If you don’t look into significant bad outcomes as they occur, you won’t be able to understand what things they are symptomatic of or how they are changing through time—i.e., are they getting better or worse?
* Source: Principles by Ray Dalio
The following principles further flesh out how to diagnose well.
a. Ask yourself: “Who should do what differently?”
I often hear people complaining about a particular outcome without attempting to understand the machine that caused it. In many cases, these complaints come from people who are seeing the cons of some decisions but not the pros and don’t know how the Responsible Party weighed them to come to a decision. Since all outcomes ultimately come from people and designs, ask yourself “Who should do what differently?” will point you in the direction of the kind of understanding that you need to actually change outcomes in the future (versus just chirping about them).
b. Identify at which step in the 5-Step Process the failure occurred.
If a person is chronically failing, it is due to a lack of training or a lack of ability. Which is it? At which of the five steps did the person fail? Different steps require different abilities and if you can identify which abilities are lacking, you’ll go a long way toward diagnosing the problem.
c. Identify the principles that were violated.
Identify which principles apply to the case at hand, review them, and see if they would have helped. Think for yourself which principles are best for handling similar cases. This will help solve not only this problem but other problems like it.
1. Is the outcome good or bad?
2. Who is responsible for the outcome?
3. If the outcome is bad, is the Responsible Party incapable and/or is the design bad?
If you keep those big questions in mind and anchor back to them, you should do well. What follows is a guide for getting the answers to these big-picture questions, mostly using a series of simple either/or questions to help you get to the synthesis you are looking for at each step. You should think of these as the answers you need before moving to the next step, leading all the way to the final diagnosis.
You can, but don’t need to, follow these questions or this format exactly. Depending on your circumstances, you may be able to move through these questions quickly or you may need to ask some different, more granular questions.
Is the outcome good or bad?
And who is responsible for the outcome? If you can’t quickly get in sync that the outcome was bad and who specifically was responsible, you’re probably already headed for the weeds (in other words, into a discussion of tiny, irrelevant details.)
In some cases, people accept unacceptable problems because they are perceived as too difficult to fix. Yet fixing unacceptable problems is a lot easier than not fixing them, because not fixing them will lead to more stress, more work, and chronic bad outcomes that could get you fired. So remember one of the first principles of management: You need to look at the feedback you’re getting on your machine and either fix your problems or escalate them, if need be, over and over again. There is no easier alternative than bringing problems to the surface and putting them in the hands of good problem solvers.
a. Understand that problems with good, planned solutions in place are completely different from those without such solutions.
Unidentified problems are the worst; identified problems without planned solutions are better, but worse for morale; identified problems with a good planned soultion are better still; and solved problems are best. It’s really important to know which category a problem belongs to. The metrics you use to track the progress of your solution should be so clear and intuitive that they are obvious extensions of the plan.
For example, don’t say, “Client advisors aren’t communicating well with the analysts.” Be specific: Name which client advisors aren’t doing this well and in which ways. Start with the specifics and then observe patterns.
a. Avoid the anonymous “we” and “they,” because they mask personal responsibility.
Things don’t just happen by themselves—they happen because specific people did or didn’t do specific things. Don’t undermine personal accountability with vagueness. Instead of the passive generalization or the royal “we,” attribute specific actions to specific people: “Harry didn’t handle this well.” Also avoid “We should…” or “We are…” and so on. Since individuals are the most important building blocks of any organization and since individuals are responsible for the ways things are done, mistakes must be connected to those individuals by name. Someone created the procedure that went wrong or made the faulty decision. Glossing over that can only slow progress toward improvement.
* Source: Principles by Ray Dalio
This is usually done by having the right people—people who will probe, who can’t stand inferior work or products, and who can synthesize well—and by having good metrics.
a. Assign people the job of perceiving problems, give them time to investigate, and make sure they have independent reporting lines so that they can convey problems without any fear of recrimination.
Without these things in place, you can’t rely on people raising all the problems you need to hear about.
b. Watch out for the “Frog in the Boiling Water Syndrome.”
Apparently, if you throw a frog into a pot of boiling water it will jump out immediately, but if you put it in room-temperature water and gradually bring it to a boil, it will stay in the pot until it dies. Whether or not that’s true of frogs, I see someting similar happen to managers all the time. People have a strong tendency to slowly get used to unacceptable things that would shock them if they saw them with fresh eyes.
That’s because worrying about what can go wrong will protect you and not worrying about what will go wrong will leave you exposed.
* Source: Principles by Ray Dalio
Escalating means saying you don’t believe you can successfully handle a situation and that you are passing the Responsible Party job to someone else. The person you are escalating to—the person to whom you report—can then decide whether to coach you through it, take control themselves, have someone else handle it, or do something else.
It’s critical that escalation not be seen as a failure but as a responsibility. All Responsible Parties will eventually face tests that they don’t know whether they can handle; what’s important is raising their concerns so their boss knows about the risks and both the boss and the escalating RP can get in sync about what to do about it. There is no greater failure than to fail to escalate a responsibility you cannot handle. Make sure your people are proactive; demand that they speak up when they can’t meet agreed-upon deliverables or deadlines. Such communication is essential to get in sync both on the case at hand and on what the person handling it is like.
* Source: Principles by Ray Dalio