Last month I wrote about the joined-upness of organisations and the way that we need to see the organisation as a sum of all of it’s parts before we try to fix,what we think is, a problem in one area
I continued with my thinking about the injured body which led to this…
Often when dealing with a long term physical problem we attend to the symptoms, but because a body adapts itself to protect an injury, after a while what we find is that the area where pain is being experienced may not actually be the damaged area. In my case I had developed bad posture to protect my cuff rotator. As a result the pain was presenting around my shoulder blade. It was only when I dealt with that muscular problem properly that I was able to identify the root cause, the cuff rotator, which 5 years after injury had still not healed, as it had not been treated.
Applying this thinking to business I saw that it is all too easy in an organisation to lay the blame for a problem in an area where there is an obvious fault, without understanding that there may well be a more deep seated root cause.
As a social media trainer I see this a lot. People tell me that social media doesn’t work for them. When I explore this further it usually means that the real underlying issue is that there been no work put into planning a strategy.
One of the best theories I have read for diagnosing what is really going on is the 5 Whys developed by Sakichi Toyoda, one of the fathers of the Japanese industrial revolution, in the 1930s. Sakichi Toyoda created the 5 Whys technique to stop people solving symptoms. When presented with a problem, you simply ask ‘Why’ 5 times, and you get to solve the root problem.
So when the issue is, for example, Twitter doesn’t work for us, if we ask the 5 Whys we will get to something like this…
What bits of your organisation aren’t working? Are you seeing the symptoms, or the root causes?
Before you sack someone, or close something down, it’s certainly worth taking a step back and asking what is really behind that issue.
If you would like Jane to help you with your social media and sales strategy planning, drop her an email at jane@janebinnion.com, or tweet her at @janebinnion