I think part of what avoids panic is being able to credibly shift from discussing the defects and the problem to talking about how we’ll go above solving the problem.

Great question. Only time will tell. I’m sure many companies are chasing the shiny object by jamming AI into their tech product, or demanding their employee jam AI into their work.

Lean Coach
Mark: can we know the root cause of a problem by discussing it in a meeting room?

Coach: Short answer: rarely. The conference room is where root cause analysis goes to die.

### Why the room isn’t enough

When you discuss a problem in a meeting room, you’re working from memory, opinion, and secondhand accounts. People describe what they *think* happens, not what actually happens. Those are different things more often than anyone wants to admit.

Taiichi Ohno was blunt about this. **The answers are at the gemba — the actual place where work happens.** Not in a slide deck. Not in someone’s recollection. The famous story of Ohno drawing a circle on the floor and making a manager stand in it for hours was about teaching one thing: go see, and keep seeing until you actually understand.

### What the room produces instead

Meeting-room root cause analysis tends to generate:

– **Plausible-sounding causes** that match people’s existing assumptions
– **Person-blame** — “the operator wasn’t careful” — because that’s the easy story when you’re not watching the work
– **Solutions in search of a problem** — someone’s pet idea gets attached to the symptom

A 5 Whys done in a conference room often becomes 5 Guesses. You can chain together five confident answers and still be completely wrong because nobody checked any of them against reality.

### What the room is good for

The room isn’t useless. It’s where you:

– Frame the problem and agree on what you’re trying to understand
– Share what people observed at the gemba
– Compare data — ideally on a process behavior chart, so you know whether you’re chasing a signal or just noise
– Plan the next experiment

But the *understanding* has to come from going and seeing. The room is for making sense of what you found, not for inventing it.

### The bottom line

You can discuss a problem in a meeting room, but you can’t find its root cause there — the cause lives at the gemba, and the conference room only works once you’ve gone and observed the actual work.

— Lean Coach by Mark Graban (markgraban.com/coach)

Thanks for reading and commenting, Doug. If we don’t let employees experiment with “it’s the right thing to do” situations, I wouldn’t expect them to be excited about any improvement work that’s directed by leaders or ROI factors.