Clarify the gaps between where you are and where you want to be in the future. 

Involving all team members in this process creates great buy-in, easing your ability to drive change. 

If you’ve been following the steps in my last three blog posts you now have your team agreeing on:

• What you all are doing,

• The current state, and

• The target state. 

Now that you have a good understanding of where your team is currently and clarity about the vision for the future, the next step is to identify the key gaps between your current and future state, and dig deep into the root causes of those gaps. 

You want to start by agreeing on the most important gaps. These are generally the most important metrics that determine success for the team. They generally relate to quality, safety, customer experience, productivity, and team member engagement. 

Choose a maximum of the three most important metrics, and then follow this process for each of them separately:

1. Brainstorm all the possible root causes for each gap. This step is meant to be highly creative. Everyone participates, working on their own to write down, on post-it notes or a virtual equivalent, each idea and posting all ideas to a shared board. 

2. Affinitize: The team collectively affinitizes all the ideas into 3-6 categories, giving you a good idea of what is more important. You will find a lot of duplication of ideas, which is fine and lets you know that those potential root causes deserve priority. 

3. Apply the Pareto Principle - the concept that 80% of the issues come from 20% of the gaps, to pick a few gaps that the team will analyze in depth. 

4. Ask “Why?” five times - Dig deep into the true root cause - this involves asking “Why?” five times for each of the few gaps you are focusing on. For example, if you are often running out of a key supply, it might be because the supplier isn’t ready for your next order. Then ask why the supplier isn’t ready, and continue on until you get to the real root cause. It may take 2-3 questions or 5-6 questions to get to that root cause. 

Once you have identified 3-6 key root causes, you are ready for your team to do a great job on the next step, a solutions session. 

In the next post, we’ll talk about how to lead a solutions session. 

See you in there . . . 

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