My wife is a doctor, and she has shown me how to be a better manager (and less of a hypochondriac)
When my wife diagnoses patients, she recognises four things:
1. Symptoms are the effect of an underlying ailment.
2. Any one ailment may cause several symptoms.
3. Treating symptoms will provide — at most — temporary benefit (painkillers).
4. Treating the underlying ailment will remove all symptoms (cure).
As a fledgling manager, I did not understand this. I tried to tackle each organisational problem that I was facing in isolation, be it slowing software delivery, growing customer escalations, constant firefighting, high attrition or increasing project costs.
However, both the human body and the modern-day organisation are complex systems, comprising many interdependent parts.
As I started to learn the Theory of Constraints and from my wife’s experiences, I saw that the problems I face in organisations were similar in nature to the symptoms she was diagnosing in her patients. Each problem I faced rarely existed in isolation, and was often a symptom of very few common underlying causes.
To be successful, I needed to behave like my wife — I needed to find and treat the common underlying cause(s) if I wanted to create anything other than short-term relief.
The takeaway? Finding and treating common underlying cause(s) can eliminate large clusters of problems in one go. A Current Reality Tree is one thinking tool that can help.
Note: This is a cross-post from LinkedIn; others are available here.
