WHEN A PROBLEM IS ACTUALLY JUST A SYMPTOM

Historically, and even today, organizations often treat defects in production as a problem to solve. And while a product detect certainly seems like a problem, especially a problem to fix, historically production lines ignored the defects until the end of the line. Then at that point someone would look over things, identifies what is defective, how much of a defect it is, and decide if it can be fixed, or should just be trashed. This accounts for a lot of waste. It also accounts for how that sometimes defective products get through and are delivered to customers. As a result management tends to blame employees for defective products as shoddy work, a result of incompetence, laziness, and not caring.

Then one day Edwards Deming began thinking about all of this in a different way. What he did was to frame defects as symptoms. That then led him to adopt an entirely different approach, an approach that gave birth to the Quality Movement. Seeing defects as symptoms implies that, at a higher level, there is a hidden problem. “What’s the actual problem which is causing the defects?”

For Deming, the problem was structural—one of design. Deming saw that doing quality control at the end of the process was too late—too late to do anything about the defect. As a key innovation, he suggested putting the quality control inside the process itself (thereby changing the design of the system). Yet doing that implied other changes. It implied stopping the assembling line to check, fixing defects in real time, giving employees the power to make decisions about stopping the line, and putting the focus on quality rather than speed.

This changed the thinking of people on the production line. Now defects became valued data for learning, adjusting, proactive corrections, etc. It put a stop to the reactive fixing or trashing at the end. Here the defects, when viewed as a symptom, rather than a problem, shifted people’s thinking to a meta-level. The higher frame is this: Defects tell us there’s something not working as it should in the process, and that the place to intervene and/or upgrade is in the process itself. As such, this way of thinking required a different way of perceiving, a different attitude, and a different set of skills.

When we quickly and automatically label something as a ‘problem,’ we tend to then jump to conclusions which may mis-direct our problem-solving skills. What if the problem that we think we’re facing is not the problem at all? What if it is actually a symptom of an unknown problem? Yes, symptoms can be painful, distressful, and can create headaches and problems for you. But that does not mean that the symptoms are the problems. And yes, we tend to call them ‘problems,’ which in this case is a linguistic-semantic problem that blinds us to what’s really going on.

When you consider all of the energy, effort, and time devoted to solving symptomatic ‘problems,’ that is the price we pay for not looking further into the problem-behind-the-problem. This is generally the problem of everyone who thinks of a problem in terms of being an outside factor. As long as they see what is obvious on the outside, the manifestation of the problem, and think ‘that is the problem,’ they never even consider taking an inside perspective. And without taking an inside perspective, one will never discover the hidden problems—the kind of thinking which creates the mental and emotional blocks. In this way, the real problem stays hidden.

You therefore take a big and significant step in terms of problem-solving when you understand that many times what we call a ‘problem,’ is actually just a symptom of a problem. It’s not the real problem, it is an expression of a problem and a manifestation of a problem. It tells you that there is a problem, but it is not the problem. To find the problem, you have to look inside for what is deeper and higher. So, learn to be suspicious about symptoms. They certain tell you that you are in the presence of a problem, but the problem may very well be not the symptom.

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