Chris Schroeder | Principal Consultant, Provia
One observation I’ve made throughout my career is that organisations often rush to find solutions before properly understanding the problems they’re trying to solve.
We naturally favour approaches that have worked before. They’re familiar, proven and easier to defend than something fundamentally different. For routine problems, that makes sense. However, yesterday’s successful solution can easily become today’s unquestioned constraint.
The quality of a solution is often limited by the quality of thinking that precedes it.
Under pressure to deliver results, organisations tend to adopt the first plausible answer, then concentrate on refining it rather than questioning whether a better approach exists. Over time, they can become exceptionally good at improving processes that perhaps shouldn’t exist in their current form at all.
When Good Solutions Outlive Their Purpose
Consider a manufacturer experiencing recurring quality problems. An additional inspection is introduced to prevent defects reaching customers. It works, and the immediate problem appears resolved.
Later, another issue emerges. Further inspections, procedures, documentation and approvals follow. Each decision seems reasonable, yet over time the organisation accumulates layers of controls, duplicated effort and unnecessary handovers, often without addressing the underlying causes.
Eventually, processes become so cumbersome that employees develop workarounds simply to get their jobs done.
Management may interpret this as a compliance or behavioural problem, when the real issue lies in how the work has been designed.
Rather than asking, “How do we make people follow the process?”, perhaps the better question is, “Why has following the process become so difficult?”
That distinction can fundamentally change the solution.
Understand Before You Improve
Effective business improvement starts with understanding how work actually happens, not simply how procedures say it should happen.
There’s often a significant difference between how a process was designed, how management believes it operates, and how employees actually perform the work.
Observing those differences can reveal bottlenecks, unnecessary complexity, ineffective controls, duplicated effort and problems that have gradually become accepted as the norm.
At TasNetworks, I designed and led the TasNetworks Excellence (TEX) program, applying structured Lean and Six Sigma improvement methods across a complex electricity transmission and distribution business. The program delivered more than $3 million in cost efficiencies while developing employees’ capability to identify and resolve operational problems.
One important principle underpinning this work was that sustainable improvement requires more than performing existing activities faster. It means identifying the underlying causes of poor performance, challenging assumptions and understanding which activities genuinely contribute to better outcomes.
Sometimes the answer is to redesign and improve a process, but occasionally it’s best to eliminate an activity entirely if it’s no longer serving a useful purpose.
Challenge Assumptions, Not Common Sense
The most dangerous assumptions are often those we no longer recognise as assumptions.
“We’ve always done it this way.”
“The system won’t allow that.”
“That’s what the procedure requires.”
Over time, these explanations become accepted constraints, limiting what people believe is possible.
Of course, many established procedures and controls exist for good reason, often reflecting years of experience and lessons learned from costly failures. The objective isn’t to remove safeguards indiscriminately, but to understand why they exist, whether they’re still effective, and whether better outcomes could be achieved with less complexity.
This is where structured root cause analysis and Lean thinking become particularly valuable. Rather than automatically introducing another corrective action, we examine the process, test our assumptions and identify what genuinely needs to change.
Leadership Makes Improvement Possible
There’s also an important cultural dimension. Employees often recognise problems long before they appear in management reports. They know where work accumulates, which procedures create unnecessary effort, and which controls are routinely bypassed.
However, recognising a problem and feeling comfortable raising it are very different things.
When questioning established practices is interpreted as criticism or resistance, employees often remain silent. The organisation consequently loses access to some of its most valuable operational knowledge.
Effective leaders encourage respectful challenge, honest discussion and experimentation, while maintaining accountability for results.
This doesn’t mean accepting every suggestion or pursuing change for its own sake. New ideas deserve the same scrutiny as established practices. The objective is better performance, not novelty.
Are We Improving the Right Things?
One of the most important principles in operational excellence is recognising that optimising individual activities doesn’t necessarily optimise the overall system.
A faster production step might simply shift a bottleneck downstream. Another inspection may detect more defects without preventing them. And additional reporting might improve management visibility while consuming resources better spent elsewhere.
Each improvement can appear successful in isolation while delivering little overall benefit.
Before investing in another “solution”, leaders should consider five fundamental questions:
- What problem are we actually trying to solve?
- What’s causing it?
- Which activities genuinely contribute to the desired outcome?
- What assumptions are limiting our thinking?
- Is there a simpler, more effective way to achieve the result?
Answering these questions requires observation, sound analysis and the willingness to challenge established thinking.
Ultimately, one of leadership’s most important responsibilities isn’t simply providing better answers. It’s ensuring the organisation continues asking better questions.
Every successful solution carries the potential to become a future constraint. The more successful it becomes, the less likely it is to be questioned.
Perhaps the first step towards better business improvement isn’t finding another solution. It’s making the assumptions behind our existing solutions visible again.
Could your organisation benefit from a fresh perspective?
Provia helps organisations identify the underlying causes of operational problems, simplify processes and implement practical, sustainable improvements.