Continuous Improvement - The Second Symptom To Fix

I said yesterday that one of the solutions to teams being able to fix wider systemic problems beyond their control is to escalate the problems to people more senior than they are. People who have more control over the design of the wider system.

However, there is a huge and surprisingly common blocker to this happening, and that is the mantra some managers appear to have picked up. The mantra of "Don't bring me problems, bring me solutions".

I've never fully understood the reasons why a certain type of senior manager says this, but it's cropped up enough times in enough organisations now that it's definitely a widespread pattern.

Maybe they're too busy to engage with yet more problems given how many plates they're spinning at any given moment?

Maybe they're worried that they wouldn't know how to or wouldn't have the authority to fix a problem if someone did raise it with them, and they don't want that fact to be made obvious?

Maybe they think that if something is enough of a problem then someone should have a solution in mind already, and if they don't, it can't really be a problem?

Whatever the reason, "Don't bring me problems, bring me solutions" is one of the most flawed approaches to management I've ever come across, introducing huge amounts of risk to an organisation. The problems with it are many.

The first is that it shuts down transparency.

Imagine someone sees a problem.

They don't know what the solution to it might be.

However, they've been told that they're not allowed to raise problems, only solutions.

So they just say nothing, and the problem continues to cause its negative impacts.

Now admittedly this is probably an unlikely scenario if something is going significantly wrong. If someone sees a significant problem, they're likely to raise it regardless of what they've been told they can and can't raise. However, this actually makes things almost worse. For the best time to fix a problem is when it first emerges and is easier to deal with, yet it's only being raised once it has already grown well beyond that stage.

For example, when is the best time to deal with an electrical fire in your house? When you see some small sparks from a plug and notice a slight smell of burning plastic, or when the flames from the fault have engulfed your entire house?

If problems only get raised when they're large enough, then their impacts and costs to resolve will both be that much greater.

What managers should be encouraging people to do is raise what are called 'weak failure signals'. That first inkling that something might be wrong, that first time someone says 'It's probably nothing, but...'. The earlier you catch a problem, the better. Creating a culture where people feel they can't raise problems just means the problems and their impacts have to grow before they are noticed and addressed.

The second issue is that 'don't bring me problems, bring me solutions' is a phrase implicitly rooted in strong hierarchy and managerial control, rather than personal and team empowerment.

The ultimate aim of the situation in which a problem exists is to find a solution to that problem. If someone can't think of the solution themselves, it makes sense for them to ask others if they might be able to, including their manager. That's just positive collaboration towards a common goal. But that isn't what the 'don't bring me problems' manager is looking for. They're looking for people to bring them solutions, not problems to solve together.

The problem with this is that if someone's already found a solution, what was needed to happen has now indeed happened. The solution has been found. So why does the solution need to be brought to the line manager?

For feedback? Possibly.

For approval? If so, well, why?

You can't tell people to think up solutions, and then make them come to you to see if you think the solution is acceptable. If the manager sees their role as critiquing, reshaping and potentially vetoing solutions that people come up with, then my bet is that people will just become less likely to think up solutions. Why spend time working out a solution to a problem if someone who hasn't spent that time understanding the problem or the solution is then allowed to alter or veto the solution? Again, by asking to be brought solutions not problems, the manager is in reality making solutions and their implementation less likely, not more.

The third issue with 'don't bring me problems, bring me solutions' is that most of the time what people call solutions aren't actually solutions at all.

A solution is something that solves a problem.

However, until the solution has been applied to a problem, you can't actually know whether it will work or not. Therefore a solution isn't a solution until it has actually solved something. So the only way you could bring someone a solution is if you've already applied the idea you had to the problem and solved the problem as a result. At which point, all you're doing is bringing them information on what you've done anyway without their involvement. Which makes the manager look like some sort of slightly redundant overhead to the context.

The impact of that situation of 'manager as overhead' might be small, and all of this may sound like some nit picking academic point of language, but the definition of the word solution actually really matters at a deeper level too.

For when someone is told 'here's a solution to a problem', mentally the tendency is for their brain to think 'great, that's that problem solved then' and then take their attention away from the problem. The question of whether the 'solution' did actually solve the problem is then less well reflected upon afterwards, meaning the problem may be assumed to have been fixed, without it ever actually being fixed.

Which pretty much misses the main point of fixing problems.

I doubt the term will ever catch on, but for the sake of completeness, really what we call 'solutions' we should be calling 'counter measures'. Things we're going to do that might counter the problem, but we will only find out if they do actually counter the problem or not after we have applied the counter measure.

So there we are, just some of the massive risks stored up in a 'don't bring me problems, bring me solutions' management approach.

So what then can we do to start shifting the organisational culture to one that actually encourages, facilitates and embraces continuous improvement?

The answer lies, to some degree, in this final point around counter measures. How we define, record and action our improvements is what will really make the diference, and it is that I will talk more about tomorrow....