You're Fixing It Where You Can See It
- Tate Linden
- 18h
- 3 min read
In the first issue I talked about the importance of repeated problems. Once you recognize that problems repeat, the next instinct is to look more closely at where they show up. That seems reasonable. The issue is visible there - we feel the impact. People can describe what happened. It feels like the most concrete place to act.
It's also where most organizations get stuck.
What you can see is almost never where the problem begins. It's where the problem becomes measurable.
By the time something surfaces as a visible issue, the conditions that produced it have already been in place for a while. Work has already moved through several stages. Decisions have already been made. Tradeoffs have already been accepted, often without anyone realizing they were making them. The system has already narrowed things down to a small set of possible outcomes, and one of them just showed up as the problem.
At that point, the organization is reacting to something it has no hope of preventing.
Consider what might happen in a hospital when the Emergency Department starts getting hammered in patient satisfaction scores. Wait times are up, and patients who've already been stabilized are reporting that nobody talks to them. They feel forgotten. It looks like an ED communication problem, so the hospital rolls out a new rounding protocol. Nurses check in every hour, tell patients what's happening, give them a sense of where things stand.
The protocol gets implemented. Scores don't move much.
What may actually be happening is that nurses can't tell patients anything useful because they don't know anything useful. Each patient is waiting on a specialist consult, but the request is sitting in a queue that Case Management owns, and nobody has the bandwidth to follow up on it. So the nurse walks in every thirty minutes, smiles, and says some version of "we're still waiting." The patient hears that eight times and leaves a bad review.
The rounding protocol was fine. The problem was that the information nurses needed didn't exist yet, because a process nobody was watching had already stalled.
That's why fixes at the point of visibility rarely hold. They address what happened, not what made it likely to happen. The intervention lands at the end of the chain while the thing driving the outcome sits much further back. When the same conditions show up again, the system follows the same path.
To actually change the pattern, attention has to move earlier. Where does the work first run into trouble? Where do decisions get made that box in everything that comes after? Where do assumptions about speed or accuracy start shaping how things flow?
These spots are usually quieter and less dramatic than the problem itself. They don't look like failures. They look like normal operations. That's exactly why they're easy to walk right past.
But they're also where change actually sticks.
The visible problem stops coming back because it's no longer being set up the same way. The fix landed where the result was made inevitable, not just where it finally became obvious.
As long as the focus stays on what's visible, the organization keeps cleaning up outcomes, putting out fires, and picking up dropped balls. When the focus shifts to where those outcomes get made, lasting improvements are possible.
