Tuning out the Noise – the New, New Normal?

Picture the scene. It won’t be hard. It’s 2:10pm on a Wednesday.

• The quality exception report is due by the end of the day, but you still have 4 more hours of work.
• You need to pick up your daughter at 5pm, feed her dinner and then take her to basketball practice by 6pm.
• You haven’t finalised travel plans for next week’s visit to your key supplier who has been having problems – the reason for the quality exception report.
• 72 new emails haven’t been opened and 3 people need to schedule mandatory meetings with you, but your schedule is already booked.
• Your company is reorganising. You’re not sure where you will land at the end of all this.
• A new information system is being installed. You are responsible for training your team on this new system, which is going live in a month, but you aren’t up to speed yourself.

Unfortunately, this is a typical day that has to be managed on top of your core job responsibilities. It’s a never-ending treadmill of reactivity with no end in sight. This is the new normal.

Given that your day is usually toast before you sit down at your desk, there is simply no time for dealing with yet another problem, but they still keep coming. You know that your problem-solving skills should be applied to the latest supplier problem, yet you have 4 more supplier exception reports to complete by the end of the week. What on earth to do?

You know Gandhi was probably right: “Be the change you wish to see in the world” But Gandhi, he didn’t have an iPhone going bezerk with texts/emails/posts every two minutes.

So, what do experienced RCA problem solvers do? Firstly, they know that they can’t slip into trying to ‘boil the ocean’ every time they encounter a new problem. They tend to start small and work their way up. A smart decision is to allocate 2-3 hours/month to performing an RCA— Maybe pull the time from doing yet more exception reports. Remind yourself that while you accept that you need to complete the exception reports, the time spent on them typically doesn’t provide commensurate benefits to you or the organisation. Your time is better spent understanding and eliminating the causes for why the problem developed in the first place. This is genuine value-added work. In today’s environment, permanent elimination of just one problem will save multiple people countless hours of reactivity, and it usually saves tens and/or hundreds of thousands of dollars. It’ll get you noticed too. Assuming you want that!

Maybe try it on the next big problem that lands in your lap. Maybe target a problem that has been troubling you and your team for a while, grab a couple of colleagues and schedule 2 hours of their time to do an RCA. By turning off the cell phone and blocking out other distractions, you can focus on the causes of the problem. I think you (and your colleagues) will be pleasantly surprised. You will enable the discovery of effective solutions that will prevent recurrence.

The time invested in the RCA will rebate itself to you and others, down the road. Wouldn’t it be doubly nice if some of your colleagues did the same so that you wouldn’t get pulled into their problems? Most major problems that are responsible for keeping people in the reactive tail-spin are/were preventable, and most all of these problems exhibit ample warning signs for weeks, months or even years. The problems you read about for corporations in the business pages didn’t usually spring up overnight.

You aren’t going to completely stop the cycle of reactivity with one RCA, but you will begin to slow it down. That’s a start. Build on it. Things will get better. Who knows, it may even leave you with enough time to actually watch your daughter’s basketball game as opposed to just being there physically and spending most of your time on your phone responding to emails from people who want to know when the latest problem will be resolved.

Could this be the new, new normal?