The Musée d’Orsay is my favorite museum in Paris. I loved strolling through there last Fall when I was scouting a venue for my Coaches Retreat in France coming up in October 2023. (More details on that below.)
Even with all of the beautiful artwork in the museum housed in an elegant former train station with the huge beaux-arts windows and grand clock, it was a green bucket on the smooth tile floor that has stuck with me.
You see, it had been raining in Paris and the green bucket was collecting rain leaking from the ceiling. Yes, even the most pretty, ornate, and iconic pieces of architecture can leak.
The reason why this has stuck with me is that the bucket is useful because it solves the problem of a wet floor. Yet the actual source of the problem is the leaky roof.
The bucket provides a temporary solution to the problem, but solving the source of the problem, fixing the roof, is what will solve the problem for good.
The wet floor and bucket are the symptoms.
The leaky roof is the source.
I was working with the leadership team of a local successful fast-food chain in my area.
A problem that kept coming up was how their current protocol of emailing each other internally was inefficient. Sometimes there were cc’s in the email, sometimes not. Sometimes there were bcc’s too.
Oftentimes it seemed like there was a lot of unnecessary back and forth in their emails. Nobody knew who knew what.
After this was spoken in the room, the team quickly wanted to create a new system of emailing each other that would be more efficient.
However, I knew that the email problem was not really the problem. It was just a symptom of the source of what was going on.
I introduced the distinction between symptom and the source of the problem to see how it resonated with them.
After a few beats of silent reflection, it came out that the real problem aka the source of the problem, was that there was a lack of trust on the team.
The emails were like the bucket in the museum.
The lack of trust was like the leaky roof.
Fix the symptom, and the problem will return when it rains.
Fix the source, and the problem goes away forever (well at least for a longer term).
The inefficiency and lack of consistency of who was included in the emails was due to fear of making sure that nothing in email could be used against you later.
After this was brought to the surface, we were able to dig deeper and work through what was really going on in the team.
Where in your life, team and organization are you continually addressing only the symptoms of the problem rather than diving into the source?
Fixing the symptom is often more attractive because it seems faster and easier, and conversations probably aren’t as difficult.
However, this quick-fix is merely a temporary solution to a much bigger source of a problem that may worsen if not addressed.
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