Why the economy and your supplier are not the real cause

The economy, the market, your competitors or your supplier can all be completely true, and still not be the cause of the problem in your business. According to the source, a real cause is limited to what you can control. That is not a matter of attitude. It is a matter of definition.

The boundary the source draws

The source has its own word for the real cause of a problem: the Why. A Why is not the explanation that sounds best. It is the thing that, once you fix it, brings your numbers back up. From that follows one rule, which the source sets in capitals in one place: “Thus the Why is limited by what you can control.”

Then it spells out what a Why never is. It is never that other division, never top management, and never the bumps on the moon.

The bumps on the moon are not decoration. They lump together every excuse that comes from outside: the economy, the market, the competition, the authorities, the weather, the customers. Any of them may be completely true, and all of them are just as useless. A cause you cannot act on is not a cause for you.

Suppose a business owner has spent two years blaming interest rates. Rates really did go up. And there is nothing he can do to bring them down. So the explanation is true, and the business is stuck.

Why this is a definition, not a lecture

It is easy to read this as a speech about personal responsibility. The source is saying something else. If a Why is measured by whether fixing it brings the numbers back, then anything you have no way to fix cannot be a Why. It simply does not meet the definition.

That changes the question. Instead of asking what happened out there, you ask what changed inside the business when it happened.

Back to the owner and the interest rates. Once he swaps the question and asks what changed in his own business when rates went up, the answer shows up. Customers had started asking to pay in installments, and he had no way to offer that. That, he can fix.

Or take a shop owner who blames everything on a shopping centre that does no marketing. When she asks what she does with the people who do walk in, she finds there is no follow-up with them at all.

The lumber that never gets loaded

The source gives an example where you can swap in your own names and get your own business. A staff member is responsible for loading lumber onto a truck. He explains that it is not getting loaded because the personnel section will not find people for him.

According to the source, this man is not looking at his own area, because he is convinced the fault lies with other departments. And it does not occur to him that he is leaning on a cause he cannot control, so it is not a cause for his area at all. The result, in one line from the source: “And the lumber never gets loaded.”

That is the whole picture. What he says is true, it is documented, he could prove it. And the truck is still standing there.

In a small business it sounds familiar. The supplier does not deliver, the accountant does not send things over, the customer will not decide.

Suppose an owner waits four months for stock from one supplier. The supplier really is late. But there is also no second supplier, and that part was in his hands all along.

Or a designer who says her projects are stuck because clients will not approve them. Not one of her proposals says by when they need to approve.

Or an installer who says there are no workers out there. He has never posted a job. He has only asked around among people he knows.

What a cause you control looks like

The source does not stop at criticism. It shows how that same staff member would phrase a cause that is actually in his hands.

In one version, he has no authority to hire workers by the day, and he needs to get that authority before his area falls apart. In the other, the jobs in his department are drawn too narrowly, and at peak times he needs everyone to pitch in, whatever their role.

Both answers are about the exact same workload. The difference is that in both of them, the person saying the sentence is also the person who can act on it. The first asks for authority he is missing. The second says he does not need more people, only roles that are less rigid.

It works on everyday sentences too. Someone who says his employee does not care may discover he never defined what good work looks like in that role, so the employee has nothing to aim at.

What the booklet has on this

The chapter this article is based on includes two exercises: sort, and swap the subject. It also has a self-check, and it belongs to a booklet about telling an answer that opens a door apart from one that only closes the discussion.

The next time you catch yourself explaining a problem in your business with something that happens out there, stop and ask: even if it is true, what part of it is actually in my hands?