How to Navigate the Dissonance of a Problem, Its Root Cause, and Potential Solutions
Roger Mitchell
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Digital transformation initiatives often get stuck when defining problems, root causes, and solutions. While this creates dissonance among stakeholders, learning to work through this tension is critical for success.
Before we dive into how the dissonance appears, let’s clear up any ambiguity around what these terms mean:
- Problems: Things that need to be understood and solved for some benefit
- Root Cause: The driving factor behind why a problem exists
- Potential Solutions: Options for addressing the problem, including “do nothing”
As an aside, I refer to things as “problems”, although this broadly can include things like challenges, issues, opportunities, etc. This is likely due to my love of mathematics earlier in life and never being presented with “math opportunities” as homework.
Most of the dissonance originates from three places:
- Conflating what is a problem versus its root cause
- Defining a root cause versus contributing factor
- Recommending a solution that is pure versus optimal
Let’s dive into each of these to understand what it is and how to deal with it.
Conflating what is a problem versus its root cause
It’s common and incorrect to point to a single system or how systems are connected as being the problem. While it’s possible that how a system is configured or customized is the root cause of a problem, it is not the problem itself.
To avoid conflating these, it’s critical to step back and spend more time defining the problem clearly, which should be grounded in parts of a business process like prerequisites, specific steps, expected outcomes, etc.
Defining a root cause versus contributing factor
Similar to conflating a problem and its root cause, there tends to be more emphasis placed on systems as the root cause than a business process, an overall strategy, or the people involved.
This is likely due to:
- Lack of familiarity with how systems work
- Feeling comfortable with how a business process
- Unwillingness to be vulnerable or point to how people are involved
It’s entirely possible that a system is the issue, although don’t overlook the other causes when figuring out which is the driving factor.
To avoid this misattribution, consider whether the people involved did not receive sufficient support or enablement, the business process makes sense and is optimized, and whether the strategy itself is differentiated and achievable.
Recommending a solution that is pure versus optimal
It’s easy to make a joke that a consultant will answer “it depends” before asking more questions and caveating their position.
When looking at a list of potential solutions, there is often a desire to go with the one that is purist, in the sense that it addresses the root cause directly or matches an industry’s or vendor’s “best practices”.
In reality, the purist solution is often not the optimal solution, as organizations are faced with constraints about how they can commit their limited time and resources to a backlog worth of problems.
To avoid this dichotomy, ensure that you understand the value associated with the problem you’re solving before recommending a solution. If this is not feasible, at least define the assumptions made when providing a recommendation.
TLDR: The dissonance of digital transformation occurs for three reasons: conflating a problem versus root cause, misattributing the root cause, and recommending solutions that are optimal but not necessarily pure.