Have you ever had the experience of opening the fridge to the smell of some science experiment going really south on us and the smell is enough to knock an elephant off its feet at a distance of half a mile? Obviously, we can’t leave that until the weekend when we’d planned to clean the fridge, so we attend to it right there and then. But as we do so, we find still other problems living in our fridge. Now we do a thorough cleaning and a couple of hours later, our fridge is sparkling clean and a healthy place to once again store our perishables.
What if we treated issues within our organizations the same way we approached finding the source of the smell and fixing things so our fridge was again safe for food storage? Do we work to identify potential issues before they erupt? Or do we wait until the issue goes from a molehill to a mountain? Once an issue is identified, we must address it effectively so that it is completely resolved. We don’t simply address the symptom (yes, let’s throw out that bag of salad we were saving for lunch next week, only “next” week was actually last week and now it’s changing into a liquid version of itself. And oh, good grief! The bag is leaking all over the place!)
Getting to the source of the problem quickly and developing effective resolutions can prevent issues from developing that can consume all our time and energy – time and energy better spent on insuring quality productivity and customer service. Focusing on identifying the issue correctly also helps prevent us from addressing only the symptoms. Throwing away the outdated bag of salad addresses the symptom but doesn’t address the problem (we need to pay attention to what’s there and for how long.) Now off to organize the freezer…..
