How to Deep-Dive
Required Prerequisite Reading: How to Enforce the Quality Bar for your Team
The Real Place
As I’m sure you’ve noticed by now, all of the specific frameworks we teach flow from larger belief systems. Deep dives are no exception, and before diving into instructions, it’s worth taking a step back to consider why we do deep dives.
We deeply believe that ‘the answer is in the details’ - it’s why we do deep dives and it’s why we do Gemba Walks.
The highest leaders in the company are constantly diving deep - listening to front line calls, interviewing ICs in every corner of the company, and clicking their way through links to find details.
Elite managers are not only comfortable but also regularly deep dive into the details.
The first thing you need to realize before doing a deep dive is that you must do ‘Enforce the Quality Bar’ first. Deep dives are based on specific units that have failed the quality bar which is exactly what ‘Enforce Quality Bar’ produces.
If you have not yet done ‘Enforce Quality Bar’, go back and do it before proceeding.
There are 2 purposes for Deep Dives. The first is to identify the root cause and the second is to create an action plan to fix the root cause.
To identify the root cause of the quality bar failure, you should look at a specific unit that failed and ask ‘Why?’
It’s easy to identify the surface reason why the unit failed but this does not provide any value. The key to a good deep dive is getting all the way down to the root cause.
Once you have your first answer to ‘Why did this unit fail?’ ask ‘Why?’ Keep asking ‘Why?’ to your answers until you are at the root.
Most managers fail Deep Dives because they get stuck in abstract layers before getting to the root cause - they don’t go deep enough.
How do you know when you are deep enough? You know you are deep enough when you come up with the specific reason why that individual unit failed.
If you’re in the source code or the tactical weeds of your IC’s core function, you’re probably in the right spot.
When it comes to creating an action plan to fix the issue, there is not too much to say besides: apply your expertise to craft a solution that would have prevented this exact unit failure.
Instructions
1. Create a 3-hour calendar invite to timebox your Deep Dive. During this block, turn off Skype, shut down email, and only work on your Deep Dive. If you let yourself be distracted, you will decrease the quality of your Deep Dive
2. Identify at least 3 units which recently failed your quality bar. This will be a natural outcome after you’ve enforced the quality bar for your team.
3. Get into the right mindset. While you are doing a deep dive you want to:
Objective: every decision must be supported by concrete, proven facts, not hearsay or intuition;
Amplify negative feedback: we try to solve more than what was brought to our attention; we ask
“Is this a deeper problem than what is immediately visible?”
“Is this a general problem that I may find in other tickets as well?”
“Setting aside the root problem, did we also uncover related problems with these tickets?”
Customer-oriented: we look at each problem with the eyes of the customer; we ignore our metrics, our org chart, our convenience.
Seek counter-measures rather than simple solutions: a solution is something that fixes this one issue; a counter-measure is something that you deploy and that fixes all future issues of the same type.
The counter-measures that are identified can be formulated in terms of quality bars. Which concrete quality bar should have prevented this issue from occurring? Does that quality bar need to be
raised? (i.e. we should add items to the QB in order to prevent these defects)
or
enforced? (i.e. our current QB is good enough but it was not properly enforced)
4. For each unit, do a deep dive to identify the root cause of the quality bar failure. To help get to the right depth, you can use the ‘5 Whys’ approach.
Ask yourself why the unit failed the quality bar. When you have your answer, ask why. Repeat this process until you’ve asked at least 5 whys.
5. Once you’ve identified the true root cause for the quality bar failure, build an action plan to address the failure. Since this is based on individual units, the action plan should be very specific.
If you’re dying to read more, read Farnam Street’s take on Root Causes: link.
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