By Dan Kocher
Managers and consultants tend to spend most of their time putting out fires. They treat individual symptoms of larger problems as they come up. Fixing the symptoms is easy. Solving the underlying problem isn't.
These individual symptoms are easy to spot. The easiest path a business or a consultant can take is to identify the symptoms that are ailing a business/business unit and then document, design, build, and implement a solution that fixes it. In the short term, this makes you look good. You follow your process, roll out a great solution, and then wonder why you didn't solve this earlier. Pats on the back all around. The business will feel great and the consultant will move on and solve the next big thing.
Then a few months will go by and the same symptoms begin to show up again. You take a look under the hood, perhaps engage the consultant to come back in and tweak the solution a bit, add a few new features, and then watch the symptoms subside. Then a few months go by, the symptoms show up again… you get the picture. The business starts questioning the skills of the consultant and the consultant starts pointing back at the client. Why does this happen so often?
The answer is simple, but the real solution may encounter resistance. It's easy to get "buy-in" for quick tactical fixes; but strategic fixes that solve the problem and not the symptom often run up against bureaucratic snafus and a "we've always done it this way" mentality. For long-term success and growth, you have to build and implement solutions that solve the problem, not just treat the symptoms. Solving symptoms might get you through the year or perhaps even yield a promotion, but it won't get you sustainable growth and continuous improvement that will put you and your business on the path to long-term success.
It's easy to fall into the "treat the symptom" trap, often simply because there are so many symptoms, and it may seem as though there is not enough time to analyze it on a deeper level. There is constant pressure to solve the latest issue that has come across the CXO's desk or to implement a new solution that the Chairman just heard about that will improve the sales team's efficiency. Solving problems requires time to investigate the root cause, to establish metrics and data that quantify the problem, to document all possible scenarios where this problem could occur, and to document what the impact will be when you solve the problem… this is all before you even begin to think about solutions.
Why go to all the trouble, when you already know what needs to be fixed, and the symptom can be treated efficiently right away? Fix the symptom, and you get a quick positive return. Take time to find the real problem, and you may have others wondering what you're doing with your time. Nonetheless, the problem-solving approach and deeper analysis is essential to ensure that the solution you eventually implement actually improves the situation, for the long-term.
Symptoms can go away, and if you're lucky they might even go away for a reasonable amount of time. But if they come back–and they almost always do–when the problem hasn't been thoroughly investigated, they won't be so simple to fix the second or third time around. Organizational or systemic problems that have been treated at the 'symptom level' can have significantly greater impacts when those symptoms recur, all too often when you least expect it.
It is possible though, to embark on a problem-solving strategy without getting bogged down. There are numerous techniques and approaches that you and your organization can use to ensure that you are approaching problem identification and quantification in a structured way. These techniques focus on rigorous investigation and broad stakeholder involvement; pre-planning and investing up-front time to identify all the symptoms and developing fact-based documentation that thoroughly describes the problem.
So, at your next meeting when the IT Solution Lead or the Senior Business Analyst suggests 'just adding a few new data fields' or 'building that new report to improve visibility' or 'remove that step in the process to get rid of the bottlenecks', ask them a few follow-up questions about the real problem they are trying to solve. The last thing you want to do as an organization is add more data, create more reports, or change a process just to find out that you now have more data to manage, more reports to update, and bottlenecks in a different part of the process… and you still have the problem.
Dan Kocher is senior consultant at RAS & Associates, a Denver based Strategy and Management consulting firm. Dan has more than 15 years of experience partnering with organizations in the financial services, aerospace & defense, energy, and across all levels of domestic and international government. His specialties include financial analysis, process design/improvement, and organizational effectiveness. Currently, Dan is working with one of the leading suppliers of building materials to develop standards and optimize key business processes across the organization.
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