Caution: A Simple Solution May Not Be the Answer
Photo by Joe Roberts on Unsplash
Imagine yourself driving along at a fairly good speed. The stoplight at the intersection ahead turns yellow and you hit the brakes.
Nothing happens.
Your brakes are not working! You frantically do everything you can to slow the car down and manage to reduce your speed, but you still bump into the car in front of you. Expletives ensue…..
Of course, you deal responsibly with the consequences by ensuring no one is hurt, trading insurance information and notifying the police if necessary.
Now what? Get back on the road and drive home? Hopefully not! You’ll most likely have the car towed to a shop, asking them to find out what went wrong with your brakes and fix it, so it doesn’t happen again.
Now transfer the situation to the workplace: it could be a new product or service that is not working, a new employee that is not synching with the team, software that is not delivering reports with the information you need, etc. But you’ve got this! It looks easy to patch things up: apologize to customers, reassign the employee, or replace the software.
The problem with easy solutions is that they tend to serve only as temporary bandages. They may alleviate the consequences of the problem, but they rarely FIX the problem. That product or service malfunction will most likely recur. The employee you moved may not be the issue – it could be the team. The software may not be the problem, it could be insufficient training in its optimal usage.
“For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.” H.L. Mencken
To stop a problem from happening again (and again!), it’s necessary to not only alleviate the consequences, but to discover and repair the root problem. This is not a matter of assigning BLAME. Blame is a dead end and does nothing to fix the root problem.
Check in with yourself and your team to ensure that you are fixing problems, not just applying bandages.
And get your brakes checked!
Fundamental of the Week #19: FIX PROBLEMS AT THE SOURCE
Address issues by discovering the root cause rather than only focusing on the symptoms or the consequences. Seek improvement by developing long-term solutions.
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