The Reality of Virtual Root Cause Analysis Last month, I watched a team of engineers spend three hours on a video call trying to build a fishbone diagram in a shared Word document. Three people talking over each other. One person accidentally deleting half the work. The facilitator frantically typing while everyone else waited. It…
The Reality Behind the Fishbone I’ve watched teams stare at whiteboards covered in sticky notes, convinced they’re solving problems when they’re really just listing symptoms. The fishbone diagram — also called the Ishikawa diagram after its creator — cuts through this confusion by forcing you to think systematically about root causes. Most problem-solving sessions go…
The Real Problem With Most Problem-Solving Last month, I watched a finance team spend three weeks building elaborate spreadsheets to track their “cash flow issues.” They color-coded everything, created automated alerts, and presented beautiful dashboards to leadership. The real problem? Their biggest client had quietly extended payment terms from 30 to 60 days, and nobody…
The Problem with Problem-Solving Frameworks I spent six years watching smart people overcomplicate simple problems. They’d pull out massive frameworks, schedule three-hour workshops, and create elaborate root cause analyses for issues that needed ten minutes of clear thinking. The real problem isn’t that we lack problem-solving techniques. It’s that we use the wrong technique for…