Is Your Problem Really the Problem?

Is your problem really the problem, or is it a symptom?  

This company wasn’t so sure.  

An item was put on the agenda of our quarterly planning session to dialogue about something that everyone was frustrated with.  Digital Communications amongst and between the team had run amok.  One participant said he had 3000 unread emails from teammates that week that he wouldn’t be reading and would be deleting shortly.  Everyone in the meeting owned up to doing something similar.     

Everyone was frustrated.  This was pushing the real work off the table. Seemed like internet hell to me. Something had to be done.  But what.  

“Digital Communications Protocols” became a Rock to be moved.  Create a common sense based set digital communication guidelines to follow and then communicate it to everyone (about 100 people) and reinforced.  They wanted a rulebook. That they could hold up to everyone and tell them to follow.  

Some guidelines are probably necessary.  Yet this kept nagging at me, the business unit leader, and the operations leader.  

Our common thought was “This can’t be a Rock, I can’t believe this is what we decided.” These behaviors needed to change, sure, but a rulebook seemed like a bandaid that would fall off and be replaced repeatedly, never really making a sustainable difference. We asked ourselves two important questions. Questions that we failed to ask in the quarterly planning session due to time restraints. 

• “Why is this happening?” 

• “What is driving these behaviors?”  

That’s when we realized that was a “symptom” rather than the problem.  And we found that there are a few things bigger and deeper at play that drove the behaviors that everyone was frustrated with.   

Now we have a couple of Rocks to move to solve the deeper problem and in doing so reduce and even eliminate the frustration that everyone is experiencing.