How to Address the Root Cause of a Problem (From The Work Done Right Book)
The following article is an excerpt from Work Done Right: Using Systems Thinking to Guide Your Digital Transformation by Matthew Kleiman . The full book can be purchased via Amazon.
“If you define the problem correctly, you almost have the solution.” —Steve Jobs
The construction and maintenance of the built world hasn’t changed much in the past century. In fact, regulations and paperwork have made us less efficient. In 1931, the Empire State Building—the tallest building in the world at the time—opened its doors to the public. Standing at 1,250 feet tall, a great fanfare greeted the completion of this building. A prestigious opening ceremony was hosted by the US President, Herbert Hoover.
What’s even more impressive is that construction workers completed the construction of this monstrosity in just over a year—forty-five days ahead of the planned opening date. When was the last time you heard of a project being forty-five days ahead of schedule? During peak construction, the building grew over four stories a week, with 3,400 construction workers laboring to make this a reality.
To understand the magnitude of what they created in such a short amount of time, let’s fast- forward forty years. In 1970 and 1971, respectively, builders completed the North and South Tower of the World Trade Center. Each tower had 110 stories and stood at approximately 1,360 feet tall. Construction of each tower took three years to complete.
More recent still is the One World Trade Center, which stands on the original site of the Twin Towers. Measuring 1,776 feet or 104 stories high, the building was completed in 2014, eight years after it started.
The purpose of this example isn’t to provide a lesson in architectural history, although that may be equally interesting. It teaches an important lesson about the general lack of progress we’ve made in the past century in the field of construction.
To be fair, the government has rightfully increased the implementation of regulations to make work safer for construction workers. This has slowed construction progress with red tape and approvals. Further, we must also consider the increase in the complexity of materials, supply chain constraints, and sustainability initiatives when evaluating the pace of construction.
On the flip side, the breakneck speed of digitalization and innovation has exponentially increased the productivity of the industries that have embraced it successfully. Sectors like IT, media, and finance have used digital technologies to both amplify the bandwidth of personnel and improve the quality of the goods and services they offer.
By now, you’ve likely already seen McKinsey’s widely shared digitalization report that pointed out just how far behind the construction industry is in adopting digital transformation. Since then, there’s been a flurry of activity and investment, as the construction industry scrambles to go digital. To accommodate this, companies large and small have appointed many digitalization officers and innovation managers.
However, the numbers show we still haven’t gotten any better at building or maintaining things. A recent study found that correcting poor work quality costs construction companies and their customers about $625 billion each year. Even worse, this rework is responsible for a disproportionate 39 percent of all workplace injuries in construction.
We can and must do better. Our infrastructure is crumbling, the world population is growing, and the transition to alternative forms of energy is upon us. Rising to meet these challenges is daunting, especially when you consider that we are still experiencing a new chemical accident in the United States every other day.
As these quality issues escalate, project timelines and budgets are also negatively impacted. A 2021 survey by Procore Technologies and IDC found that 75 percent of projects were over budget and 77 percent were late by an average of seventy days per project.
Why is this? Why is it that with all the technological advancements, billions of dollars in investments, and great new minds joining the industry every day, we’re unable to complete projects on time and on budget? Even worse, we can’t seem to properly maintain the infrastructure we do have.
While many factors are at play, one of the main reasons we’ve failed to get better at building and maintaining things is that we’ve become too focused on new technologies without first understanding the problems we need to solve. Instead of focusing on “the problem,” the industry has become distracted with the latest and greatest from Silicon Valley.
I call this “Splashy Technology Syndrome,” which occurs when companies select a new technology because of its curb appeal, and only later do they try to find a problem to solve with it. It’s a hammer looking for a nail, and it’s a recipe for failure.
Blockchain is an excellent example of this phenomenon. Starting around 2021, there was a lot of hype around blockchain technologies, such as Smart Contracts. However, the buzz died down as people realized that, despite the laundry list of purported use cases, it wasn’t economical to adopt at scale. This, for example, led to IBM and Maersk’s 2022 announcement that they were abandoning their blockchain-enabled TradeLens platform because it had “not reached the level of commercial viability necessary to continue work and meet the financial expectations as an independent business.”
领英推荐
It’s only when we truly understand the root cause of our problems, and prioritize solving those problems as our foundation for progress, that we will move forward as an industry.
Everybody has problems, yet many people aren’t proactive about addressing them. The result is an industry that has normalized industrial accidents. Industrial disasters happen all the time, yet these catastrophes only occasionally make the news. Instead of drawing widespread attention and concern, they’ve become normalized as a “necessary evil” of industrialized society.
This might sound like a lot of doom and gloom, but there’s a silver lining. The fact that you are reading this book shows me you know we can do better. You believe we can and should hold work quality to a higher standard, and I am grateful for that.
Driving change in an industry where many fail to see the systemic problem won’t be easy. But by applying the principles in this book, you can be on the right side of history.
Identifying the Problem
Successful innovation always starts with a problem. This may sound simple, but it’s not. There is a long list of symptoms that may distract and disorient you from identifying the true root cause of the challenges you face.
I’ll give you an example to highlight this principle. About a year ago, a close relative of mine started losing vision in his left eye. He went to all the best eye doctors, but nobody could figure out what was happening. His eyesight kept getting worse and doctors worried it would soon expand to his right eye.
Several months later, doctors admitted him to the hospital for severe stomach pain. It turns out he had a perforated colon that had gone undetected and caused a sepsis infection that traveled to his eye, causing the damage. Who would have thought that the cause for failing vision was his colon? Certainly not any of the highly regarded physicians treating him.
Once they treated his colon, his vision immediately stopped deteriorating. While the doctors cannot undo the damage, he has thankfully maintained full vision in his right eye.
Like the human body, your workplace is a highly complex system where seemingly unrelated components and processes all interact with each other in both expected and unexpected ways. So, while you may hypothesize about the cause of your workplace issues, many root causes will go undiscovered.
It’s only when you examine them systematically with the right data that you will identify the most impactful ways to improve work quality in your operations.
I learned this lesson firsthand about five years ago. We were deploying new technology at a facility, building equipment for a new LNG (Liquified Natural Gas) terminal. Each train had about one thousand bolted joints that had to be tightened to exact specifications. During post- assembly pressure testing, three of the bolted joints exhibited leaks, a significant safety risk.
The team immediately jumped into overdrive to solve the problem. Initially, quality assurance personnel on-site thought it was a problem with material quality or equipment calibration. They began implementing procedures to address both perceived issues. The remedial actions would have delayed work on the next set of LNG trains by several weeks, adding significant cost and schedule delays to the project.
Luckily, data came to the rescue. As we reviewed the granular work data that we had captured during the bolting assembly, we learned that the same worker had over-tightened all three of the leaking connections. It became clear that the root cause of the leaks wasn’t a material or equipment issue, but a training or performance issue with that individual. The remedial actions initially proposed by the quality team would have completely failed to address the problem. In fact, the worker in question would likely have continued to cause leaks throughout the facility unintentionally, while management scrambled to figure out why their remedial actions weren’t having any effect.
Maybe you can relate. How many times have you tried to solve a problem by implementing a solution that was completely ineffective? Despite your best efforts and intentions, you may even have inadvertently made the problem worse. This is because it likely wasn’t the right problem in the first place.
Addressing the true root cause of the problem is the only way to get work done right the first time. Otherwise, you may feel you’re playing an insidious game of whack-a-mole. The problems will keep cropping up, and you’ll continue throwing the wrong solutions at them.
Here’s a framework to help you identify the actual problems causing your challenges. It’s the first step in determining which of your problems digitalization can effectively solve:
Nearly all the causes you wrote are likely contributing to your quality issues. In the next chapter, I will help you develop a system to understand which problems are the most impactful and to create an actionable framework to address those systematically.