If you have ever made a blunder, you have probably uttered the phrase, “Well, I’ll never do that again.” It’s productivity on rails when you are accurately learning from mistakes, but you need more than a resolute response to get it right.
Where I live, dandelions are common invaders of lawns. Bright yellow flowers, polka-dotted against otherwise green fields. The yellow flowers become white balls, and with a healthy breeze, millions of seeds are carried on the wind to new fields.
In 2008, the province banned hundreds of pesticides used to treat these and other weeds. Since then, homeowners have had to find alternative solutions to control the problem. Mowing alleviates the sea of yellow, but only for so long.
Learning from mistakes, what is the best solution? Pulling the trespasser out by the root.
Treating Mistakes Once and For All
When you want to get rid of a mistake once and for all, you need to treat it like a homeowner treats a dandelion – pull it out by the root.
The objective of root cause analysis is straightforward. Eliminate the thing that caused the mistake to happen, and it’s gone for good. Instead of wasting your time tackling symptoms and spin-offs, you get to the heart of the matter. You can act with precision, accuracy and efficiency.
When you get it right, it’s a great time-saver. It’s productivity on rails when time is spent on investigation rather than immediate action.
It’s genius in the making because it requires and enables understanding of the factors and variables that matter, and the investigation introduces you to those variables. You can’t undertake this exercise without learning something new about how it all went down (which makes it all the easier to solve next time!).
Finding the root means rewinding the entire chain of causes and effects until you reach the starting point. It’s this starting place we call the root.
One method of root cause analysis involves asking why, at least five times. Start with when, where and how you noticed the mistake. Step backward through time, each time turning the answer into the next question. Yes, but why did that happen? On and on.
Until you get there.
Unpredictable Surprises
Sometimes the root is something quite extraordinary you never would have predicted.
In Root Cause Analysis, authors Bjorn Andersen and Tom Fagerhaug tell the story of a hair salon that had to pay damages to clients whose hair was dyed the wrong colour. The root cause was suspected to be a lack of time or a lack of training.
The actual root cause was a color-blind cleaner who had replaced the bottles in the wrong places.
Is that the end of the investigation? Additional actionable information that was uncovered was that the stylists didn’t verify the label before using it, relying solely on the principle of organization – being in the right place – to ensure quality.
Learning from mistakes helps you see where quick checks and double checks can be wonderful root cause eliminators.
Being rushed and not being adequately trained are common root causes, and even when they are indeed factors, accepting them as the only causes prevents you from finding easy-to-implement solutions that don’t involve complicated systems or added oversight.
How do you know you’ve found the root? Whether it is commonplace and expected or something no one could have guessed, the root renders everything that happened before that event irrelevant.
Finding the root cause often carries with it the Homer Simpson “D’oh!” or the V8 whack on the head. They do say hindsight is twenty-twenty, so don’t be so hard on yourself. You may not have known then, but you know now.
Root cause investigations are a step-by-step journey. Stepping backwards from the point of detection, ask why that happened? Once you have your answer, ask why did that happen? If you feel like a three-year-old, have faith and don’t let simplistic answers shut you down.
Simplistic Symptoms
Simplistic answers are mere symptoms. Don’t fall for them on the way to the root, for fear of wasting your time and energy. When you work on symptoms, you are likely to cause more problems for yourself for two reasons.
One, not only is the original problem still there, but it is also harder to detect. It’s gone underground, so to speak, because you’ve removed the indication that it is there. It will pop up somewhere else, and may not even look like a relative of the original. Problem solvers of the whack-a-mole will probably start their investigation from scratch and may never realize you have helpful information for them.
Two, you’ve likely caused a brand-new problem that could easily snowball. When you introduce change into a system that addresses symptoms, you’ve not achieved the precision and accuracy necessary to minimize disturbance to the system, and you don’t have the knowledge of the system to know how it will respond.
Respond it will, taking time to absorb and integrate the change before settling back down again. Unfortunately, there is usually little patience for the resettling period, and more action is taken.
The best use of your time when you’ve made a mistake is to take a deliberate analysis of the factors, events and actions that led up to it.
Finding the root and taking precise action is the way to end mistakes once and for all. What mistake simplistic symptoms have you fallen for lately?
Hiding Behind Principles
A root cause is the first failure that occurred. Think of an avalanche and a snowflake. You notice the avalanche, the avalanche causes major problems, but it was the disturbance that upset the layers of the snowpack that caused the whole problem. You could call the disturbance the root cause.
Root causes are not that simple. It’s easy to go too far back, as in, the root cause of the avalanche was the formation of the mountain. It’s easy to go into territory you can’t do anything about, as in the cause of the avalanche was the shift in the weather. Since nothing happens in isolation, but rather as a result of a chain of events, there are many possibilities, in many different directions.
Learning from mistakes takes you in each of those directions. There are people who don’t want to be put under the spotlight, processes that were never documented, streamlined, or even defined, and technology that exists in a black box, with a lack of anyone who knows the transformation taking place within it.
Don’t get lost, misdirected, or baffled. Don’t hold on to the directive to find root causes as a way to escape change, accountability, or progress. Each challenge represents an opportunity to improve. A challenge to solve, so that next time the whole effort is much easier, much clearer, much quicker to learn what you need to know.
The Most Actionable Largest Contributing Cause
When learning from mistakes by identifying root causes, lean toward things you can do something about, like measuring conditions and informing people in the area when to stay away.
Some like to apply the Pareto principle to find the largest contributing cause. You may know it at the 80/20 rule. It describes the pattern that 80 percent of the problems are caused by 20 percent of the factors.
However, before you apply this principle, check for sequence. If you can eliminate the earliest thing that happens, even it is only 5% of the causes; will it also eliminate others from happening?
Order matters more than size when analyzing causes. You want to find the thing that makes the biggest difference to the success measure, while simultaneously making the smallest change. It’s the best use of your resources, and that is simply productivity on rails.
Maybe like a homeowner with the dandelion problem, you start to see not a sea of weeds to remove, but a bountiful harvest. The root, roasted and brewed, can replace coffee, and the leaves and flowers can be tossed into your salad.
Now that is learning from mistakes of perception and labelling, along with a simple lack of knowledge. With seven secrets to building everlasting motivation, what is stopping you?
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