Use your powers of deduction to find a problem
Use your powers of detection to find the source of a problem – the answer may lie ‘upstream’, writes Alastair Dryburgh.
Suppose you have a river at the bottom of your garden, and one morning you find it full of dead fish. What has happened? You’d start looking for the cause of the problem at the bottom of your garden, but what if you couldn’t see anything wrong there? It wouldn’t take you long to realise that you needed to look further upstream.
This is obvious as anything when it relates to dead fish in a river, but when faced with the same sort of thing in organisations we so often miss the point and lose a huge amount of time in futile action. We forget the dead fish principle – the place where the problem manifests itself is not usually where the problem was created.
As an example, consider some work I did with a software company. They told me that they had a problem with development (spoiler alert – they didn’t). Projects consistently went over budget, and took far longer than promised.
This was causing all sorts of tension within the company. Profits were suffering, cash flow was tight, the development department was lashed by a constant stream of complaints, harangues and snide emails from sales, account management and senior management. It was a real mess, but it had nothing to do with the development department.
Here is what was going on. Sales wanted to make sales, and there was competition. So they made extra promises. Could we make the menu this shape, rather than that shape? Of course we could. Could we meet this very ambitious delivery date? Of course we can, even if you, customer, don’t meet your side of the bargain and give us the material we need by the agreed date.
Do we need to document all these special agreements in the contract? No, we don’t. We don’t even need to mention them to development until they are half way through. Can we, when the project is half way through, change our minds about what we want and introduce new complicated requirements without any increase in budget or change to final delivery date? Of course we can.
With all this, it is hardly surprising that development struggled to deliver. But the source of the problem was upstream, in sales. And that is where we solved it.
Looking backwards
Looking too far downstream is endemic in organisations. I have seen many profitability problems wrongly characterised as being caused by excessive costs when in fact they arise from poor pricing. Customer dissatisfaction is blamed on poor delivery, when in fact it arises from poor expectation management (management-speak for ‘making promises you have no chance of keeping’).
As a general principle, whenever you see a problem, look for the cause earlier in the process. If any part of your organisation smells of dead fish, look upstream for the solution.
About the author
Alastair Dryburgh is a consultant offering uncommon solutions to common problems.