Not Every Problem Is Yours to Solve | Observations from the Shop Floor
Michael Gardner, COO
One of the harder lessons I have learned over the years is that not every problem deserves the same amount of my attention.
Early in my career, I probably believed the opposite. If I saw a problem, I wanted to understand it, get involved and help solve it. There is certainly value in that instinct. Businesses need people who are willing to dig in when something isn’t working.
Experience has taught me, though, that there is a difference between a problem that needs my awareness and a problem that needs my effort. That distinction took me a while to learn.
Understanding Is Different From Owning
Leadership doesn’t mean being disconnected from the problems happening around you. In fact, I think good leaders need to understand more of those problems, not fewer. Understanding gives us context, helps us recognize patterns and sometimes allows us to see that something appearing to be an isolated problem is actually connected to something larger.
But understanding a problem doesn’t necessarily mean becoming the person responsible for solving it.
There are only so many hours in a day, and every hour spent solving one problem is an hour that cannot be spent somewhere else. Eventually, the question becomes less about whether I can help solve something and more about whether my involvement is where I can create the most value.
Sometimes it is. Other times, the right thing to do is make sure the problem is understood by the right person and then get out of the way.
A Lesson That Stayed With Me
There have been books, mentors and experiences throughout my career that changed the way I think about business. One of those books was The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt. Later, I was fortunate enough to meet the man behind Alex Rogo, the plant manager at the center of the story. That experience made something I had read in a business book feel considerably more real.
The Goal introduced many of us to the Theory of Constraints, but what stayed with me wasn’t simply a manufacturing philosophy or a method for finding bottlenecks. It was the much simpler realization that improving everything isn’t necessarily the same as improving the system.
A company can have problems everywhere. In fact, most companies do. There are always things that could be faster, cleaner, more accurate or more efficient. But working hard to improve something that isn’t limiting the system may make that particular area better without making the business better.
At the time, I probably thought about that primarily in terms of manufacturing and operations. Over the years, I began to realize the same principle applies to something else.
Our attention has a constraint too.
We cannot investigate everything, and we cannot personally solve everything. Treating every problem as though it deserves equal attention doesn’t make us more effective. It simply spreads our limited attention across everything competing for it.
That realization changed how I began to think about problems.
The People Closest to the Problem
I’ve developed a great deal of respect over the years for the people closest to the work. They often understand things that aren’t immediately obvious from a report, procedure or conversation. They know which exceptions happen regularly, where a process slows down and which workaround has quietly become part of the job.
If I immediately step in and solve the problem for them, I may actually lose something important. I may solve the symptom without learning why it happened, or miss an opportunity for the person closest to the problem to recognize something I wouldn’t have seen.
Worse, I may unintentionally teach people that when something unusual happens, the answer is to find someone else to solve it.
There is a difference between helping someone think through a problem and taking the problem away from them. That difference becomes increasingly important as organizations grow.
Some Problems Are Trying to Tell Us Something
There is another reason I don’t want every problem solved too quickly: problems contain information.
An exception may reveal a weakness in a process. A customer complaint may expose something nobody had considered. An inventory discrepancy may tell us more about receiving, production or shipping than it does about inventory.
If our first instinct is simply to make the problem disappear, we may miss what the problem was trying to teach us. This is particularly true with recurring problems.
When the same type of issue keeps appearing, solving each individual occurrence can feel productive. We fixed today’s problem, everyone gets back to work and the business keeps moving. But eventually we have to stop asking, “How do we fix this one?” and start asking, “Why does this keep happening?”
And perhaps there is another question worth asking: Is this the problem that is actually limiting us?
Attention May Be the Scarce Resource
Most businesses I have worked with don’t suffer from a shortage of problems. There are orders that need attention, inventory discrepancies, vendor issues, customer questions, production problems, pricing decisions and hundreds of smaller exceptions occurring every day.
Most of them get handled. The interesting part is how.
Experienced people are constantly making decisions about what deserves their attention. They don’t investigate every transaction or question everything the system tells them. Over time, they develop a sense for what looks normal and what doesn’t.
A purchasing person may recognize that a promised date from a particular vendor deserves another look. Someone in customer service may know that an ordinary-looking order has something unusual about it. A warehouse employee may look at an inventory number that seems perfectly reasonable on the screen and still decide to walk out and check it.
Those decisions happen so naturally that we may not even recognize them as decisions. The experienced person is filtering hundreds of pieces of information and deciding, often almost instinctively, which few deserve more attention.
That judgment may be one of the most valuable forms of operational knowledge a company possesses.
Where Technology May Help
For decades, technology has helped us process more transactions and give people access to more information. We have built reports, dashboards, alerts and workflows designed to make sure people can see what is happening in the business, and those tools have created enormous value.
But I have started wondering whether the next opportunity is not simply helping us process more or see more. Maybe it is helping us decide where our attention belongs.
As technology becomes better at recognizing patterns, comparing information and understanding what normally happens, perhaps one of its most useful roles won’t be solving every problem for us. Maybe it will help us recognize which problems deserve our attention in the first place.
That doesn’t replace the person who understands the customer, remembers the vendor history, recognizes the exception or knows why something that looks perfectly reasonable in the system doesn’t feel quite right. It may simply allow that person’s experience and judgment to be spent where they matter most.
Final Observation
Not every problem is yours to solve, but every problem may be worth understanding.
Some problems need immediate action. Some belong with the person closest to the work. Some need to be watched because they may reveal a pattern. And some probably shouldn’t consume much of our attention at all.
One of the lessons I took from The Goal all those years ago was that improving every part of a system doesn’t necessarily improve the system. Experience has taught me something similar about leadership: giving every problem our attention doesn’t necessarily make the business better.
The difficult part isn’t always solving the problem. Sometimes the difficult part is recognizing which problem deserves our effort.
As our technology becomes more capable, perhaps we have an opportunity to become better at making that distinction. Not by asking technology to make every problem disappear, but by allowing it to help us recognize what matters while preserving the experience and judgment that tell us why it matters.
The goal isn’t to eliminate problems. It is to become better at recognizing which ones matter, understanding what they are trying to tell us, and putting the right attention in the right place.