Tuesday, September 20, 2022

Success results from deeper engagement and more holistic thinking

 I've been a consultant most of my working life, doing all kinds of consulting - starting out in software development, moving on to process improvement, data analytics, new product development and strategy.  To paraphrase an old saying, all consulting is good, and some of it is useful.

I want to talk today about a point I keep seeing get repeated in many of my strategy and innovation customers, a problem that should be easy to solve but it isn't.  That is the problem of solving for symptoms instead of solving for root causes.  Or, conversely, solving for a specific problem when the real solution needs to be much more holistic.

Why do we miss the trees?

In the first instance, we stand in front of a forest, admiring the scenery, but completely miss the individual trees.  We are so taken by the enormity and complexity of the opportunity that it can be hard to see the component parts.  Some of those components may be working really well, while others aren't working so well or are failing. It can be hard to see which components aren't working well or failing when all you do is see the big picture.  It's entirely possible that the whole forest looks healthy, while many individual trees are sick or dying.  While the entirety is beautiful, getting into the weeds to look at selected individual components is vital.  Unfortunately for many executives, this takes time and could uncover issues that they aren't familiar with, or simply don't want to know about.

Zeroing in on a problem

A lot of times I see clients anxious to fix what seems to be an important problem, not realizing that it is a component of a larger whole.  I'm reminded of the old song about the thigh bone and how it is connected to the hip bone, and so forth.  It turns out that the skeleton, even when attached correctly, with all the bones in the right place, can't stand up without ligaments and tendons and muscles.  Even if I correct a problem with one of the thigh bones, if the rest of the machine isn't working correctly, I've solved a point problem but haven't solved the holistic problem.

The ability to identify a problem is valuable, the ability to understand how that problem or issue affects the entire whole is also really important.  Fixing the problem without considering what knock-on effects a discrete solution creates is almost worse than ignoring the problem at all.

Two dramatic but different errors

The first problem, the forest and trees problem, comes from remaining too abstracted from your business and its needs.  Flying along at 30,000 feet, it can seem like everything is working pretty well, while some people have their feet up on the desk and others are killing themselves to meet client expectations.  Problems can take root throughout the organization but it can still deliver a reasonably good quality product on time due to heroic actions by individuals.  The operations work, but they are not sustainable over time, and the machine will break down.

The second problem is a blinkering problem - that is, it is easy to find a problem and isolate it, but more difficult to consider how the small problem as you've chosen to frame it interacts and infects other parts of the business.  For example, you could be deciding to implement a new computer system to support machine learning.  If you rush out to acquire new machine learning algorithms, it can feel like the job is 80% done.  Most people who know anything about data can tell you that cleaning and normalizing the data, getting it ready to be used in machine learning, can take months.  But that isn't fun and seems like drudgery, so it gets overlooked so someone can claim that the company has machine learning algorithms.  Just don't look too close at the output.

Not an intelligence gap

Smart people in smart businesses make these two mistakes all the time.  This isn't an error of intelligence, its an error of not allocating the appropriate time to deeply understand the opportunity or problem, or an error of wanting to solve easy challenges.  Identifying the weak trees in a big forest is not something you can do with a snap of the fingers, but culling weak trees makes the entire forest healthier.  Likewise, taking time to be more holistic when you frame problems to solve may expand the scope or timeframe to resolution, but it makes the solution better.

This is where an overemphasis on time and a lack of emphasis on management engagement has led us - not seeing the problems because we are too abstracted (or distracted) or narrowing in to solve a small portion of a larger problem, because we cannot be bothered with actually thinking through the solution.

Time and engagement are the enemy, and only careful discernment and holistic thinking can solve these challenges.

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posted by Jeffrey Phillips at 5:51 AM

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