When you work hard on a problem and nothing moves, you are probably working on the wrong problem. According to the source, the cause in cases like these is usually something that should be there and simply is not. If you search only for what was done wrong, you will never find it.
Twelve cases, one pattern
The source describes several occasions when it found analyses of a business situation that arrived at no cause anyone could act on. Some of them offered a false cause, the kind that would have upset things if somebody had put it to use.
In each case, the point that held the real clue was something omitted. In a dozen cases it was the same thing every time: people who were missing. The most extreme case reads: “One area to which orders were being issued had no one in it at all.” For a period of time, orders went out to that area and nobody checked that anyone was there to receive them.
Suppose an owner sends marketing material to a mailing list that was never built. Three months of content, and nobody to read it.
Or suppose an owner has a follow-up role written into the process and never appoints anybody to it. The role exists on paper and the follow-up never happens.
Look at what these two examples share with the source's cases. Somebody is missing: nobody to read, nobody to follow up, nobody to receive the orders. No report shows this, because a report describes what was done, and a person who is absent does nothing to report.
Nobody was lazy
Here is the line that turns the story over. According to the source, in none of these cases did anyone spot that a missing something had caused a whole activity to decay. People worked frantically to remedy the general situation, and none of them noticed the omissions that were the true cause.
Working frantically. That phrase tells you nobody was lazy. Everyone put in effort, and the effort went to the wrong thing.
The pattern repeats. When something stops working, people try harder, and the effort goes into repairing the general situation. What is missing stays in the corner, because nobody is looking for it. A thing done badly leaves a mark you can work on. A thing never done leaves none, so people end up working hard on the wrong problem while the right one stays invisible.
Suppose an office spends a whole quarter improving its response times. The real problem is that nobody there ever makes the first approach.
Now picture the same office after someone asks what is being left undone. The answer is one line long, and the fix takes an hour a week.
The sign of a wrong diagnosis
One sentence is worth catching in your own head: we worked hard on it and nothing changed. When you hear yourself say it, stop. According to the booklet, hard work that changes nothing points to a wrong diagnosis.
You do not need to know the real cause to use this sign. It is enough to notice that the effort moves nothing, because that already tells you something about the diagnosis.
The amount of effort is fine. Its direction is wrong, and adding more effort in the same direction only raises the bill without bringing you closer to the cause.
There is a danger here too. A false cause is more than a waste of time: the source says that putting one to use would have upset things. A wrong diagnosis can upset the very situation it was meant to fix.
Turn the question round
From all this the source draws a rule, and the booklet calls it the most practical tool it contains. When an analysis comes up empty, you can safely conclude that the cause is an omission, and look for “things that should be there and aren't.”
The natural reflex when something fails is to ask what was done wrong. In most such cases, says the booklet, that is the wrong search. If you searched and found nothing, searching harder in the same place gets you nowhere. Ask what was never done at all.
The reversed question moves your eyes from what exists to what is missing, and that is usually where the answer sits.
Suppose a garage owner spends a year trying to work out why revenue will not rise. When he turns the question round, the answer is that he has no periodic service offer, something that never existed in his business.
Or take a designer hunting for what is wrong with her design work. What was missing turns out to be one question at the start of the process.
And an owner who starts every diagnosis with the reversed question finds, within three months, four things that did not exist in his business.
The booklet gives this chapter two short exercises, called reverse and check. The practice section at the end also has one called the absence list.
Next time a problem stays stuck despite all the effort, ask what is missing before you add more effort in the same place.