What I notice when I work with […] companies applying those [Six Sigma, TRIZ, 5 Whys, root cause analysis] was those tools tend to make you dig deeper into the first understanding of the problem we have. […] That they kind of get caught by the details. That, in a way, is a bad way to work on problems because it really assumes that there’s […] a root cause. That you have to dig down and find the one true problem, and everything else was just symptoms. That’s a bad way to think about problems because problems tend to be multicausal. There tend to be lots of causes or levers you can potentially press to address a problem. And if you think there’s only one, if that’s the right problem, that’s actually a dangerous way. And so […] the key tends to be […] about shifting out and saying, is there a totally different way of thinking about the problem versus getting too caught up in the mechanistic details of what happens.
Author: Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg
Source: “Harvard Business Review”
Subjects: Innovation, Management, Problems / Solutions, Thought
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