The Problem Isn’t Always the Problem

One of the first things you learn in consulting is that the problem you’re asked to solve isn’t necessarily the problem that needs to be solved.

A client may say, “We need more people.” Or, “We need a new system.” Maybe they need more warehouse space. Perhaps their people aren’t productive enough, or they have what management describes as a communication problem.

Maybe.

But before I start working on the solution, I want to understand why they believe that’s the problem.

Over the years, I’ve learned to keep asking one simple question:

Why?

Peel the Onion

I sometimes describe problem-solving as peeling an onion. The first answer removes the first layer. Then you ask why again. And again.

Eventually, if you’re patient enough—and if people are willing to be honest enough—you begin getting closer to what’s actually happening.

Suppose an operation isn’t shipping orders on time. Management tells us the shipping department can’t keep up, so perhaps the obvious answer is to add people to shipping.

But why can’t shipping keep up?

Maybe orders arrive at shipping too late in the day. Why? Perhaps picking isn’t completing them on schedule. Why?

Now we’re getting somewhere.

Perhaps the problem isn’t shipping at all. It may be order release, inventory accuracy, poor scheduling, equipment downtime, the layout, or priorities that change throughout the day. Maybe information arrives late. Perhaps the process contains work that doesn’t need to be done in the first place.

Until we understand that, adding people to shipping may simply give us a more expensive version of the same problem.

Symptoms Are Expensive

Organizations understandably want action. A problem is identified, and everyone wants to know what we’re going to do about it.

That urgency can cause us to move too quickly from symptom to solution. Sometimes the most valuable thing a consultant—or a good manager—can do is resist that pressure long enough to understand the problem.

That’s not inactivity. Diagnosis is work.

If my car is making an unusual noise, I don’t want a mechanic who starts replacing expensive parts until the noise disappears. I want someone who understands what caused the noise.

Business problems deserve the same discipline.

Be Careful With Experience

Experience helps because patterns repeat. After you’ve seen enough operations, certain symptoms become familiar.

But experience creates its own danger. We can recognize something so quickly that we stop investigating.

“I’ve seen this before.”

Maybe we have. But perhaps we’ve only seen something that looks like it.

Good consultants bring experience to a problem without allowing experience to close the investigation too early. Experience should help us ask better questions, not make us stop asking them.

Solve the Right Problem

There is nothing particularly sophisticated about asking why. A five-year-old can do it relentlessly.

But in business, it’s one of the most useful questions available to us.

Why is this happening? Why do we do it this way? Why does this require three approvals? Why does this information get entered twice? Why are people waiting? Why does this problem keep returning after we’ve supposedly fixed it?

Keep peeling.

The answer may be uncomfortable. It may cross departmental boundaries. It may reveal that a process everyone has accepted for years no longer makes sense. It may even reveal that the solution management originally requested isn’t needed.

That’s okay.

The objective isn’t to validate the solution we arrived with. It’s to solve the problem that actually exists.

Because there are few things more expensive than solving the wrong problem extremely well.