Have you felt a pain in your company, but when you looked, you couldn't find a significant cause? Medicine has a concept called "referred pain" that might offer an insight.
Two weeks ago I had a laparoscopic cholecystectomy. For those like me who don't know what that is, it's a gall bladder removal. It turns out a Gall Bladder has similarities to an Appendix. You can live without one just fine. Not going for sympathy here; the staff at the hospital were absolutely great in all respects. Two weeks later my wife and I just went for a 7-mile hike, with me feeling better than I have in years. If you are ever in the market for such a procedure and live anywhere near Coventry in the UK, I can highly recommend the team that performed it on me. Feeling such an improvement got me thinking… I've had a dodgy back for a long time now. Sometimes okay, but sometimes very not. A few times, for up to a month. I couldn't do anything significantly physical, sometimes I could hardly move and certainly couldn't get comfortable. Exercises, yoga, pilates, diet changes, going alcohol-free for a year, nothing seemed to improve it. This surgery seems to have sorted it out to a great extent. In discussing this with my surgeon, he mentioned something called "referred pain". I'm not qualified to try to explain it, but here's one definition I found: "Referred pain is a fascinating phenomenon where pain is felt in one part of the body due to the convergence of nerve pathways, even when the source of pain is elsewhere. It highlights the complexity of our nervous system's pain processing." Hrm…'fascinating'. Not the word I'd have used, actually. At any rate, I feel this has applicability in our day jobs as well. How often have you had a problem and started looking for the cause? When you found one, it didn't feel like the prime mover cause; it felt like a symptom. You keep looking, and then you find a cause for that one. Hopefully, you can finally find the root cause of the issue and create a plan to stop it from reoccurring in the future. The idea is not to treat the symptom but rather the cause. Many people have heard of "The Five Whys" (or maybe the 5Ys). According to MindTools: Sakichi Toyoda, the Japanese industrialist, inventor, and founder of Toyota Industries, developed the 5 Whys technique in the 1930s. It became popular in the 1970s, and Toyota still uses it to solve problems today. Toyota has a "go and see" philosophy. I expect most teams would benefit from this sort of "go and see" thinking. I feel it applies to all teams such as Finance, HR, Customer Support, and any other department in the organisation. In other words, don't react to symptoms; go and see what's really causing the problems and fix *those*.
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February 2024
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