OK, I have personally faced this so many times I’m ashamed to admit it to even myself, let alone publicly:
You fix the thing that looks broken… and nothing happens. Dang it!
You rewrite procedures and retrain people, but that ugly boomerang keeps on giving.
You reorganize the process, but the errors don’t budge.
And then it hits you: “Wait… what if the thing I’m fixing isn’t the thing that’s broken?”
That’s the moment you enter the DMAIC’s Analyze phase – the part of the process improvement storyline where the real villain finally steps out from behind the curtain.
The trap we fall into
When identifying causes, most of us will point a finger at visible symptoms, noisy complaints, you know – the easy targets – the low-hanging fruit. It is a natural reaction.
But symptoms are liars. They’re loud, dramatic, and often misleading. They pull your attention downstream while the real issue hides quietly upstream.
And because a symptom feels true (you can see it, touch it, feel it) you treat it as the cause. You invest in it, you organize around it, you “fix” it. And nothing changes.
Why Analyze matters more than you think
The Analyze phase of the DMAIC methodology is where you stop accepting surface-level explanations and start asking the very uncomfortable question, which you don’t have an answer to:
“Why is this actually happening?”
Because until you know the WHY, every fix is temporary. Every improvement is a band-aid. Every investment is a gamble of waste.
When you analyze properly, you are:
• Separating actual data and signals from ubiquitous noise
• Distinguishing symptoms from causes
• Exposing the hidden friction points
• Discovering real bottlenecks and dead-ends in your process
You start asking “why”. Relentlessly. And you don’t stop asking until you run out of whys.
Have you ever had a kid ask “why?”
You give a perfectly reasonable answer… and they hit you with another “why?”
And another.
And another.
Until you’re questioning your life choices.
It’s uncomfortable, it’s painful, it’s unpredictable and it is precisely where the process improvement story stops being a reactive dumpster-fire water-bucket-hurtling event and turns into a strategic and highly calculated game.
A real-world example (that hits harder than you’d expect)
Imagine you have had an ongoing problem with your client scheduling again. A large portion of your appointments with clients are completely messed up and need to be redone – wrong times, wrong addresses, wrong jobs, wrong everything… Your team is working overtime, doing rework. Everyone in the office is frustrated (because their hard work was pointless and they have to do it all over again), customers are annoyed.
You don’t want this to happen again. Your instinct kicks in: “We need better training!”
So, you train, and coach, and document, and write SOPs, and train some more.
Still broken.
Now that you already know how to define a process and how to obtain and read data you think you are equipped with the right tools. So, you analyze the facts and, suddenly, your feeling of being on top of the world bursts and you collapse. Ego deflated. Why?
• 60% of rework was caused by unclear requirements
• 25% comes from missing information clients never gave you
• 10% is due to conflicting priorities (whatever that means???)
• Less than 5% are actual human errors in execution.
Your people weren’t the problem. Their training wasn’t the problem. The process wasn’t the problem. You were fixing the wrong thing. The data is staring you right in the face: garbage in, garbage out. Your entire team was fed wrong data, because the requirements were unclear. You now see as plain as day that you have a break in your process. A gaping hole.
What happens when you analyze correctly
How do you analyze correctly, you ask?
• You ask why until it’s uncomfortable. Keep asking till it’s ridiculous
• Go full Six Sigma Ninja with an Ishikawa diagram and flow tracers
• Correlate & compare – look for shapes and patterns, not one-offs
• Stop when the answers stop changing. You’ve found the cause
The fix starts here
Eventually, you will reach a point of diminishing returns where asking more “why” questions doesn’t bring results different from what you have already seen. Only then do you know you’ve exhausted all options and can be confident you have pinpointed the root cause.
• You’ve analyzed the process flow.
• You’ve analyzed the pain points where friction occurs.
• You’ve uncovered the actual failure points.
• You’ve identified the root cause of your failures. Congratulations!
This is the only time, THE ONLY TIME, where you can act and start thinking about a fix. And let’s be honest, that is one of the easiest things you as a process re-engineering warrior could hope for. Because by now, you know the process, you know the failure, you know the cause, and knowing what is wrong is half of a solution. The fix becomes blatantly obvious. But that’s a story for another day.
For now, you will be content and peaceful while knowing that:
There is never a bad time to stop solving the wrong problems. Why?Because wrong problems are someone else's problems...
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