One of the participants in my Conclusion Trap class was grappling with a persistent problem at her company: their website regularly crashed after upgrades. She believed that one of the primary drivers of the problem was poor communication between two teams. The solution was obvious—schedule additional meetings between those two teams.
Along with spending more money on technology, adding meetings to everyone’s already overburdened schedule is an example of conclusion jumping at its finest.
Fortunately, before instituting a new set of meetings, she took the time to deeply understand the situation during our class.
What do companies typically do when there’s poor communication? Schedule more meetings. But that’s another example of jumping to solutions without really understanding the root causes of the issue. Meetings are simply a Band-Aid for a systemic, structural problem.
This is precisely what my student discovered when she dove more deeply into the situation. She saw that the root cause of the poor communication was not a lack of meetings. It was that the critical teams report up through different groups. Here’s her 5 Why analysis:
Would more meetings have helped? Sure. (Because, you know, that’s just what everyone wants. More meetings.) But that’s another administrative burden that would just slow the company down. Better to improve the ineffective organizational structure and eliminate the need for extra meetings. Which is what the company did, and now the website doesn’t crash.
As Peter Drucker wrote, meetings are by definition a concession to deficient organization. While they’re a necessary evil, they should be rare:
“But above all, meetings have to be the exception rather than the rule. An organization in which everybody meets all the time is an organization in which no one gets anything done. Too many meetings always bespeak poor structure of jobs and the wrong organizational components. . . if people in an organization find themselves in meetings a quarter of their time or more -- there is time-wasting malorganization.”
Jumping to conclusions is an unavoidable part of the human condition—even more so at work, where there’s so much time pressure. But by avoiding the conclusion trap, by spending time understanding the problem before you rush to action, you can find more effective, less expensive, and more durable solutions.