“The problem is communication.”
Maybe. It is one of those explanations that can cover almost anything: late deliveries, customer complaints, mistakes, slow decisions, or a change that somehow never quite happened.
The danger comes when everybody agrees. Once an explanation becomes familiar enough, people tend to jump straight from “this is the problem” to “this is what we should do about it.”
More communication. More training. Another procedure. Another meeting.
I prefer to follow the trail first.
Where does the trail lead?
Take a fairly ordinary problem: customers are complaining about late deliveries.
Perhaps orders are being promised too quickly. Perhaps work is being scheduled badly. Information may be missing when the work starts, something may have to be done twice, or everybody may know there is a problem but nobody really owns the handover where it occurs.
Each answer gives us another lead to follow.
This is where familiar tools can help. A Fishbone Analysis may open up the possible causes, and Root Cause Analysis can take us deeper into the ones that matter. There is no reason to replace useful tools just to invent another one.
Where’s the Beef? picks up those findings and keeps going.
Once we have a credible cause, what needs to change? What do people need to do differently? What should those actions produce, and how will we know whether they worked?
The trail runs naturally from problem to cause to change to action to expected result to measurement and to learning.
How far we follow it depends on what we need.
For a relatively small problem, finding the cause and agreeing what needs to change may be quite enough. For something more substantial, we can continue into implementation planning: who needs to do what, in what sequence, with what support, and what result we expect. Those expected results also give us a sensible basis for measurement planning and KPIs.
So something that started as troubleshooting can gradually become a practical change plan.
Something else happens while we do this
There is another side to Where’s the Beef?, and to me it is just as important.
When people work through these trails together, the questions gradually become familiar.
“We need more training.” What needs to become different afterwards?
“We need better communication.” Between whom, about what, and what should happen differently?
“We need people to take more responsibility.” Responsibility for what, exactly?
These aren’t particularly clever questions. That’s rather the point. People can use them.
After a while, they don’t necessarily need a consultant or manager to ask them. People become less inclined to jump from a symptom to the familiar solution and start following the connections themselves. They look for evidence, consequences and ownership, and they begin to see more clearly where their own work connects with somebody else’s.
In other words, the tool we are using to troubleshoot the problem is also helping to change the way people deal with problems.
And quite often, following one trail exposes something else that needs fixing. That’s useful too. We weren’t trying to prove that the first explanation was right.
We were trying to find the beef.
If you have a problem where everyone already seems to know the cause — or where the usual fixes keep coming back without much changing — that is a good place to start.
We can follow the trail together, work out what actually needs to change, and take it as far into change, implementation and measurement planning as makes sense.
If you want to have a look at one, send me a message here on LinkedIn and we can have an initial discussion. No strings attached. Or check out baleteworks.com.