As an entrepreneur, you are solving problems in your business every day. However, are you actually fixing your problems, or just patching them? My friend and client, Keith Mitnik, mentioned that he read my book Family 2.0 and it made him think about how he learned to deal with issues by taking a page from the manufacturing process. At the end of the day it’s about not putting a bandaid or patch on a problem, but addressing the actual problem. With any relationship, the fight isn’t about the thing, it’s about something that’s been festering (you’ve no doubt heard Dane Cook’s “The Nothing Fight”). Now when a problem happens, before reacting, Keith tells me he looks for the cause, and voila he’s got a resolution.
Sometimes, you don’t have the time to immediately track the cause of the problem. You just need a quick temporary patch to get back to work. There’s nothing wrong with doing that… as long as it’s not your ONLY approach to problem-solving.
The Scenario
Imagine this scenario: Your customer is upset because the product you’ve been sending them is occasionally defective in a certain way. They have to bring in staff to quality check your work, something you should have handled. You promise to hire an extra person to quality control (QC). Did you solve the problem, or just patch it? To improve your business, you need to implement the “4-loop process.”
How to Fix vs. Patch a Problem
In this case it’s obvious that you merely patched it, and you didn’t understand WHY your product is sometimes defective. This is Loop One: Fix-As-Fail. By adding a QC person, you simply prevented the customer from seeing the problem. You haven’t figured out why it failed. This yields the quickest result, but it’s also the most expensive way of fixing things, as your production line is spitting out defectives.
Loop Two is Prevention. You decided to add a person to the production line to check and stop the line when they spot a problem. This reduced the number of defective products that had to be scrapped, but you still haven’t figured out WHY the production line occasionally spat out defective products.
Loop Three in the process is Finding the Root Cause. After inspecting the production line and studying the defective products, you concluded one particular machine seems to be the culprit, and by maintaining that machine more often, you’ve managed to eliminate the problem. Congratulations! You have actually solved the problem this time.
Loop Four is Anticipation. You need to anticipate what the customer would want, by improving your product based on your knowledge of the entire production process. This is how you can outmaneuver your competition.
By not merely patching over your problems, but actually fixing them, your business can be improved, and even bring it back from the dead. Fix the process, and the problem will be fixed forever.
Let me know what your business does to fix problems the first time; I’d love to hear from you.
Please note: I reserve the right to delete comments that are offensive or off-topic.