The Root of the Problem

Last weekend was quite bizarre.

I live in Ontario, Canada, about an hour west of Toronto, in the wonderful city of Waterloo. If you haven’t heard of it yet, you should read about it. Our region is known as Canada’s Technology Triangle, aka the Silicon Valley of Canada. We have loads of technology companies and start-ups. There are hundreds of job openings for tech people. Seriously, what are you waiting for?

In Waterloo at this time of year we usually have several inches of snow and an average temperature of about 0 degrees Celcius. Not this year.

On November 22 in Waterloo it was 10 degrees Celcius. The sun was shining, and the air was warm. Kids were outside playing ball hockey in the street in their t-shirts, while parents were outside putting up holiday decorations.

Really!

Up and down the street people were taking advantage of the beautiful weather to put up their decorations. So, while it was earlier than we typically put ours up, we followed suit. We weren’t going to pass up the chance to put them up when it wasn’t snowing and -10 C (cause that’s when we usually do it). For all we knew, it would be -10 C the next day and we would have a foot of snow. Our weather is quite unpredictable sometimes.

While we were outside, I noticed that we had weeds in our garden to be pulled. Again. With a sigh, I resigned myself to finally getting the rest of them out, or from the front and side gardens at the least. I had hoped we had finished pulling them a couple months ago, but the darn things kept popping up.

So, on a balmy November 22, we put up holiday lights and decorations, AND weeded the gardens. Quite unusual.

Last fall we decided to get our property landscaped. Prior to the landscaping, we had what I liked to refer to as a ‘weed farm’. No matter what we did, all we had was weeds. Oh, and a swamp in the backyard, thanks to the builder putting our backyard right over top of a natural pond. Yuck.

So, we had the friendly landscapers come in and overhaul our entire property. It was worth it. We now have a usable backyard, no grass to cut in front of our house, and some nice natural stones down the side of the house into our backyard. The cherry on top was that we were assured they took care of things so all those pesky weeds would not come back.

The following summer we found out how wrong they were.

We spent the better part of our summer pulling weeds on the very few sunny days we had this year. It was one of the rainiest and cloudiest summers we’ve had in memory – which of course the weeds flourished in. While pulling those suckers out, we did our best to pull them out completely.

The thing about weeds is that if you don’t get every last piece of them, they will grow back. So the tiniest little piece of root somehow manages to grow itself into a big annoying weed that invades your gardens and lawn.

Weeds are strong. The roots cleverly manipulate themselves deep into the soil, around the roots of plants you want to keep, and sometimes traverse several feet underground. While pulling a weed out, often just the top green portion will come out. If you’re lucky you might get a couple inches of root too. It’s very difficult to get the entire root, and when you don’t, you likely don’t have the patience to try and get it.

Then it grows back so you can try and pick it out again in a couple of weeks. It’s a vicious cycle.

While I was pulling weeds last weekend, I wondered how many times I had tried to pick those very ones out in their entirety and had failed. How many times had I tried to remove the roots, and ended up only removing the visible parts of the intruder? How often did I lose patience or give up just because removing the entire root was really challenging? And now I was paying the price, sinking more time and frustration into trying to fix the problem.

Bemused, I thought to myself…

In life, how often do we take time to really understand problems that we encounter? At work, how often do we exhibit the patience necessary to navigate an issue to determine the root of the problem? It is so easy to get caught up in trying to fix the visible symptoms to a problem, because working with the actual problem is too challenging.

I see and experience this often.

When it comes to software bugs, some people tend to put in a quick-fix to address them, without ever understanding the root cause. That rarely helps. The problem does come back, though perhaps with different symptoms. In the end, fixing the issue costs many times more than what it would have if the time had been taken to understand and fix it properly the first time.

A lot of other problems occur in organizations too, such as unhappy customers, process adherence issues, unhappy employees, and poor relationships. Many of these are symptoms of a people problem, but rarely is the necessary time invested to learn what that problem really is. Sadly, even when it is understood, the actual problem is often not addressed.

What do you do when you encounter problems?

• Do you take the time to understand the root cause?
• Do you address symptoms, or the root cause(s) of a problem?
• Do you know if you are working to fix all of the root problems? Remember sometimes the root gets tangled up in other matter and can be tricky to extract.
• Do you follow the root along to the very tip? Roots can travel a fair distance from the symptom, so may not even seem to be related when it is.
• Do you put in the time and care needed to help remove a problem, or do you try to quickly eradicate it? The quick approach may mean that the root cause is still lurking, and will need to be revisited again in the future.

I resolved to do better as I continued my weeding.

I went a little slower as I worked on each weed, carefully digging around them to loosen them up and pull the entire root out with it. I treated them as if they were a plant that I loved and wanted to transplant. That actually worked! Whole root systems were coming out with the visible leafy greens.

A couple of hours later, I was done the front and side yards and called it a day. I admit that I wasn’t able to succeed with every one I faced down, but I did collect a yard waste bag full of weeds that would never see the light of day again. And for a good percentage of them, I did address the root of the problem.

The Root of the Problem5.051