More Effort Won’t Fix the Wrong Strategy
Photo by Christina Morillo
Earlier in my career, I described my work in a way that was accurate but broad.
I could support operations, coordinate projects, create content, manage client communication, organize systems, and contribute to strategy. I assumed that listing everything I could do would create more opportunities. Instead, it sometimes made my value harder to understand.
The problem was not that I lacked experience or needed to work harder. I needed to distinguish between everything I could do and the problems I was particularly great at solving.
Job seekers often encounter a similar problem. When applications receive little or no response, the natural reaction is to submit more. Rewrite the résumé, add more keywords, widen the search, and spend another evening applying.
Leaders and teams do this, too. When deadlines are repeatedly missed, they schedule more check-ins and send more reminders.
In both situations, increasing the activity feels productive. But if the source of the problem is unclear positioning, poor ownership, an inefficient process, or the wrong strategy, more effort simply makes the inefficiency more expensive.
Activity Is Not the Same as Progress
There is comfort in doing something we can count.
An application submitted gives us a number and a completed task. A reminder sent or another meeting scheduled provides similar evidence that we are addressing the problem. But counting activity only tells us how much we have done. It does not tell us whether the activity was well-directed.
If a qualified candidate submits fifty applications without receiving an interview, the answer may be to apply more. It may also be that the roles are not sufficiently aligned, the résumé does not communicate relevant value, or the candidate’s broad experience makes it difficult for employers to understand where they fit.
Inside an organization, the same instinct appears when a team continues to miss deadlines. More reminders may create urgency, but forgetfulness may not be the problem. The actual source could be unclear ownership, competing priorities, an unrealistic timeline, or an approval process that creates delays.
The visible result tells us that something is not working. It does not automatically tell us why.
Three Questions to Find the Source
Root-cause analysis does not always require a complicated framework. It can begin with three questions.
1. Where does the problem first appear?
Start with the earliest point at which the process stops working as intended.
If a project misses its deadline, trace the work backward. Did the delay begin when responsibilities were assigned, when information moved from one person to another, or when approval was required?
The missed deadline is the final consequence, but the problem may have started days or weeks earlier. Locating the first visible breakdown helps prevent the team from concentrating only on the outcome that eventually drew attention.
2. What conditions repeatedly produce the result?
One disappointing outcome may be an exception. A recurring pattern provides more useful information.
If projects consistently slow down at the same approval stage, the bottleneck is probably not individual motivation. If deadlines are missed whenever priorities change midway through the work, another reminder will not resolve the underlying conflict.
The goal is not to assign blame. It is to notice what remains consistent each time the problem occurs.
There may not be one perfect explanation. Most workplace problems have several interacting causes. Still, patterns help us move from assumptions toward a more informed diagnosis.
3. What change would prevent the problem from recurring?
An immediate solution helps us recover. A source-level solution reduces the likelihood that we will need the same recovery again.
A team can work together to meet the current deadline while also clarifying ownership, simplifying the approval process, or adjusting future timelines. One response addresses what must happen now. The other improves what happens next.
This is the difference between correcting an outcome and improving the system that produced it.
Two Things Can Be True
Looking for the source should not become another way to blame people for circumstances they cannot control.
External conditions matter. A difficult hiring market can limit opportunities, just as a demanding workload can strain even a capable and committed team.
At the same time, those conditions should not prevent us from examining the parts of a process we can influence. A person can be highly qualified and still need clearer positioning. A team can be committed and still be working within a process that makes success unnecessarily difficult.
Both can be true: the circumstances may be challenging, and the strategy may still need work.
That distinction moves us away from judgment and toward diagnosis.
Trace the Problem to Its Source
Momentum Fundamental #19, Fix Problems at the Source, challenges us to look beneath symptoms and consequences.
Sometimes the answer really is more effort. A task may simply require more time, consistency, or attention. But before directing more time, people, or resources toward a problem, leaders should understand what “more” is expected to solve.
Will another reminder clarify ownership? Will another meeting remove the bottleneck? Will asking for more activity improve the process producing the result?
If not, additional effort may help manage the immediate symptom, but it will not prevent the problem from returning.
Fixing the source can initially feel slower than responding to what is immediately visible. It requires us to pause, trace the problem backward, challenge our assumptions, and sometimes admit that the process we have been working to sustain is the very thing that needs to change.
That pause is not a lack of action. It is what prevents today’s workaround from becoming tomorrow’s recurring responsibility.
~ Katrina
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Fundamental of the Week #19: FIX PROBLEMS AT THE SOURCE
Address issues by discovering the root cause rather than only focusing on the symptoms or the consequences. Seek improvement by developing long-term solutions.
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