Look at the whole system

- The final part of this first section on identifying the root cause of a problem is about keeping an eye on the whole system. There's a great book called "Why Things Bite Back" which says that often you'll fix something but it'll somehow come back again. For example, when they made kids playgrounds safer by putting sponge on the ground around the climbing frames, all that happened was that the kids climbed higher and jumped off more because they knew there was sponge there. The number of accidents stayed the same because the kids' risk tolerance was still the same until they were somewhere without sponge, and then of course, they hadn't learned what it feels like to fall onto concrete. So the key is to think about what will happen over time if you make your change. In his amazing book, "The Fifth Discipline," Peter Senge says that humans are not good at planning ahead. In fact, anything that has a time lag of more than about two seconds fools us. If there's a two-second time lag in the shower, you turn up the warmth and you think: Ugh, this isn't working, so you turn it up some more and then: Ugh, it's too hot, so you turn it right down and then it's freezing. While I'm talking about Peter Senge's book, I want to mention another idea from it which relates to problem solving and how we aren't good at standing back and looking at the whole system. He calls it the illusion of control. Often managers make decisions based on the evidence that they have. They're basically reacting to the situation and any sensible manager would make that same decision. Production is behind schedule so let's work overtime at the weekend. The manager thinks they're in control but really they're just a cog in the machine. Next, the costs of overtime are too high. There's a big cutback, but then production starts to get behind again. It's just like the person swinging the temperature around in the shower. So ideally, the manager would stand back and analyze the system and set it up in the optimal way. Senge says that systems consist of feedback loops and time delays, and it's the combination of these that we're bad at coping with. When the feedback comes back to bite you, but later, you don't worry about it until later when it will have got worse. But if you draw the problem out as a flow diagram, you can then think about how to cut the loop. I mentioned the example of overfishing earlier where it's the logical action for each fisherman in the short term to make his net smaller to get the remaining fish. But in the longer term, they all lose because they all end up chasing after smaller and smaller fish. But once we understand the system and see that smaller nets lead to everyone getting smaller fish, we can see that we need to bring in quotas and net controls and work together to get the stocks back up again and then we can all gain. So for your problem and the solution that you're considering, can you see any longer-term effects that might end up coming back round to bite you?