I think more often than not we end up treating the symptoms and not the problem.  You say, “I have a headache.”  My first response is, “Do you want an aspirin?”  In that scenario, we’re treating the symptom (the headache) and not the problem that’s causing the headache (poor vision, for example.)  When we treat the symptoms, they are cleared up for awhile, but then return (because we haven’t eliminated their cause.)

The Japanese say that in order to get to the real problem, you have to ask why five times.  Here’s a possible scenario.  A manufacturing company just lost its biggest customer.  Their first response was to jump on an airplane, go visit the customer and try to resurrect him.  But here’s how the Japanese would have handled it:  Why #1: Why did we lose our biggest customer?  A) Because we didn’t ship his order on time.

Why #2:  Why didn’t we ship his order on time?  A) We didn’t have the items.

Why #3:  Why didn’t we have the item?  A)  Because we didn’t have the parts necessary to make it.

Why #4:  Why didn’t we have the parts to make it?  A)  Because the guy who makes it was on vacation and we didn’t have anyone else to take his place.

Why #5:  Why didn’t we have someone else to take his place?  A)  I don’t know.

Now we’ve actually gotten to the problem.  The problem isn’t that we lost our biggest customer.  The problem is we let the vacation of a $5 / hour employee take precedence over our biggest customer (and all the other customers.)   Something happened deep in the belly of the beast that management could have never predicted nor foreseen that cost the company its biggest customer.  Had we not gotten to the bottom of this, who knows how many customers we would have lost.

You must be sure you’re treating problems and not symptoms in your business.  Make sure you’ve gotten all the way to the bottom of the issue before you rush in with a solution.  The truth is, in the example above we should have probably gone two to three more levels deep to get to the real problem.  This problem stems all the way back to HR policies like vacation policies, temp worker policies, etc.   If you’re going to be a successful problem solver, you must be certain you’ve gotten all the way to the root of the cause.

The bottom line is this:  If you’ve been suffering from the frustration of treating symptoms and not the problems, you’ll understand exactly why we’re asking why.