🌳 How I ensure problems don’t reoccur

We often get so caught up considering what is in front of us that we cannot see what is behind it, we struggle to see the root causes of things ourselves. We fail to see the wood for the trees.

Last week, in one of my client calls, a client was explaining to me how he was frustrated that he is working long hours because his client created issues in his project by hiring an adjacent team without telling him.

My client believed that the issue was a lack of communication. It wasn’t.

When we delved into it, it was clear that everybody had communicated reasonably clearly. 

The issue was trust - his client didn’t believe he could meet the deadline, so hired help. But it doesn’t end there.

When we looked into that trust issue further, it turned out to be caused by a perceived lack of control. His client didn’t trust him because he seemed busy. We took it a step further, and found that my client had a common limiting belief that it is better to be (and to look) busy. This belief was the root cause.

If we had taken things at face value, we would have settled on having a stern word with the client and implementing improved communications policies.

After looking at things in depth, we did something completely different. We discussed what it looks like to be in control, and what we can do to improve both our reality of control and our outward appearance of control.

We don’t want to fix a problem, we want to prevent a problem from ever occurring. As I have shared before, “a clever person solves a problem. A wise person avoids it”. Improving communications policy would mean that next time a client wants to undermine us they would actually tell us about it. However, improving our sense and appearance of control means that we stop a client from ever feeling that they need to undermine us in the first place.

The client isn’t a bad client. We want to tackle the root cause to prevent them becoming a bad client - bad clients are often our fault as we train our clients with every interaction - and to prevent future issues. 

Five lessons from this:

1. Don’t try to look busy.

   
   

2. The real issue is often hidden.

   
   

3. Your sense of control over your business is critically important.

   
   

4. Analyse why something went wrong. Keep asking why until you find the root.

   
   

5. Get an external perspective. It really helps.

Iceberg model for system thinking: My client had stopped analysing at the “Events” stage, he identified that an issue was caused by lack of communication. When we looked deeper, we discovered that my client had a common limiting belief that it is better to be (and to look) busy. This belief was the root cause of this

- and other - issues. By helping him identify this, I am able to create an action plan with the client to

tackle the root issue which has unlocked highly leveraged growth.

I shared this in my Work Smart Wednesday newsletter. Want the full set of related insights? You can read them here: https://worksmartwednesday.substack.com/p/work-smart-wednesday-april-24-2024

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