Why do things rarely work the first time? Learn how inefficient problems arise and what leaders can do to turn them into efficient ones.

Why can’t you get it right on the first attempt?

Why does it take so long to get this fixed?

I’m sure you have been confronted with such questions, irrespective of the role and industry you’re active in. Sometimes, I hear these questions from our customers, and sometimes I hear them from my team.

It’s one of leadership’s primary tasks to remove friction and frustration. Frictions and frustrations are inefficient, and you don’t make money when you waste your time on inefficiencies.

And there we have it. Inefficient. That’s the root cause why stuff can’t be done quickly, or things don’t work on the first attempt. Inefficiencies cannot just be found in processes, but also in problems.

Let’s look at efficient and inefficient problems, and what you can do to get out of the trap.

Efficient Problems

An efficient problem is a problem that can be solved without any ambiguity.

For simple problems, this is easy: If your kids spill their milk glasses onto the floor, mop up the floor. If you see somebody with an open wound, apply a bandage. If a user can’t access a certain functionality in your software, assign the correct permissions.

In most organizations, there aren’t just simple problems, but also complicated problems: All the tasks that need to be executed when a new employee joins the company. All the tasks that need to be completed to close the annual accounts. Such problems can still be solved efficiently with proper processes, checklists, and work instructions. However, solutions for complicated problems must be documented completely free of ambiguity.

Inefficient Problems

As soon as there is ambiguity in a problem, it becomes an inefficient problem. Not all your team members have the same understanding of what it means to onboard a new colleague. Not all your customers expect a new feature in your software to work the same way. Office politics get in the way of a permanent improvement of the situation.

Inefficient problems frustrate everybody. They suck out energy, time and passion from most people — except for those few strange people who enjoy nurturing problems for their personal or political gain. 

Very often, inefficient problems take 80% of your energy and time, and they solve only 20% of the overall pain.

Ways Out of The Trap

How can we get out of the trap? Start with yourself, and with your own organization.

If you solve all the efficient problems first, you will already have 80% of the overall problem pain solved. So start with solving the efficient problems before turning to the inefficient problems.

When you start touching the inefficient problems, try to make them efficient. It’s an old saying that only simple plans work in reality. A solution to a problem is simple enough only when you can explain it in three sentences to a five-year-old kid. Now think of your own organization. How many overly complicated processes are there in your organization? Try to simplify processes wherever possible, and you will see that some inefficient problems suddenly turn into efficient problems.

The same is true for software. At Yonder, a B2B SaaS company I co-founded, we started to simplify features to remove ambiguity: There is nothing worse than a bug report straight after release of a new feature, because some customers expected the feature to work differently than you designed it. If you can’t simplify your features, make them user-configurable so that each user can control the behavior for themselves.

So much for the easy part. The nastier root cause of inefficient problems is toxic people who nurture problems. There is no way around getting rid of toxic people if you want to solve all inefficient problems, irrespective of whether those toxic people are your team members or your customers.