Breaking the Cycle of Fixes that Fail

Systems thinking is leadership

You just saved your customer from losing orders from an error in your product.  What a relief! Now you can go back to your regular work.  But something is nagging in the back of your mind. 

You recall it was only a month ago that a different error caused a single point of failure that was discovered moments before scheduled maintenance would have hurt your customer’s orders.  On top of this, you have a quarterly review with this customer in two weeks. 

How do you break out of this cycle of heroics?  How do you break out if no one else feels there is an issue?

To resolve the repeating failures without delaying your product growth, let's look at Systems Thinking to build willpower in your organization.

Applying Systems Thinking - Fixes That Fail

In the above example, your team is heroically fixing problems and saving customers from losing orders due to issues with your product.  The product team is very proud of their ability to fix problems and minimize customer impact.

However, your customers are not happy about the chronic failures.  Another impact of the heroic fixes is the continuing delay of a permanent fix to loss of customer orders.  The engineering team has designed a proactive monitor that detects order issues and raises an alert to the support team.  When this proactive monitor is in place then the support team and engineering team can prevent order issues. 

Systems Thinking calls this Fixes That Fail.  This is what it looks like:

This repeating pattern looks very clear to you. Unfortunately, the rest of the product team doesn't see any issue.  How can you break the cycle?

Breaking the Cycle - Current Situation

The first step in breaking the cycle is communicating about the current situation.  As a product leader, you can see this cycle and you see a way forward.  Don't run out and broadcast this picture of the current situation!  Your product team is busy celebrating how they saved the customer and they are about to tell you that the next release with proactive monitoring is delayed. 

Broadcasting this current situation without steps to break the cycle will be ignored.  Or even worse, you might be bypassed as being too negative.  How do you work through this disconnect while inspiring new actions that break the cycle?

Breaking the Cycle - Recognizing The Repeating Failure

Now that you recognize the cycle of fixing a customer problem and the ongoing delay of a permanent fix, you set out to document the cycle.  A good way to document the cycle is with Past, Present, and Future.  This is what it looks like:

In this situation, you would document it like this:

• Problem 1: last month the team caught a single point of failure just before starting scheduled maintenance.  The scheduled maintenance checklist saved customers from any loss of service!

• Problem 2: yesterday, your biggest customer had 10 orders delayed for three days while the team worked with IT to fix license checking. 

• Problem 3: Next month, your newest customer is going to launch their service and is expecting a lot of orders on launch day. 

You take this information to a few key stakeholders to validate there is a pattern of repeating failures and delays of proactive monitoring.  At first, the stakeholders respond with doubt about the pattern.  But you give them time to think and soon they begin discussing how to handle the customer launch event.

Now that there is consideration of the real consequences of delaying proactive monitoring, the team is ready to think about breaking the cycle.

Breaking the Cycle - Small Steps to Help Your Future Self

Now that a few key stakeholders are ready to behave differently, your product leadership skills can help guide the product team to a better outcome. Since you put thought into the problems on the Past, Present, and Future exercise, you drafted a few small steps to break the cycle.  Your first draft had:

• Past issue: checklist and process had the same effect as proactive monitoring.  How about considering a customer launch checklist?

• Present issue: Early collaboration with IT helped the teams work together and fix the licensing problem.  How about proactively working with IT to prepare for the customer launch?

• Future issue: Your new customer wants to work with you on a successful launch.  How about partnering your support team with the customer to monitor orders on launch day?

As you met with the key stakeholders, they added their own ideas to your draft list.  You kept the list for the whole product team.  Your communication about the cycle of fixing customer issues and ongoing delays now resonates with the team.  The product team begins preventing problems and focuses on the next release with proactive monitoring.

Your product team now understands the cycle and they are actively preventing problems.  You have a well-documented solution for:

• short term - with checklists and process

• and longer-term - with proactive monitoring

And you have material to share in your quarterly business review with your customer!

Conclusion - Organizational Willpower

Having the willpower to affect change in a fast-paced environment is challenging.  Taking these steps helps the organization change:

1. Characterizing the problem by recognizing the pattern

2. Using Past-Present-Future to rally the team around breaking the cycle

3. Executing small steps to buy time until the cycle is broken

Taking the time to lead your team to break the Fix and Fail cycle results in a better solution for your product and customers.