Finding the cause for the majority of the issues

Wouldn't it be wonderful by following some simple steps it is possible to find the root of what is causing the majority of the issues?

One has to remember, often, if not the root, the solution lies outside the periphery we tend to look for solutions. Therefore out-of-the-box thinking is required to address the root of the majority of the issues.

The Cloud is a tool that finds its origin in ToC (Theory of Constraints). It is excellent for finding root causes of the majority of the issues.

Basically it is a very compact description of a dilemma. When examining several dilemmas it is usually possible to extract a few, or even one, generic dilemma: a description of a reoccuring dilemma. There are many uses for this: explanation of what happens in the past and now, prediction for the future ...and a good guide to effectively deal with the reoccuring dilemma.

There are several techiques and instructions around to construct a cloud and a generic cloud. Here I present the technique I developed over the years. The technique is very reliable and others are quite successful in using it as well. Best of all, same input usually generates very similar conclusion ...this can't be said of some other techniques.

The following is a real case where I'm the coach of a programme manager who feels he needs to improve himself. You might recognise yourself or a generic issue. Fine, but the scope of this blog is the specific case for this programme manager. For home work I asked him to following:

• List all the interventions you took or wanted to take in the past 3-6 months
• For each intervention:
• List why it was / would be good to take that intervention
• List why it was / would be good NOT to take that intervention
• What goal did you aim for that required both above

Intervention = interfering in some course of events

We practised together two:

Intervention	Why good to	Why good not to	Goal/Aim
Call resource manager	- personal contact - keep a project member	- maintain relation - steering committe takes their role	maintain relationship
Escalate to senior supplier	- project member will return - senior supplier takes his role	- maintain relation - respect the decision	to force a solution

Two interventions are not enough, but after little more than one week I got a list with 15 interventions. This is more like it, following some rules it structured the data in such a way that all what was required to see if there was a commonality between one or more dilemmas.

In this case there was, to be precisely everything seem to fit into one generic dilemma:

Two question had to be answered:

• 
  
  Do you ever let something go wrong?
  Answer: seldom
• 
  
  Does the formulated objective (green box) match what you feel is what you are trying to achieve and seems so hard to achieve?
  Answer: yes

Then we discussed the validity of the generic description of his core dilemma. It matched.

So how to read the cloud:

• 
  
  You demand people (steering committe members, resource managers, etc) to live up to their roles and responsibilities in order to improve the probability for succes in your project.
• 
  
  However, you feel you should not demand people to live up to their roles and responsibilities because you must respect their positions and this makes you look powerful.
• 
  
  If you demand people to live up to their roles / responsibilities, you do not respect them (you know better and act like a boss rather than a subordinate or equal) and you look weak because you can't manage.
• 
  
  On the other hand, if you do not demand people to live up to their roles and responsibilities it is very hard or impossible to improve the success of your project
• 
  
  And, you need both to improve the probability for success of your project and to respect people's positition and to look strong in order to fulfill your objective: make steps forward in the project and that people associate you with delivering good results.

We explored his generic dilemma using his home work and other situations. It was a very good respresentation for his situation.

The theory of the cloud says: as long as you are captured in the dilemma, you will not achieve your objectives. You might do a bit of both, make some trade-offs, you will never achieve what you want because you need BOTH necessary conditions. Any solution MUST positively contribute to both necessary conditions (the blue boxes) at the same time.

With this we have the focus, we have very clear criteria for any solution or idea to improve his situation.

He is going to talk to some senior programme managers he knew who are quite successful and try to learn how they deal with the dilemma. What do they do to ensure that stakeholders take-up their responsibility and that respect is paid to the position of the stakeholders? He knows how to value any suggestion or proposed idea.

So, with a couple of simple questions and following some rules to construct the generic cloud, the dilemma that caused so many issues latetly for this programme manager became very explicit. And, at the same time we have focused his attention on the characteristics the solution must have in order to work for him. This is very helpful to think-out-of-the-box.