I love sugar. It is delicious. I have always had a sweet tooth. Chocolate milkshakes are very difficult to say no to. The trouble with sugar is that we, as human beings, didn’t really have access to it until the dawn of agriculture.
Sugar increases the build-up of plaque on our teeth. The plaque traps bacteria which causes cavities. To stop the cavities we furiously scrape our teeth every night, and once or maybe twice a year we go to the dentist to get a professional scraping. If we are unlucky, we also get a cavity that needs to get addressed.
The smart thing would be to lower our sugar intake to reduce or minimise the amount of plaque forming in the first place. But sugar is delicious so we often don’t do that.
We have many situations like this in our work and personal life that we attempt to solve what can be seen rather than thinking about the thought process that created the problem in the first place.
Obvious and Mechanical
This is the how it happened question. A good question, but not a great question.
We tend to be good at dealing with how it happened because it is the thing staring us in the face. This work item is over budget so I need to figure out what is the hold-up.
We like it because there is a clear cause and effect. It is mechanical. This one thing triggers this other thing. It is simple and linear.
It is a normal response, but it is also a short-term solution.
The problem is that it is just dealing with the problem, it ensures that the problem will happen again. It is not solving the problem so it doesn’t happen again.
Hidden and Philosophical
This is the why it happened question. This one is harder to understand and unpack.
Every decision we make, system, structure, or process we use has many hidden assumptions and biases underpinning them. Most of these are philosophical but people are unaware that they have them.
The reason why people deal with the mechanical is that it is obvious, it can be seen, so something can be done about it. They don’t address the hidden because often that would be asking someone higher up what they were thinking. This can be seen as a challenge.
Or it could feel like an attack on the culture. This is the way it has always been and we have got this far, who are you to dare question how we work?
What To Do?
The first question you need to ask is are we having a conversation about the symptom or the cause. Again, this can be very scary but at least it raises that potentially underneath it all there is an explanation for why this happened rather than how it happened.
If they are up for a causes conversation ask what the desired outcome is. Have everyone be on the same page about what success looks like. This will also need to factor in the success of all stakeholders. Each stakeholder will have a different version of success and there will be a hierarchy of who is most important.
The next question is to have the decision-makers unpack the thought process on how the system or process was created. This starts the process of learning about the assumptions and biases involved.
Now you can re-engineer a process that successfully creates the outcome without the errors that happened with the current process.
The symptom is easy to address, the cause is hard to understand, but way more valuable.
Luke McMeeken-Ruscoe 