1: That’s what the Total Quality Management proponents say.
“In the same way that a fever alerts us that something is wrong with our bodies, a defect alerts us that something is wrong with our businesses—or the domain of our lives in which the defect appears,” Fred Kofman writes in his book The Meaning Revolution: The Power of Transcendent Leadership.
When a problem occurs, our tendency is to fix the problem rather than identify the root cause.
“If we lower the fever with medication,” Fred observes, we’ll “suppress the symptom, but we’ll never find the underlying infection.”
Instead, we are wise to diagnose what is causing the fever and then treat that. That’s how we find a cure.
2: Asking “Why” five times is a foundational principle of Total Quality Management.
“Under this scrutiny, the defect reveals its source,” Fred writes.
The benefits of this approach are many. When we find and fix the root cause, we “improve the system at a fundamental level,” Fred writes. “We will not only solve the specific problem that caught our attention, but many potential others that an out-of-control process could produce.”
When Fred served as VP of Executive Development at LinkedIn, whenever customers would report an error, the firm’s engineers prided themselves on going “under the hood” to identify the root cause and debug the software thoroughly.
Rather than show up as the “victim,” attributing “causality to factors beyond our control,” Fred writes, we can instead show up as “a player.”
As players, we diagnose before we prescribe.
As players, we identify the root cause of the problem before taking action.
“When we get a result we want to change,” Fred writes, “first ask ourselves why it happened.”
3: We can choose to see defects more broadly as “any gap between what we desire and what we get, between our vision and our reality,” Fred suggests. “The tension between these two poles is like that between the two poles of a battery.
“The difference in charge between positive and negative generates the electricity that can energize a circuit.
“Action springs from dissatisfaction,” he observes. “Dissatisfaction with the current state drives our efforts to shape a different future.”
More tomorrow!
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Reflection: Consider a difficult problem I am facing. Ask “Why” five times.
Action: Journal about my answers and what I will do as a result.
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