Ask why, not who

Inflation is out of control! Who should we blame?

When something goes wrong, we want to find someone to blame. It seems to be human nature and it’s turned into an art form for our Congress.

It’s easier than figuring out why something went wrong. And sometimes the answer is so complicated that we find multiple guilty parties. But we often don’t know why something (bad) happened. We just know we want to blame someone.

But if we don’t figure it out, we may not solve the problem before it returns. And “figuring it out” is often hard work and we just don’t have time for that – so we join the blame-game. It’s so much easier.

It’s in the system

Most big problems are actually system problems. Lots of parts – lots of connections – tight coupling — too many things we don’t understand. Here are couple of examples.

CONGRESS: We know that Congress is dysfunctional and it’s easy to blame one party or the other. We can see the dysfunctionality, but do we (do you) know why? Is it because of ideology? What about greed? Or staying in power? Or is it simply “human nature?” (If you figure this out, please write a book. It’s needed.)

COVID-19: We’re (hopefully) at the tail-end of the Covid-19 pandemic and millions of people were sick or have died. Should we blame China? What about our healthcare “system?” (I put that in quotes because I don’t see a real system). What about the anti-vaccers?

We WILL see another pandemic in the coming years (simple premise – germs get on airplanes.) Have we spent the time determining why “our” pandemic was so bad? What should we do to mitigate the next one?

2020 GLOBAL SUPPLY CHAIN IMBALANCE: We blamed “globalization.” We blamed the “shutdown.” We blamed China. We blamed truckers. We blamed the LA port workers. But do we know the many reasons why it happened?

Two suggestions

1. Learn about and how to perform root-cause analysis. If you want to grab an excellent resource, I suggest looking at the cause-mapping materials at https://thinkreliability.com . (I get nothing from them. I just like their stuff.)

2. If you want to learn from the CIA, grab their material about the “analysis of competing hypotheses.” I’m serious – it’s funded by us, the taxpayers, and they have some good stuff. You can grab a book about the Psychology of Intelligence Analysis HERE. Go to chapter 8.

Next

We continue our preview of our new course Intercept the Future by offering some comments about the power of assuming failure.

Cheers,

Bill