Facilitating the question "What’s the problem?"
The sinking of the Titanic provides an effective example of how Cause Mapping Root Cause Analysis can simplify disagreements about defining a problem. The Titanic is an internationally known historic tragedy that provides several valuable lessons about defining a problem.
The first question is "What’s the problem?" While some may consider the answer to this question obvious, other will disagree. Some people will say the problem was the Titanic sank. Others may say the Titanic hit an iceberg. And others may still disagree arguing that the problem was the steel wasn’t strong enough, the ship was going too fast and arrogance of the crew.
As the facilitator (leader of the investigation) the question "What’s the problem?" allows the facilitator to accommodate the different point of view. Some people want to immediately share what they see as the problem. They don’t have time for an investigation because they know exactly what happened – and they’re positive they’re right. They are attending the root cause analysis to educate everyone else. These people are valuable to the investigation because they typically have specific details that are pertinent to the issue. We need these people to be connected to the investigation because they may have valuable information. It’s the facilitator’s responsibility to get these people involved. The facilitator shouldn’t tell anyone "that’s not the problem."
The facilitator should agree with whatever people offer as the problem. Write it down and say "got it." If someone else in the investigation sees the problem differently the facilitator adds a comma and writes that next problem on the same line - and says "got it." The facilitator must write down "the problems." If the facilitator continues to agree with everyone, but doesn’t write anything down credibility will be lost – it looks like appeasement.
The point is, asking a person or a group of people what the problem is, allows the facilitator to listen first. In Stephen Covey’s book "7 Habits of Highly Effective People." Habit 5 is Seek first to understand, then to be understood. People from different departments may come into an investigation to enlighten the group. They may not even realize that other people believe the same thing. We people have a tendency to think we’re objective, that we see the big picture. Really we see things from our own experiences. It may seem like we know exactly what happened, but we really only know what we know without realizing there’s more to the story. We can’t include information that we’re unaware of. Without having all of the details of a problem we may believe that you have all the information. While our experience may be is accurate, it’s not necessarily complete. This concept is something that the facilitator must understand very well so that when the investigation begins, when people are adamant that they know the problem, the facilitator can say "got it," write it down and move on.
Two or three or more people may have a different view of the problem. There is no need to pick "the problem." A problem in an organization cannot be defined accurately and completely as a singular thing, even though most people think of a problem as being singular. There’s no need to explain this in the first question. The only people who argue about the problem are the ones that don’t know this. Once everyone within the investigation has experience with this problem definition format they think of the first question as the title (or headline) of the incident. Trying to find the one problem is potentially a huge waste of time.
We’ve worked with people in companies who have insisted the question "What’s the problem?" should take at least 45 minutes to an hour to get everyone’s input. You can imagine their response when we tell experienced investigators that the question should take about 10-15 seconds. Whatever anyone offers as the problem, we write it down. Even if two or three or four different problems are offered write them down. People sometimes think they need to debate the four different problems to select the one important problem. Before the debate can begin, the facilitator quickly says "OK, there are some different views of what the problem is (even some disagreement). We’ve captured some of them here. We’ll come back to this later to clear it up. Let’s move on to the next question – the when.
The 2nd and 3rd questions, the when and where, are typically straightforward. The last question quantifies the negative impact to each one of the goals for a given incident. These impacts to the goals provide the starting point for the cause-and-effect analysis. People sometimes ask, if the goals are fundamental for defining an incident accurately why not start there instead of waiting until the fourth question? Starting with "What’s the problem?" allows the facilitator to listen to the group first. If there are disagreements about the problem the facilitator can easily accommodate the different responses. The problem definition is then completed with an agreement on the quantified impact to each of the goals.
One of the overall goals for the company operating the Titanic was to not injure any of the passengers – the goal was zero injuries. This goal was not me because there were over 1500 fatalities. This is one of the starting points of the analysis. Another goal was to have no damage to the vessel. In the case of the Titanic, the entire vessel was lost to the bottom of the North Atlantic. This is another starting point for the analysis. The cause-and-effect analysis doesn’t start with "the problems" offered in the first question. It starts with the goals that were negatively impacted in the fourth question. Each of the "the problems" offered in the first question is actually a cause in the analysis. See Cause Mapping root cause analysis for more information.