Episode 6 - The Quick Fix Trap: Stop Fixing the Same Problem Over and Over Again

Listen to Episode 6 - The Quick Fix Trap: Stop Fixing the Same Problem Over and Over Again

Here's a situation that will likely feel familiar to you. Something goes wrong at work, people get frustrated, scramble to fix it as fast as possible, and then things go back to normal.

Everyone moves on like this problem won’t rear its ugly head again anytime soon.

And then, three months later, the exact same thing happens and everyone acts shocked.

Didn't we just fix this?

Nope. You patched it, so here we are again.

So many of us get caught in this cycle, which is why today I want to talk about one of the most expensive habits in business, and really, in life: reaching for a quick fix instead of solving the actual problem.

I'm not here to make anyone feel bad about this, because there are actual psychological reasons that we do this, and once you understand those reasons, it gets a lot easier to change how you respond to the problems that pop up in our everyday lives.

I'm also going to touch on something specific to this podcast/blog’s whole reason for existing: Research on why (and how) women tend to get stuck in this quick fix cycle more than men do.

Why do we default to short-term fixes?

When something goes wrong at work or at home, there's almost always pressure to not only fix it, but to fix it fast.

There's a deadline, it's month-end, a customer is impatiently waiting, another department is on hold until you can get them an answer, along with any other number of things. The last thing anyone wants to do in that moment is be the person who says, “let's slow down and figure out what's actually causing this.” People hear “slow down” and they panic. So what we do is we patch the problem instead of solving it, because patching is faster, at least in the short term.

Usually the patch works for a little while and the immediate problem goes away. Because it went away, we treat the patch like a win and we move on, but this is where the psychology piece comes in. There's a concept in behavioral economics called present bias, and simply put, it means that we are wired to overvalue what happens right now and undervalue what happens later, even if we know that the later outcome matters more.

The relief of solving the immediate problem feels more real to our brains than the abstract benefit of preventing that same problem at an unspecified time down the road. How many times have we heard or said “we'll cross that bridge when we get to it?” Well, we say that because of present bias, the overvaluing of now versus later.

Research has also shown that the parts of the brain involved in processing immediate rewards, and the parts of the brain involved in long-term reasoning ,are essentially competing with one another during decision making. The immediate reward pathway is fast, it's emotionally driven, and it's really hard to ignore. The long-term reasoning pathway takes more cognitive effort and it feels less urgent. So under pressure and stress, the immediate pathway almost always wins that battle because it's louder and faster and easier, which makes us think it's better. So when you're in the middle of a problem and you reach for the quickest available fix, that's your brain doing what it was designed to do. The issue is that what our brains are wired to do and what it takes to make good long-term decisions are not the same thing.

Richard Fisher actually researched this during a fellowship at MIT, and he identified five psychological pressures that push us toward short-term thinking. He built them into an acronym for like ease of use and remembering, and he came up with the acronym SHORT: Salience, habits, overload, responsibility, and targets. I'm only going to cover the salience piece because that’s especially relevant here and it ties back into what I mentioned above: It means that immediately visible problems dominate our thinking far more than abstract future problems do, even when the future problem is objectively more important. If it's happening right now, and it's causing pain right now, it feels more real than a recurring problem that hasn't materialized yet.

When you add organizational pressures on top of that: the quarterly goals, the performance reviews that are generally tied to immediate results, leaders that get rewarded for visible quick wins, you end up with a system that's pretty much designed to reward short-term thinking despite its failings.

So, now that we understand why it happens, let's talk about what it costs.

Let's start with a pretty unfortunate statistic. In a survey of over 100 C-suite executives across 91 companies in 17 countries, 85% of those executives agreed that their organizations were bad at diagnosing problems. And 87% of those same executives agreed that this flaw of being bad at diagnosing problems was costing them, as an organization, significant money.

What this tells us is that, first, this is a global problem. And second, most senior leaders already know that their organizations aren't solving the right problems. They know it's costing them, and yet the cycle continues despite this knowledge.

So what does it actually cost? Because not all of the cost is financial, but I'll start with the financial piece.

Financially, it is estimated to cost organizations 3-4x more when they implement a reactive problem solving approach, and a reactive problem solving approach means that you respond after something breaks. You react to it.

Some of the things that factor into that 3-4x more cost are system downtimes, emergency labor or overtime, and lost productivity. Every time the same problem comes back, you're paying to fix it again, and again, and again. Over time, what you'll find is that this cost to fix and re-fix adds up in a way that a single upfront investment to solve the actual problem usually doesn't. You will genuinely spend more money patching a problem repeatedly than you would have spent just solving the root cause of the problem the first time.

Next, there's the opportunity cost. Every hour your team spends putting out a fire that they've already put out before is an hour they're not spending on something that actually moves your business forward. Organizations that get stuck in reactive firefighting mode are fundamentally limited in how strategic or innovative they can be because their best people are tied up managing problems that with a different approach (aka proactive problem solving), wouldn't need managing at all because they wouldn't exist.

Some might say I left the best for last here, but there is the human cost. There are few things more demoralizing than being asked to fix the same thing over and over again. When people feel like they're on a hamster wheel, burnout increases, engagement drops, and people start looking for somewhere else to work. Somewhere they hopefully won't be spending most of their time as a firefighter. It is exhausting to work in this type of environment. Peter Senge, a senior lecturer at MIT and one of the most influential people in the field of organizational learning, was very clear about his thoughts on this problem in his book, The Fifth Discipline. Senge said, “today's problems come from yesterday's solutions.” It's pretty clear what he's saying. What he means is that quick fixes don't just fail to solve your current problem, they often create new ones. If you take away the symptom, but the underlying cause is still there, the problem doesn't just disappear. And sometimes, the patch that you've rolled out creates new complications that you didn't have before. The easy way out of a problem usually leads right back in. You cannot ignore a problem and make it go away, no matter how much you might want to.

So we've covered why we default to quick fixes and what they cost, but what does the alternative actually look like?

What does it look like to actually solve a problem?

I think people assume that solving the root problem is way more difficult than it actually is, and that assumption is part of why it doesn't happen more often. People tend to picture some massive, expensive, months-long initiative, but it's often nowhere near that. It often doesn't look anything like that.

There is a methodology that directly addresses solving the root problem called Root Cause Analysis or RCA, and it's been used across industries for decades, so you might be familiar with it already. For those of you who aren't familiar with it, Root Cause Analysis is really straightforward…It means that instead of addressing what you can see on the surface or the symptom, you investigate what's actually driving the problem underneath.

I'll share an analogy that I think does a good job of illustrating the point. S, think about a weed in your garden. You can cut the visible growth above ground and it'll look fine for a while, but if you didn't pull the root, the weed keeps coming back no matter how many times you cut it. Root Cause Analysis is about pulling the root, that's why it's called Root Cause Analysis.

One of the most useful tools within RCA is called the “five whys” and it was originally developed at Toyota.

The concept is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. When a problem occurs, you ask “why” five times.

The answer to each “why” question forms the basis of the next “why”question.

By the time you get to the fourth or fifth “why”, you've usually moved on from talking about the symptom of the problem to uncovering the actual root cause of the problem. I'll give you a quick-ish example:

Situation: A client keeps receiving incorrect invoices.

Why #1. Why does the client keep receiving incorrect invoices?

Answer: Because the billing team is entering the wrong information.

Why#2: Why is the billing team entering the wrong information?

Answer: Because the intake form is confusing, so clients fill it out inconsistently.

Why #3: Why is the form confusing?

Answer: Because the form was designed years ago and hasn't been updated since the data entry process changed.

Why #4: Well, why hasn't the form been updated?

Answer: Because there's no standardized process for reviewing and updating forms when a process changes.

(Now we're getting somewhere.)

Why #5: Why isn't there a process to review and update forms?

Answer: Because nobody owns the responsibility of keeping forms in compliance with current processes.

BOOM!

So, the real problem here was never the incorrect invoices. The problem was the absence of process ownership and documentation standards. You fix that and the invoice problem goes away, probably along with a few other problems you didn't even know were connected to that same root cause.

This is also where systems thinking comes in as a broader framework, and Peter Senge describes systems thinking as the practice of seeing wholes instead of parts and understanding how different pieces of a system interact with each other instead of just looking at each problem in isolation. Leaders who practice systems thinking are much better equipped to see not just what went wrong, but why it went wrong within the bigger picture of how the organization operates. That why (why it went wrong) matters because a lot of the time what looks like a people problem on the surface, like a billing team entering incorrect information, is actually a process problem underneath, like no standardized way to ensure that documentation is consistent with current process.

At this point, I've given you a lot of information, and you might be thinking, hey, this is great information (at least I hope you're thinking that), but how do I put systems thinking into practice and get to the root cause? Like this:

First: When something goes wrong, your first question shouldn't be, “how do we fix this right now?” It should be, “have we seen this before?” And if the answer is yes, that is a sign that the fix you applied last time didn't actually solve anything. So, before you apply the same fix again, you owe it to yourself (and your team) to figure out why it didn't solve the problem last time.

Second: Use the “five whys” before you decide on even a potential solution. The “five whys” process takes maybe 10 minutes to run through, so there's no good excuse to skip over it. You can do it yourself, but it's more effective if you bring in the people closest to the problem because often they already know the root cause of the problem. They just haven't been asked about it. Your job within the “five whys” is to get curious. I mention getting curious in so many episodes, but it's so important to so many things, so I'm going to keep ringing the curiosity bell until people start listening. Implementing the “five whys” will uncover root causes of problems far more consistently than jumping straight into a solution that was formed solely around a visible symptom and not the underlying issue.

Third: Document your findings and what you did about them. One of the most frustrating patterns in reactive organizations is that the same problem often gets solved by different people at different times with zero shared learning among the parties. Someone fixes a problem in Q1, then that person leaves or changes roles and they didn't document anything. That same problem shows up in Q3 in a different department, and someone else fixes it without knowing it's already been fixed once. Documentation and knowledge sharing aren't bureaucratic, nice-to-haves. They're what leads to what's known as institutional memory. That's just institutional knowledge of how things work, how to repair a problem, fix an issue, or how to do things in general. Without institutional memory, without documentation and knowledge sharing, you will start from zero every time you go to fix a problem that's already been solved because you didn't know it had already been solved.

Fourth: Leave time for proactive problem solving, not just reactive. This one is a leadership issue as much as anything else mentioned in this episode so far. If every meeting or initiative in an organization is driven by whatever's on fire at that moment, there is no time, nor space, for the kind of thinking that prevents the fires in the first place. The leaders who operate most effectively will deliberately and consciously leave time in their schedule to look ahead, to consider what could go wrong, and uncover any patterns that they're seeing. These types of leaders have internalized the idea that an upfront investment in problem solving costs a fraction of what it costs to solve the same problem after it blows up.

Now, what's the gender angle when it comes to quick fixes vs root problem solving?

First, I'll say this: Research does not show that women are worse when it comes to root cause thinking, nor are women naturally wired to prefer quick fixes. What the research does show is that women are more likely to get stuck doing the fixing, whether they choose to or not. Economists Linda Babcock, Maria Recalled, Lisa Vesterland, and Lori Weingart studied what they called “non-promotable tasks.” Non-promotable tasks are the necessary but invisible work that keeps things running, but it doesn't actually help the person doing it advance in their role. Think about things like onboarding, note-taking, smoothing over a conflict, or patching an issue. The Economists’ research found that, while women do volunteer for these tasks significantly more often than men, managers (regardless of their own gender), are also more likely to ask women to take them on in the first place. So, even if they don't volunteer, their manager is more likely to ask the women to take on these invisible tasks.

In mixed gender groups, meaning teams made up of both men and women, women volunteered for these tasks 48% more often than men. 48% more often than men!! Why? Well, it's debatable. Men don't really volunteer for them, and so my opinion is that since men don't volunteer, a woman will put up her hand and say, “Fine, I guess I'll do it.” Or maybe women think that they can do a better job because they just think, “well, I've done this before, I can do it again. I know what I'm doing.” These are my assumptions…There isn’t any actual data as to WHY women volunteer more often.

Ultimately, though, here's why this matters when it comes to everything covered in this post so far: A lot of quick fix firefighting work, functionally, is a non-promotable task. It's necessary, it's often invisible, like the economists mentioned, but it rarely gets you the credit you deserve, or a seat at the strategic table later to help plan how to move forward from the issue that you just solved.

If women are disproportionately the ones being asked to patch the recurring problem, they're also disproportionately the ones losing the time and bandwidth to do the kind of root cause, systems-level thinking that actually gets noticed and rewarded. This loss of time and bandwidth compounds the exact same way as the financial cost of a quick fix: a little bit at a time, over and over again, until it becomes a career-sized problem. The kind of problem that men experience on a much less frequent basis because, not only do they not volunteer to take on these tasks, but they're not asked to take them on either.

There's another piece of research worth mentioning here, too, and it's a 2024 study out of the University of Padua in Italy. This study found that fear seemed to push women toward choosing immediate rewards over larger, delayed ones. So, fear pushes women toward a quick fix vs a root cause solution, while men's choices were significantly less affected by fear. The study did note that this finding needs more research before we draw sweeping conclusions, but it's still an interesting data point. If quick fix decisions often get made under some degree of stress or urgency, and fear amplifies the pull toward the immediate option more for women than men, that's just one more reason to build in time for a deliberate pause before reaching for the fastest fix, especially when the pressure is on. So, if you're a woman in a leadership role, take notice of who's getting asked to patch whatever the recurring problem is on your team, and take notice if it's you.

And, if you're leading a team of any gender mix, notice who you're asking. Do you ask the men just as often as the women?

The “five whys” and the root cause habits we just walked through work exactly the same, regardless of whether a man or a woman is performing the task, but if the same person keeps getting handed the fire extinguisher, they never get the time to ask why the fire keeps starting.

Before I wrap up, I want to reiterate that the pull toward a short-term fix is fundamentally a reflection of how we're wired and the organizational systems in which we operate. Quarterly targets reward short-term results. Performance reviews evaluate the last 6 or 12 months. Promotions often go to the person who visibly puts out the fire, not the person who prevented it from starting in the first place. If you're a leader, you have a real ability to change some of that. You can reward people for identifying root causes, not just for patching the symptoms. You can build a culture where it is normal to ask “why” before you ask “how.”

I hope you found this content useful. I'm Lauren. This is Glass Ceiling Smashed. Go grab your hammer and let's break something together.

You can find the sources used to write this episode/article in the show notes for this episode linked at the beginning of this post.