so much as a posture: make it safe for the person to talk, then stay out of their way.
| Do | Don't |
|---|---|
| Listen | Don't argue — nothing is settled by argument. |
| Encourage them to talk about what is important to them | Don't interrupt — when you break in, the person stops volunteering. |
| Don't jump to conclusions — the obvious explanation is often not the whole one. | |
| Don't do all the talking yourself — every minute you talk, the person is not telling you what you need to know. |
The six tips drawn from the Tom case, sorted into what to do and what to avoid.
What to notice: the "do" column is short — encourage and listen — and the "don't" column is most of the discipline. Getting feelings is less about clever questions than about getting out of the person's way.
Read out, the six tips are:
- Don't argue. Nothing is ever satisfactorily settled by argument, and an argument shuts the person down.
- Encourage them to talk about what is important to them. It took encouragement to get Tom past the machine and onto what was actually wrong. Help the person say it.
- Don't interrupt. When you break in, the person stops volunteering. Let them finish.
- Don't jump to conclusions. The supervisor could have decided Tom was just sore about money and stopped there, and missed the rest.
- Don't do all the talking yourself. The supervisor had several chances to make a speech — on safety, on quality, on the girl — and held back.
- Listen. If you want opinions and feelings, you have to listen for them. This is the one that makes the others work.
Treating "get the facts" as a quick check of the records and moving on. The facts that decide a problem are very often the ones a person has not said out loud — and those come out only when you have made it safe to talk and then listened.
A closing caution on judgment: the supervisor was right to draw Tom out about his personal life only because he knew Tom well and had the relationship to do it. How far you go depends on the individual, the problem, and the relationship you have. The point is not to pry; it is to be ready to listen when a person's feelings turn out to be part of the facts.
Section summary
Job Relations has no breakdown sheet. Its working tool is the Problem Analysis Worksheet — the four-step method on one page, built to make you deliberate: state the objective, gather the facts from the record, the rules and customs, the individual, and — hardest of all — the person's opinions and feelings, being sure you have the whole story; weigh and decide by fitting the facts together, finding the gaps, listing possible actions, and testing each against the objective and its probable effect on the individual, the group, and production; take action; and check results soon and often, watching output, attitudes, and relationships. The sheet then loops back to the foundations — which one, used in time, would have prevented the problem — turning each problem you handle into a lesson in prevention.
The Tom case shows the hardest part of all this — getting opinions and feelings — done well: don't argue, encourage the person to talk about what matters to them, don't interrupt, don't jump to conclusions, don't do all the talking, and listen. And what a person tells you in confidence stays in confidence.
The next section puts the method to work on real problems — how problems come up, how to catch them small, and how the four steps apply to individuals and to groups.