We are running our weekly IDS sessions but we keep solving surface-level symptoms instead of the real problems. How do we force our leadership team to dig up the actual root cause of an issue before we start building solutions?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Solving symptoms is an expensive waste of time because the same issues will keep resurfacing every month. When your leadership team enters the Identify phase of IDS®, you must slow down to speed up. The first person to state the issue rarely identifies the root cause. They are usually describing a frustration or a lagging result, not the actual break in your operating system.

To dig up the issue behind the issue, the facilitator must ask probing, uncomfortable questions before allowing any discussion of solutions.

- Ask "Why did this happen?" at least three times to peel back the operational layers.
- Ask "Who is the single owner of this accountabilities seat?" to pinpoint structural gaps on your Accountability Chart.
- Ask "Is this a people issue or a process issue?" to separate personal friction from system failures.

Never let the team jump to brainstorming solutions until everyone on the leadership team agrees on the exact problem statement. Write the refined problem on a whiteboard. If you are debating a customer retention issue, the root cause might not be bad customer service; it might be poor lead qualification by sales. Once you have isolated the real issue, the Discuss and Solve phases become remarkably fast. You will solve the problem permanently rather than patching over a symptom.