To find the cause of a problem in your business you need two pictures: what happens in practice, and what is supposed to happen. According to the source, most people hold only the first, which is why they can look at the same business for years and see nothing.
In this booklet, a cause is the thing that brings the numbers back once you correct it. To reach it you first have to see where something does not add up, and you can only see that against a picture of how things are supposed to look.
Two pictures, and most people hold one
The foundation is so simple it is easy to miss. The source says there are two scenes: the ideal scene and the existing scene. It adds that the two can be far apart.
You know the existing scene well, because you know exactly what goes on in the business every day. But if you have never spelled out what is supposed to happen, you have nothing to subtract from. That also leaves you with no outpoints to count, meaning pieces of data that do not fit with how things should be.
The ideal scene usually feels like a waste of time, because what should happen seems obvious. As long as it is not written down, though, you are looking at the existing scene alone.
Say an owner knows by heart how many calls came in this week, and has never written down how many are supposed to come in.
Or a clinic owner knows how many appointments were cancelled, and has no idea how many cancellations count as normal for her. Then she writes that a normal week is 22 appointments and up to 2 cancellations. All at once it is obvious that a week with 6 cancellations is a deviation, and no longer just another week.
An ideal scene is a clean statement of purpose
This is the part that makes the whole thing possible in a few minutes. The source says the ideal scene of any activity is, at bottom, a plain statement of what that activity is for. Ask what something is for, and you can work out how it is supposed to look.
That removes the barrier. One sentence saying what the area exists for is enough, with no vision or strategic plan required. If the answer is not clear to you, you have already found something.
Say you ask what the purpose of the phone is in your business, and the answer is that no caller is left waiting beyond the day. From that moment you have something to measure.
Or you ask what the purpose of a quote is, and the answer is that the customer understands what they are getting and can decide. It is immediately clear why a one-line quote does not do the job.
And one owner asked what the purpose of his weekly meeting was and could not answer. He cancelled it, and nobody noticed.
The difference between a situation and a cause
A third term is easy to confuse with a cause. The source defines a situation as a state of affairs you did not expect, one that is either very good or very bad.
The difference is real. A situation is what you saw, for example that a large share of customers do not come back. The cause is what produced it, for example that no step exists where anyone contacts the customer after the job.
Usually someone finds a situation, decides it is the problem, and tries to fix it directly. According to the booklet that cannot work, because you cannot fix a situation. You fix whatever created it.
That is why a surprising discovery that leads to no action is still a situation. It does not close the search. It shows you where to keep digging.
Say an installer announces that he found the problem: too many customers come back for repairs. That is a situation. The cause was that he had no check at the end of the job.
A good month is a situation too
Look at the other half of the definition. A situation can also be very good. A month that beat expectations is a situation just like a month that fell short, and it has a cause worth knowing.
Suppose an owner's takings rose 40% in a single month, and she never looked into the reason. The next month went back to normal, and she had no idea what she had done right.
Compare an owner who checked her strongest month specifically and found it was the only month in which she phoned every existing client.
What the booklet has on this
The chapter this article draws on includes two exercises: purpose, and separating a situation from a cause. After them comes a self-check. From there the booklet moves on to the types of outpoint, the pieces of data that do not fit against the ideal scene.
While you hold only the picture of what happens, you will keep seeing the same business. Once you also have what is supposed to happen, you finally have something to subtract from.