Finding the cause of a problem in your business has an order, and most people go through it backwards. They start by investigating what is happening, or they jump straight to a bright idea. According to the source, the start is a definition of what should be produced and how it should look, and the bright idea comes close to the end.
In this booklet, a cause is the thing that brings the numbers back once you correct it. Reaching it takes several steps in a set order, and each time you skip one, something later breaks.
The search has an order
The source breaks the whole process into a closed list of eight steps. The booklet lays them out in a table, and two things stand out at once.
The first is that the first two steps involve no investigation at all. They are definition: what the activity should be producing, and its ideal scene, the picture of how it should look. Only then do you start looking at what actually happens.
The second is that the bright idea for handling the problem arrives late, after all the work has been done. For most people it arrives first.
Say an owner starts straight away by looking into what is going on. A month later he has a lot of information and zero conclusions. Then he writes one sentence about what that area should be producing, and the same information turns into four outpoints in a day. An outpoint is a piece of data that does not fit.
Or an owner jumps to a bright idea and builds a promotion. It brings enquiries, and none of them closes, because the steps that should have come before the idea were never done.
The step that almost always gets skipped
In practice, the step that almost always gets skipped is the ideal scene: spelling out what should happen.
That is understandable. The existing scene is interesting and sits right there, so you can begin investigating at once. The ideal scene feels like wasted effort, because what should happen seems obvious. But if it is not written down, there is nothing to subtract from, and you cannot follow outpoints back from the ideal to the existing scene when only one of them exists.
The step does not ask for much. The source treats the ideal scene as a plain statement of an activity's purpose, so it is enough to know what the area exists for.
It also explains the most common symptom of all: you dig, you collect plenty, and you cannot tell which part matters.
Say an owner has 30 pages of notes after a month of checking. With no ideal scene, every page weighs the same.
Another owner wrote one line about how it should look: each enquiry gets a reply inside 24 hours. Against that line, the same notes shrank to three that mattered.
Or an installer defined when a job counts as finished: installed, tested, site clean and customer signed off. With four conditions, every outpoint became visible.
Handled, or stays handled
The last step has an ending that is easy to read past. The source says to handle it, or recommend handling, so that it stays handled.
The difference between handled and staying handled is the difference between a fix and a conversation. A correction that nobody checks later is an assumption, and it is still not a fact. That brings back the test from the booklet's second chapter: the numbers recovered, or they did not. If they recovered after the fix, that was the cause. If they did not, the orders given on the basis of it have to be cancelled too.
Say an owner introduced a follow-up call after every job. When he checked two months later, it was happening in 30% of cases. He added it as a line on the completion form, the rate rose to 90%, and only then was it handled.
Or an owner agreed a change in a team meeting and recorded it nowhere. A month on, nobody recalled that a decision had been made.
When you know when it started
The source also has a shorter version, for when a number moves and you know exactly when. The action is to observe the decline, locate the exact change that had been made, and revert that change.
It is fast, and it has one condition: you know when it started. If a number fell in a particular week, ask what changed that week. The bigger question of what is wrong with the business can wait.
According to the booklet, behind a drop like that there is usually one small change made at the same time, which everyone has already forgotten.
Say an owner's enquiries dropped sharply from the start of March. That same week, a form had been taken off the website because it did not look good.
Or a clinic owner saw cancellations jump from a specific month. That month the wording of the reminder had been changed.
Or an installer's complaints began in a particular quarter. That was exactly when he stopped calling customers the day after installation.
What the booklet has on this
The booklet has all eight steps in full, in the source's own words, along with the short version. The chapter includes two exercises: order, and the change. After the self-check, the booklet moves on to the price of a wrong cause and to one complete case from beginning to end.
The bright idea will get its turn. According to the source, its place is after you have written down what should happen, and after the outpoints have led you to the cause.