It's a culture problem. You need to fix the culture to fix the root causes of all of this. And listening to the CEO (who is the culture) doesn't seem they want to fix it.
When doing root cause analysis there is a pyramid with people problems at the top, then deeper technical problems, process problems, culture problems and value problems.
Most root cause analysis stops with people problems, or technical problems while all the root cause analysis I've done never showed that problems end there. Culture and value have often been the underlying causes.
That's an organization-wide culture change. Even a CEO can't easily make it happen. I understand the desire to find and fix the root cause, but OP definitely doesn't have that power.
The other side of this coin is it not good enough to just identify problems.
There is also the need for an organisation wide culture built on processes, procedures and channels that then enables the company to quickly and efficiently find solutions to these kind of problems.
When a company for a long time has being building a culture of ignoring problems, the effort required to rebuild that problem solving culture is massive.
It is not helped by the fact that the individuals holding the power at the different levels within the organisation tend to be the ones who oversaw the demise of that engineering culture in the first place.
If you ask why this happens and go as deep as you can, I think you'll find that the root of the problem is not per se management, but politics/government/regulations/legislation.
It would be amazing if there were a silver bullet like this that everyone could identify the root cause of companies' woes. And could be reset by flipping a switch.
But I think it's much deeper -- having worked at a couple big companies now, I realize (at least to my limited observations) that the path of a company is set by the deeply ingrained culture that has been established over many years by its founders, by its evolution, its successive leaders, and in fact, the competitive environment in which it operates. Things (good or bad) that last far beyond any one leader.
It manifests in the little incentives that people far below the CEO understand to do their jobs in a certain way, to pursue certain things and decide to drag their feet or ignore certain other things.
If you were hired at a company and worked there for years understanding that if you did <x>, you got <y>, it will be hard to change a whole workforce of that notion, especially when one individual gets beaten back in line if they stray. Even if others want to change just as much. Even if the CEO says to change. It takes years for that info to percolate. Sometimes it never does.
No, sometimes companies need to die in order to be reborn.
Well, it's a specific consequence of bad management. Identifying patterns like this is valuable, I think.
I agree that there's always someone responsible for this, even if it's the CEO who fails to empower subordinates to do this at their level.
It could be that many other problems boil down to parts of process not being owned by anyone. That is, that all management problems are ownership gaps in disguise. I'm not sure.
The root cause of the problem is believing that some technique can be successfully applied to all people in all departments in all companies at all times.
I'd say it's less "naive" than thinking you've got the correct diagnosis for a multi-billion multi-national dollar company off of a collective, oh, let's be generous and call it an hour of reading news articles about a company (time spent chewing the fat on HN and other fora don't much count), and therefore have the correct prescription for it as well.
I'd certainly say I wouldn't be surprised to get in there and discover that, yes, corporate culture is the biggest problem, but it must also be remembered that that could just be the availability heuristic at play [1]. It could also easily be a second-order effect of some more fundamental problem. Or it could end up hardly even rating in the top 3 problems. I don't know. Neither does anybody else here, really. Not because people here are particularly bad people or anything, it's just that quite likely nobody really knows; a culture tends to be blind to its own pathologies (or it would fix them; there's a selection effect in play) so there may be literally nobody currently on Earth who has a good grasp on the true problem, let alone a solution.
1. If there are no good arguments in the collective - there's no retrospective and it's primarily a management and psychological issue. No one is able to fully self-reflect and it breaks the existing delegation / escalation chains, respectively.
2. If there are no viable data sources, when it can be proven that there's a correlation with an actual business processes, - it's a management problem. People Can't establish viable metrics, once again, mostly due to 1.
This is something any company of any size and any budget can struggle with due to lack of XP and the usual collective XP-accumulation / knowledge sharing deficiency. You can't self-reflect onto something you haven't learned about, yet. And due to 1 this is a closed loop because lack of XP can't be escalated accordingly, most of the time it's also a Workplace Deviance factor.
3. Practically, it ends up in a bouquet of Workplace Deviance because no one in the end will be willing to take the blame and actual responsibility to fix anything.
Any Problem vs Solution type of culture will worsen things a lot i.e. "All the blame and no Compassion". Companies are usually forced to adopt some Teal stuff in the end, maybe for really no other good reason, but just to keep on growing.
The idea of hiring HR that can "work by the booK" and actually build up a personal profile of how anyone could fit into all this mess is impossible by definition - due to Employee Silence and broken retro no one will be willing to expose all the shit that is happening, in the first place... So, most of the time I see Kitchen Sink companies with volatile outcomes where there really no one who could even be able to listen to any arguments, in the first place.
Google's internal ML-driven productivity metrics became a meme already for all the reasons described above. You can't reason with Toxic and Inadequate people.
Also Asana claim that Social Loafing is a myth and everything else is a retro deficiency really wrong - retro can prevent and display certain glorious occasions, but it's not a root cause of any psychological effect by definition.
If there is a cult of the root cause, I have yet to meet it.
Here's what doing an exercise similar to 5 Why's gets you:
- An understanding of where issues come from. Whether your plan of action starts from the top, bottom, or middle, taking the time to step back and broaden your perspective before you jump in to fix a problem helps to make sure you're going after the right things for the right reasons.
- A culture of _not_ just picking the most expedient and facile solution every time issues come up, and going with that. In companies I've been in, the pressure is almost always on to find the dumbest, hackiest, absolutely fastest path out of trouble. Spend multiple years solving every problem that way, and you are in deep trouble! It takes institutional courage to push back against that, and having a practice in place to force you to stop and think now and again gives you an opportunity to summon that courage.
- A culture of ownership. This seems a little counterintuitive to me, since if you follow root causes deep enough you're liable to stumble onto people and process problems that are way out of your control and pay grade. Looking at root causes this way, you might think it's a process of passing the buck. However, by shining a light on such things, and finding people to address those things where they have no owner, you can push towards a better collective ownership of the real issues that face your company.
No good management idea is free from abuse, of course. You must exercise taste and judgment in deciding how deep to push with root causes, and what to do with the discoveries. I would think it's rather self-evident that 5 Why's doesn't mean you always ask exactly five questions in a strictly linear pattern. But for heaven's sake, make sure you ask more than one!
In 99% of cases, the problem is not with the people within a company, but with the motivational, management, and work systems which surround them. That is the point.
It is important to realize subtleties in how people operate, but it's more important to realize that most problems are attributable to the system and not the individuals.
Critically important, in fact. That's why it's the right way to look at the problem.
That's because they are actually struggling to admit deeper problems with the company culture and processes that they don't know how to solve, and so they're trying RTO to see if it fixes things.
The root cause of the problem is that workplace is inherently undemocratic. While we live in democratic societies, we work in feudal organizations. Unless we fix that, nothing will change.
I feel it's all rooted in bad leadership. Leaders who don't understand who's actually doing the work hire more folks like them and then there is a chain reaction. Unfortunate, but true, part of most big companies.
The deeper problem is companies change. You can't have the same organization, culture, environment at 10, 100, 1000. You really can't. Laws change. The CEO no longer has time to talk to everyone. Structure must be applied or company becomes unmanageable mess.
The lesson is you will loose waves of talent at certain transition points. This can't be helped (other than by not growing). Leaders need to be aware and plan for this.
So basically what you're saying is: it's everyone elses fault.
Seems like you need to improve communication in your org. and get more involved with the business side. The common denominator in all the problems you listed is you.
IMO there are a lot of good ideas how to solve such problems out there and that's not the blocker at all.
The real problem are the managers who only do lip service to better policies but never actually implement them. They prefer to distrust people by default and to play internal politics games so they never get fired. Thinking how the customer can succeed better and thus bring more revenue is practically one of the last points in their priority list. Not even sure that "let the creative people figure out solutions, you just give them the problems" even exists in their philosophy.
To me those are the real issues. And they are extremely hard to solve because those people are usually deeply entrenched in the organisation, they have the ear of the CEO and are being listened to during board meetings. And when those people sabotage the implementation of a policy that can improve the company's culture, well, there's basically almost nothing that can be done.
I might be too pessimistic but I've seen this scenario several times and have grown quite cynical about the ability of companies to change their DNA at all.
When doing root cause analysis there is a pyramid with people problems at the top, then deeper technical problems, process problems, culture problems and value problems.
Most root cause analysis stops with people problems, or technical problems while all the root cause analysis I've done never showed that problems end there. Culture and value have often been the underlying causes.
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