Escaping the "Fixes That Fail" Trap: Stop Patching, Start Solving
Date Published
In psychology they say that if you want a different result you should start behaving differently as the results won’t change if actions and patterns remain the same.
Individuals change behaviors for new results, but organizations often don't. Teams repeat patterns, expecting change that never arrives. Why do we expect different outcomes when we consistently repeat the same actions across projects and teams?
Systems Thinking is here to help - to change a system's outcome, one must intervene at the level of behavior and feedback loops.
How to identify the signs that something is going on wrong?
Pause and reflect with curiosity. Whether in your personal life, your team or organization check if you hear something like:
"We just need to patch this for now - long-term solutions can wait."
"Let’s just get this out the door, and we’ll improve it later?"
"It worked at first, but now we’re back where we started."
"Fixing this made something else worse."
"We’re always in firefighting mode - we never have time to fix the real issue."
"We’ve tried so many different things, but nothing sticks."
"We don’t have time for root cause analysis, just make it work."
"We know this isn’t ideal, but it’s the best we can do under the circumstances."
All those statements can be signs for a pattern which is called Fixes that fail archetype.
| A fix, effective in the short term, has unforeseen long-term consequences which may require even more use of the same fix.
What to do when you face situations listed above?
There will be no immediate effect as tackling this issue requires time - you need to stop, reflect, take an action (most probably the action should differ from those taken before, often counterintuitive, even seeming silly at first sight). Sometimes, the best way to break a bad pattern is to do the opposite of what feels 'right' - like slowing down when everyone's rushing.
The reality is that often we are put under pressure of deadlines, commitments, fast decisions, and tend to get into a trap of quick solutions, quick fixes forgetting to think of possible later consequences and unintended side effects (note: side effects can be also positive - those we usually welcome and want to repeat).
Once I was on a team where we started to get bugs, many bugs and the team was doing their best to fix them. The client stopped complaining. For a moment. Until a new urgent bug appeared and everyone started to triage it: a high priority, put the best people to have it fixed quickly to make our customers happy again. And the team succeeded, short term.
As you might guess, the issues came back again and again. Luckily, we had wonderful meetings for inspection and adaptation to check our bug process, as people were distracted from their main activities, morale went down. There were some good ideas to track bugs resolution and bugs root cause in order to better understand what underlines those issues - put them into the ticket and once per some period of time start making the analysis as we might start observing some insights.
Guess what was the decision. I would be happy if the conversation turned into a new discussion, but the answer was very short and clear: we have no time for it. We need to deliver. Someone will have to check those fields periodically and analyze. We do not have people for that.
Looking back, it's clear we weren't just dealing with technical issues; we were dealing with our mental models – those unseen beliefs that kept us stuck. In Systems Thinking, mental models are the invisible rules we use to judge situations, often without realizing it. They trap us in old ways of thinking, forcing quick fixes because 'that's just how things are done,' even when we know it's not working. And that's the biggest challenge – teaching ourselves and others to see a different perspective.
Breaking free from the 'Fixes That Fail' trap requires a fundamental shift in mindset - the next practices could help a lot:
1. Create a process for analyzing failures and extracting lessons (root cause analysis should be a regular practice not for the sake of the practice, but to understand what stands behind repeatable unintended consequences)
2. Consider delays - feedback takes time, it is a rare case when you get an immediate feedback for your action, stay curious and observe what happens overtime (imagine a delay as planting a tree - you won't see its full shade for years. In our work, these delays mean our actions today might have consequences we don't see until much later, making it hard to connect the dots and fix the real problems).
3. Always reserve time for reflections - make your retrospective regular to check on the actions taken and to think if something could have been done differently - agree on the action, try it, check over time and decide how to proceed.
4. Before implementing a solution, imagine it has failed, identify potential causes and think how to address these issues before they reach you, your team/organization.
Have you seen these in your teams? What helped you break the cycle?
What’s one counterintuitive change you could try or recommend to try based on your learnings?
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