The Symptoms are Not the Problem
At the time I write this I have 405 subscribers, which is a gain of 10 over the past week when I didn’t post a single thing.?I’m not sure that strategy will get me to the 500-subscriber mark, so please share this newsletter with your networks and I’ll earn it the old-fashioned way.
In my last post I wrote about “influencers” and how some of the wisdom shared via LinkedIn posts is basically recycled adages that your grandparents probably read in the Saturday Evening Post during World War II.?My criticism was – in part – frustration that there was no application of the adage to specific, real-world situations that readers can apply to their jobs/hustles.?To me, influence is providing advice about how to apply the adage, not just restating it and leaving it to the reader to figure it out.
With that said, I will offer my first attempt at posting as an influencer, and then provide a corollary that is makes it usable by relating it to a actual situation. So here is my “Adage of the Week”, straight from my adage archives, which resides between my 1978 student driver certificate and my 1998 tax return.
“Don’t confuse activity with progress”.
I’m sure I could leave that one on its own and perhaps get some responses, but I am going one step further and suggest a corollary that I am currently dealing with in real time on an actual consulting engagement.
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“Don’t confuse the symptoms with the problem.”
In my experience, the best approach to problem solving is to first accurately identify the actual problem that needs to be solved. ?Sounds simple, right? But what often occurs is the problem gets fragmented into various “symptom solutions” that may not directly address the problem. This affliction is most acute when symptom solutions are divided between functional units, such as sales and operation, IT and operations, or sales and contracting.?Now before you give me some lecture about “governance” saving the day, I will suggest that if – as is often the case - the problem solving has entered the crisis management stage the governance structure will be followed about as closely as the assembly instructions for your Ikea bookshelf. ?It’s AGH:?Ain’t. Gonna. Happen.
Consider the following. A call center company is experiencing incredibly lengthy hold times and their biggest client has taken their frustrations to the call center’s executive management. Now, of course, the execs want the problem solved right away because the contract is up for renewal.?The operations guys propose some incentive plans.?The IT guys plan some system upgrades.?The telecom guys want to upgrade the phone system.
The hold time is the problem to solve because the execs say so, right??Nope. It’s a symptom of a problem, but now everyone has gone off to identify their solution set for the symptoms, not the problem.
During the pandemic the call center’s staffing level fell precipitously due to a layoff, and now the company’s ongoing financial struggle that necessitated the layoff - along with the tight labor market that is demanding higher wages - has made recruiting a full complement of agents incredibly difficult. As a result, the number of agents available to take calls is less than pre-pandemic levels, but the call volume has returned to normal, pre-pandemic levels. Talk times have remained the same the entire time. So, the number of agents is the problem, not the hold times, right? Nope.
?The algorithms used to determine the optimal number of agents to handle pre-pandemic call volume and the associated hold queue sizes has not been updated to reflect fewer agents. ?Using a lower number of agents but the original hold queue sizes and talk times, the callers are going to wait longer to get through. So, the size of the queues was the problem, right? Yep. It needed to be adjusted to the lower number of agents, the hold time was just a symptom of the problem.?
Now that the actual problem has been identified somebody needs to tell the execs. I'll leave that up to you.
BIngo. So many times, I see Recruiting blamed for business problems. "Your team can't recruit enough or quickly enough." But quite often, it's just the lowest common denominator. Operations can't either identify the issue or doesn't know how to fix the issue, so blame recruiting efforts. Don't get me wrong, there are times when recruiting IS the issue, but not nearly as often as leadership would have you believe. I see leaders who are more oriented towards action rather than taking a few minutes to do some real critical thinking. I would argue that critical thinking is the number one missing competency in leaders in an automated world were we allow AI and other automated programs/analysis to do the thinking for us. We can't put two and two together. And therefore, we treat the symptoms.