Day 127: Sometimes you have to do it the hard way

Don't get them mixed up

This week, I was lucky enough to help coach and facilitate a Black belt kaizen group. The hosting company was in the financial services sector, so no physical product manufacturing here, but a customer-focused service industry full of regulatory compliance and risk management. 

This brought back fond memories of all that Sarbanes-Oxley compliance work I did over a decade ago...  Ah yes, crying over key and compensating controls, wailing about segregation of duties, fretting about COBIT... Good times were had by all...

Ok it wasn't that bad... But it was interesting to see how other Operations folks looked at the world of Finance.

Beware of talking POO

The process areas of focus were related to user access and permissions within electronic systems and applications. The group was tasked with using lean problem solving methods to map out the current processes, identify the Points of Occurrence (the POO), determine the root causes of the POO, and propose solutions or countermeasures. The value stream mapping used was a 3D version, to show all the cross-functional steps, with a bit less emphasis on times, inputs and outputs (although those could be captured where it made sense).

While the teams struggled to keep on track and on time, they kept plowing along, head down, legs pumping, brains ticking...

Until they tried to devise solutions, countermeasures, improvements. 

Then they were stuck.

But why? These are all smart people. They had followed the process. One or more solutions should have revealed themselves, right? So why not?

Current state process mapped? Check.

POO found? Check.

Root cause analyses done? Check.

So, what now? Let's go through this again, walk me through your root causes there sparky.... 

Ah... Now I see the problem: the team didn't get to the true root cause. 

Which leads me to this corollary: determining root cause is not easy.

Whenever I see a root cause like "not a priority" or "needed more training" or something kind of subjective to the opinion of the day, I always get a bit suspicious. So the solution to that root cause is what? Change the business priorities? Retrain, everyone, again? Really? It's like having a the default solution or corrective action to any issue is "retrain staff" - it's the easy and usually ineffective solution. But people like it - it's hard to quantify its effectiveness, you can check a box ("yup, I trained those guyz") and get a warm and fuzzy, but it almost never sticks. It's the easy, weak way out and it makes me bristle just a bit.

Another difficulty of root cause analysis is that it is easy to identify symptoms, and it is just as easy to convince yourself that a symptom is the a root cause. A favourite example of this is my mom. She will Google almost any medical symptom you can think of, and undoubtedly, she will conclude that she has some obscure disease that will take her from us within the month. Mom: I have this annoying cough. Me: That's no good, have you seen the doctor yet? Mom: No, but Google says I have Killer-Wormie-Thing-In-the-Brain Disease. I'll be dead within the week. You'll have to drive me to the funeral home. How's your Monday looking? Me: Oh mom.... 

Just as nefarious is the perceived relationship between cause and effect. Or more accurately, the relationship between perceived cause and real effect. Sometimes perceived causes are not real causes, but just seem like a good enough cause, a likely, possible or even probable cause. But just because something is possible or even probable doesn't mean it is the true root cause. 

Yaargh maties, where be the polar icecaps?

For example, the graph to the right. Pirates vs. global temperatures. Looks pretty straightforward. It's obvious we need more pirates right? More pirates means happier penguins? While it is possible that the global decline in high-seas piracy contributed to the increase in average global temperature, the actual probability of such a connection is about, oh, one in a gajillion. Just because something is possible does not mean it is probable. So looking at the easy way out, the symptoms, the softball answers to tough problems isn't going to get you real results. Certainly not anything sustainable.

This is what happens when you only ask "Why" once. Unless you are Chuck Norris, you better ask 5 times.