Everyone is so busy. There’s not enough time to even think! This seems to be a challenge in many areas of business – we expect more and more from fewer people. Tom DeMarco describes this situation in his book “Slack” which I have recently re-read. And I think he’s on to something when he quotes “Lister’s Law – People under time pressure don’t think faster.” And of course, that’s right. Put people under time pressure and they will try to cut out wasted time. And they can re-prioritize so they spend more time on that task. They can work longer hours. But eventually, there is a limit and so people start to take cognitive short-cuts…”this problem is the same as one I’ve encountered before and so the solution must be the same”. Of course, that might be the right conclusion but if you don’t have the available time to interrogate it a little further then you run the risk of implementing the wrong solution and even making the problem worse.
One of the reasons I often hear as to why people don’t do root cause analysis is that they don’t have the time. People don’t want to be seen analysing a problem – much better to be taking action. But what if the action is the wrong action and is not based on the root cause? If the action is “re-training” you can be sure no-one has taken the time to really understand why the problem occurred. Having a good method you can rely on is part of the battle (I suggest DIGR® of course). But even knowing how is no good if you simply don’t have the time. Not having the time is ultimately a management issue. If managers asked “why” questions more and encouraged their staff to take time to think, question and get to root cause rather than rushing to a short-term fix, we would have true learning.
If we are not learning from things that go wrong to try to stop it recurring then we have missed an opportunity. If the culture of an organization is for learning and improvement then management must support staff with the right encouragement to understand, and good tools. But above all they must provide the time to really understand an issue, get to root cause and implement actions to try to stop recurrence. And if your manager isn’t providing time and encouraging you in this, challenge them on it – and get them to read this blog!
As Robert Kiyosaki said “Don’t waste a good mistake…learn from it.”
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