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Think fast: What’s the No. 1 rule of troubleshooting?
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Get to the root cause. It’s the foundation principle drilled into every problem solver: Find the underlying cause for a problem—not just a symptom or contributing issue—then fix it.
But what if getting to root cause and fixing it is the exact opposite of what you should do? What if it narrows your focus too much and you don’t see the bigger picture?
And worse: What if this isn’t just an operational or technical problem? What if this troubleshooting mindset is a bigger business issue and slowing down growth?
If you think you always have to get to root cause, think again
Root cause is what Rachel was thinking of as she dealt with a huge out-of-stock problem. She was the VP of operations for a popular beauty brand. Her team had just navigated out of a near-disastrous packaging situation: All inbound primary packaging got stuck for three months, affecting not one, not 10, but all 150 SKUs in the portfolio.
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Comments
Root Cause Analysis problem or Project Management?
I agree that the problem as presented needed more expansive thinking. Assuming the Root Cause Investigation was correct, it seems there was likely a missing step in the solution's project management. Was the question asked of the team: Will this project succeed? I've been part of a number of management-sponsored projects where that question went unanswered, and the predictable result was that the projects didn't meet cost or time milestones.
Once the question is asked, in an environment where speaking up is valued and not punished, real solutions can be found.
Tunnel Vision
The author appears to have tunnel vision for work arounds. While they are necessary when everyone's hair is on fire, depending on them to "fix" the problem leads to disaster. At the end of the story, I see a new disaster hiding in the day-to-day work just waiting to set the fires again.
The issue wasn't from trying to find the root cause, the issue was from thinking she was the only one who could do it and not expanding her project out to all three types of answer.
Primary is containment. A separate group should have been authorized to solve the immediate problem using their own creativity. that would have handled the shipments for right now.
Second is corrective action. how They must leverage the work around into a procedural change to keep more product from going late. That could have been the same as the previous group or an entirely new group the works with the original group.
Finaly is preventative action. This is the place for the root problem to be corrected. Given this was identified as a problem of the factory et.al., by default is a much wider scope requiring many more participants and an intricated project plan with dependencies and prerequisites along with specific milestones throughout.
I've seen this story all the time
The problem was that the factory wasn't operating right, and Rachel was either not capable of fixing the problem or not empowered to do what was necessary to fix the problem.
So instead, Rachel did a whole lot of other activities while Production personnel fixed the actual problem in the meantime.
This story is so often what happens in production facilities where continuous improvement via statistical process control is not practised. It's all voodoo and tribal knowledge, and everyone is blind to what is happening and what matters, but the Operators and Production Supervisors ultimately feel enough pressure to bang their heads against the factory floor until they either fix the problem or it goes away on its own. Then white-collar heroes like Rachel go through documentation and box-checking exercises that convince leadership that the wheels are definitely on the wagon and we definitely know why they fell off and how to stop it in the future. Rinse and repeat.
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