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Key Takeaways Once a specific problem is solved, leaders often stop looking for the deeper conflict driving it. They treat evidence that one failure point has been fixed as evidence that the underlying problem has been fixed.
Later problems get treated as separate issues. The organization ends up resolving the same underlying tradeoff several times, one decision point at a time, without seeing that those decisions belong together.
Leaders should ask whether what was fixed was the problem itself, or simply the first place the problem became visible.
The COO had every reason to believe the launch problem was fixed. A regional product launch had missed its date by six weeks after a late packaging spec change got caught in a slow approval path.
Marketing needed speed to protect the launch date. Procurement needed enough review to protect spend discipline and vendor risk.
The COO resolved the conflict with a simple rule. Any launch-critical vendor expedite fee below a defined cap would receive same-day procurement approval, while anything above the cap would still go through the normal review.
On the next comparable launch, the same kind of packaging issue appeared. The request went in on a Tuesday, procurement approved it that afternoon, and the launch hit its date.
The fix worked exactly as intended.
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