Diagnose Problems to Get at Their Root Causes When you encounter problems, your objective is to specifically identify the root causes of those problems—the specific people or designs that caused them—and to see if these people or designs have a pattern of causing problems. What are the most common reasons for failing to diagnose well? The most common mistake I see people make is dealing with their problems as one-offs rather than using them to diagnose how their machine is working so that they can improve it. They move on to fix problems without getting at their root causes, which is a recipe for continued failure. A thorough and accurate diagnosis, while more time-consuming, will pay huge dividends in the future. The second most common mistake people make is to depersonalize the diagnosis. Not connecting problems to the people who failed and not examining what it is about them that caused the failure will not lead to improvements of the individuals or the machines. The third biggest reason for failure is to not connect what one is learning in one diagnosis to what was learned in prior ones. It is important to determine whether the root cause of a particular problem (“Harry was careless”) is part of a larger pattern (“Harry is often careless”) or not (“It’s unlike Harry to be careless”). In the case of our client service analytics team, I knew that unless we got to the root cause of the problems, standards would continue to decline. Bridgewater’s other leaders agreed. So I led a series of diagnostic sessions with the team, getting everyone at every level into the room to probe and find out what had gone wrong. I started with my mental map of how things should’ve gone—based on the machine I’d built—and asked the new managers to describe what had actually happened. Bad outcomes don’t just happen; they occur because specific people make, or fail to make, specific decisions. A good diagnosis always gets to the level of determining what it is about those people that led
