The Great Cover Up - A Band-Aid Paradigm
Removing processes to fix problems
Welcome to Polymathic Being, a place to explore counterintuitive insights across multiple domains. These essays take common topics and investigate them from different perspectives and disciplines to come up with unique insights and solutions.
Today's topic discusses an insight I gleaned years ago on the perpetual problems with process fixes that don’t address the root cause. This situation will probably be a timeless classic but hopefully, we can start to break the paradigm one improvement at a time.
Imagine you are working on a task and suffer a serious cut on your arm. This cut represents a breakdown in a process. How do you react? If you are like many people in our industry, just slap a few Band-Aids on it, tough it out and get the product out the door. “You’ll look at it later”. Yet when that task is complete, another action requires your undivided attention. You don’t take the time to address the problem or the cause and just focus on the next job. As the wound becomes infected you slap a few more Band-Aids on it to avoid a mess and focus on just getting the next product out. Eventually, the wound has gotten so fetid that you are incapable of work and the whole system crashes down.
So what was the problem?
If each of these Band-Aids represents an additional process, workaround, or stopgap, soon your system will be burdened with restrictive, excessive, unnecessary, or contradictory processes. The real issue, though, is when the injury first happened we didn’t focus on bringing it back to sustainable standards, then and there. We took the ‘quick fix’ and started on a dangerous, unhealthy, cycle.
What needs to happen now isn’t to add another Band-Aid, but to peel off all the bandages, get back to the root problem and work to fix the arm. Since the wound is now infected, it takes skill to clean and fix the area so healing can occur. Even then you need to institute rehabilitation processes to make sure you get back to health quickly.
It seems common sense when applied to a physical wound. So, why is it so hard to avoid doing this when it comes to work processes? Instead of getting to the root cause of the problem we put ad-hoc processes in place. The inevitable result is a messy pile of Band-Aids trying to hold the system together instead of finding and eliminating the cause of the problem to start with. Challenging existing Band-Aid processes also isn’t easy. Previous Six Sigma projects, leadership initiatives, fire-fighting successes, and even awards may be found buried within the putrid pile of Band-Aids. But until we can scrape off the Band-Aids and understand the underlying process, how can we really fix the problem?
Once we shift our paradigm on how we view our Band-Aid processes, we have the motivation to define them using process maps, dig down to root cause using reality trees and take an objective look at non-value-added processes to improve the entire system. Leveraging a good stakeholder analysis ensures processes are designed that are supported by leadership, layered into roles and responsibilities, with built-in quality that both prevents errors and instills discipline to take the time to eliminate the cause of the problem at the beginning. It should be emphasized that the root cause isn’t just fixing the wound we ignored. It’s focusing on eliminating the cause of the wound! This is essential, and all too often overlooked.
My view from doing process improvement across several major organizations is that continuous improvement projects should rarely add process. I’ve found that a large number of the solutions require doing nothing ‘new’ except stripping off the Band-Aids, going back to the original process, and instituting accountability mechanisms. In challenging the Band-Aid Paradigm I have managed to strip off layers of unnecessary processes, fix the problems, and achieve great results.
To find out the steps in fixing a problem so that you avoid this paradigm, please refer to my follow-on essay Process Surgery.
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This is really interesting - I’ve known the power of “via negativa” but have never considered it’s potentially positive implications in complex systems like you describe. It’s probably the same in a lot of quality management processes, where SOPs are piled on SOPs just to fix problems superficially, and add more tedium in the process
Part of the cultural dilemma is that medium to large organizations rarely take the time up front to assess the fundamental problem sets before them to solve and develop the often tedious work and product breakdown structures that illustrate exactly what the project[s] will create and how to do it. Nor do they do the "branches and sequels" up front to tease out contingencies and roadblocks and the concomitant responses.
Process is a path but like a river, it needs to have the capacity to bend and shape around intractable problems.