Your lamp is not turning on. Why could that be? (And why does it matter?)

Two common answers are: the lamp is not plugged in, or there is a power cut on the street.

The great thing about the first answer — the lamp is not plugged in — is that it’s so simple to validate: we can check if the plug is in the socket.

The second answer — a power cut on the street — is more interesting. Given that we cannot directly observe a power cut, how could we know if it is the real reason our lamp is not turning on?

You know the answer intuitively: if there is a power cut on the street, we should see all houses and lights on the street are dark, and we should receive an SMS message from the utility company to notify us of the power cut.

In summary: we validate our speculated cause (power cut) by checking for the presence of other expected effects (all houses and lights on the street are dark, utility company announces power cut).

But what does this have to do with organisations?

Lisa J. Scheinkopf suggests that “People are hurt and organisations do not improve, due to our carelessness in the use of ‘because.’” Too often our attempts to improve organisations fail because our efforts are focused in the wrong place, or in too many places. I’ve been guilty of this many times.

Effective solutions necessitate tracing backwards and focusing our efforts on the real underlying cause(s) of the problems we observe. These cause(s) are often far removed from their effects, and lay out of sight. Changing a bulb is not going to fix a power cut.

The scientific method can help us find and focus our efforts in the right place at the right time. More here.

The takeaway? When confronted with a problem in an organisation, let’s unleash our inner scientist to trace back to the underlying cause so our efforts pay dividends.

Note: This post draws heavily on excellent ideas from Lisa J. Scheinkopf under Chapter 25 of the Theory of Constraints Handbook.

This is a cross-post from LinkedIn; others are available here.