Can Solutioning Too Early Cause Failures? The key to ensuring lasting operational impact.

You've heard it here before... quick "solutions" may create more problems than they solve.

In the present day speed of business, we've discussed how this sense of urgency can often lead to teams making quick decisions. Often, this is an asset. Pick your path, try it and then incrementally change to adjust based on the data you're seeing. However, some decisions can't be made hastily (or at least should not be made too quickly). Why? Quick solutions can latch on to a symptom of a problem, but not get to the root cause, and solving before truly getting to the cause can send teams down a "shallow solve" spiral, creating more chaos than operational harmony.

Which decisions should be made only after deeper discovery?

Some leaders take too long to make simple decisions. Other leaders may be too hasty to make complex decisions. Where's the happy medium? Follow these guiding questions to determine whether your business decision requires deeper root cause analysis before picking a path:

1. What are the business stakes? If this decision has potential to impact customers, profits, and other core business priorities, don't rush a decision. If the impact is unknown, definitely press pause before proceeding.

2. How complex is the underlying process? A good proxy for this is how many teams/individuals does this involve. If the decision impacts several parties, better slow down before you speed up. There's generally more under the surface than meets the eye.

3. Is the "why" understood? Have you wrapped your head around the true reason this change is needed? If you understand all the layers of the root issue already, proceeding in making a decision is lower risk.

   

   
   

Real World Case Studies

Here's a real-life example of a business decision that a leader can feel okay about making quickly: We have a client who has recently gone through a rebranding initiative. For their upcoming newsletter, they were trying to debate whether to reformat the newsletter and adjust their messaging tone completely to align to this rebrand or whether they should ease into this and have a "bridge" newsletter to call out their upcoming changes.

• The business stakes: While their newsletter gets solid engagement and click-rates, it has yet to result in lead conversion and their audience is relatively small today.

• The complexity: There are no required tool changes and they already have an existing internal, peer-review process in place, making this process low-complexity.

• The why: It was understood that the real question here is whether they should give customers a "heads up" about the rebranding or go all-in on their new brand, tone, etc.

• The decision: The leader made a quick decision. A/B test the new brand voice in the upcoming newsletter and see what the results are. Use those metrics to determine the tone going forward.

On the flip-side, let's chat about a real-life example of a time where quick solutioning can get in the way of progress: Within an engineering team, documentation methods were inconsistent. Leaders were struggling to understand where projects were in flight and team members were finding it challenging to keep up with the pace of projects amongst their documentation needs.

• The business stakes: On the surface, "documentation" sounded low-stakes. In reality, the accuracy and consistency of documentation impacts client outcomes, the ability for team members to jump in to support break-fixes in code, and the ability for scale through potential process automation.

• The complexity: The whole team would be impacted in any changes to documentation standards.

• The why: It was not yet known why there was inconsistent process conformance today.

• The decision: The leader decided to create new documentation standards amongst the heavy client work load and before understanding the root cause of why the team wasn't conforming to the existing standards. While the decision felt simple and low-stakes, this caused further confusion in processes and continued the lack of adherence to standards.

Our tip?

Firewall discovery from solutioning. Quick solutions are tempting, but until you really understand the root cause and understand the impact, solutioning too quickly can cause more chaos throughout internal operations.

First, begin with a root cause analysis. Work with someone to unpack the "why." This may be done through a 5 Why's exercise or similar forum.

Need support? We can help facilitate these conversations. Reach out to learn more!