The Quality Life

What, you think it’s easy to solve a problem? You may not realize it, but sometimes it’s hard just to understand what the problem really is, and not just what you think it is at first glance.  In fact, the first step in solving a problem is to accurately define the problem. 

For example, it’s 10:30 AM and I’m hungry. This is an easy problem to define: “I’m hungry.” Not hard, right?  But if I had started the problem statement with, “Man, my stomach hurts!” we would have to work backwards to determine why my stomach hurts…is it because somebody hit me? No. Because I’m sick? No. Because I did too many sit-up? Yeah, right. After the right look at the variables, we can determine that my stomach hurts because I’m hungry.

 One of the tools for determining root cause is to ask that question–”WHY?”–until you get back to the fundamental issues. For example:

• Why am I hungry? Because I didn’t eat breakfast.
• Why didn’t I eat breakfast? Because I got up too late and had to hurry.
• Why did I get up too late? Because my alarm didn’t go off.
• Why didn’t my alarm go off? Because I forgot to reset it after the weekend.

So now I have dug down to the real reason I’m hungry: I failed to reset my alarm clock lastg night! Now, you can keep digging on the problem definition to a ridiculous degree sometimes, but this answer provides me with something that can be addressed: a real problem (resetting the alarm clock), for which I can determine a cause and establish a course of action.

And that’s the important thing: Solving a problem doesn’t mean putting a band-aid on the current concern. It means fixing the problem so that it goes away for good!

In the long run, it doesn’t help my situation to get a quick bite to eat if I ignore the real problem, failing to set the alarm. Tomorrow I could find myself right back here at my desk, hungry at 10:00 AM, because I didn’t get to the root of the problem.

Tomorrow we’ll look at how to analyze root cause, once you have properly defined the problem.