Aim at Roots, Not Ripples When Trouble Strikes

You’ve felt it a hundred times—chaos hits and you dive into firefighting mode. Projects derail, emails explode, and you’re slapping on fixes like duct tape. But within a day or two, the same troubles return. Picture this: an unexpected failure at work sets off a torrent of missed meetings, budget overshoots, and team tension. You stay late to patch each crack. Then Monday rolls around and it’s raining leaks again.

That’s symptom work—treating only the surface. You patch the deadline with weekend hours, soothe the angry client emails, and shuffle budgets until the immediate fire is out. But you’re stuck in a loop because you never asked why the failure happened to begin with.

Enter the “five whys.” Start with one tear: why did that report miss its date? Because data wasn’t ready. Why wasn’t data ready? Someone delayed the analysis. Why did they delay? They misunderstood the requirements. Why did that happen? The handoff instructions were vague. Why were they vague? Because there was no clear documentation.

And just like that, the root emerges. You didn’t mismanage your team; you misbuilt your process. The path forward is clear: write simple guidance for handoffs, brief the team on it, and watch future deadlines breathe easy. You stop the taps at the source and end the cycle.

When trouble erupts, don’t rush into fixes. Instead, grab a notepad and list every symptom—missed deadlines, extra costs, tense emails—one by one. Ask yourself why each happened, drilling down layer after layer until you find the root. Then design one solution that neutralizes that cause and apply it. You’ll stop chasing band-aids and finally fix what matters—tonight.