Grasp the nettle...

Find the cause of the problem before spending all your time handling it again and again. In this 2011 video, I use an experience with ants in the office to introduce a point about running a business.

Find the cause of the problem behind the symptoms

There were ants in an office keyboard. I thought food and crumbs might explain it. But the response was to have the ants sprayed.

It made me ask why we didn’t first investigate what attracted them to that particular place. I use the experience to illustrate how you can keep solving the visible problem without changing what creates it.

The same support questions kept coming

I talk about an employee at Jubii who had a huge number of support emails. She was busy answering, but many questions were about the same few things.

We went through them and found recurring questions about usernames and passwords, among other things. Then she got time to categorise the enquiries and take the most important problems to the developers.

After the fixes, we experienced fewer emails of that kind. The figures in the video are my retelling of events, not a documented measurement presented with the post.

Use repetition as a signal

If lots of people call or write about the same thing, something in the product, website or communication may need changing.

You can keep answering individually. But perhaps it’s more valuable to find the pattern and make things easier for the next customer.

That was my business point: Look at where problems are created, and give yourself time to work on the cause. The video’s other comparisons are part of my rallying cry back then.

The ants had found a particular keyboard

A colleague at the office wondered why there were ants in her computer, down in the keyboard. I’d also seen them strolling around a little on my desk, but they were mainly over at hers.

So you could try thinking: Why that particular keyboard? What do ants like? Sugar and food. If you eat lunch over the keyboard, might something have fallen in? I thought that was a really good guess.

I imagined you could act on that and clean the keyboard, or whatever you were using as a plate. But instead, a pest controller was called to spray against the ants.

Afterwards, to me, the little office of around 12 square metres smelled like a barrel of poison mixed with nasty perfume. I decided to finish early. I wasn’t bloody keen on sitting there. In the video, I turn it into a rather sharp generalisation about Americans: The ants were removed without first tackling what attracted them.

My blunt comparison with pills

From there, I jump into criticism of what I saw as Americans’ heavy use of pills. I talked about people I knew who, in my view, took 15–20 pills a day, and a programme where a man took 160. Those were my examples in the recording, not a study of medication use.

My image was of taking something for an ailment, getting a side effect and then taking something else to suppress it. It could become a chain where you constantly handled something new without solving the original problem.

It reminded me of what was called a bodybuilder cocktail in the bodybuilding days of my youth. I described it as morphine for pain, amphetamine for drowsiness and anabolic steroids for bigger muscles. That was my critical retelling of something I’d heard about in that environment.

I also used an exaggerated example of a cat allergy: First something for the allergy, then something for red bumps, then something for headaches and tiredness, and finally trouble sleeping. My crude joke about the cat was meant to underline that I thought the starting point was being overlooked.

Those are my very blunt comparisons from 2011. They don’t explain how any particular treatment works and aren’t an invitation to stop medication. What I was getting at was a way of thinking about recurring problems in a business.

The Jubii support employee drowning in emails

In the happy Jubii days, an employee was under pressure from how much she had to do. She had to answer around 150 support emails a day, as I remember it in the video. Everything was wrong and strange, and she was busy replying.

We decided to look at the emails before she completely collapsed. About 30 were about people who couldn’t remember their password. Around 20 came from people who couldn’t remember their username. As we continued through the pile, it became clear many questions concerned the same few things.

I referred to the old 80/20 rule: As I recall, roughly 80 percent of enquiries concerned four or five recurring problems. The figures are my retelling of events, not documented measurements in the post.

Three days to work on the cause

I told her to forget ongoing support for three days and categorise the enquiries instead. Then we could take a top five of the problems to the developers and ask them to fix them.

It perhaps took her a day to make the list and communicate it to the programmers. They then spent perhaps two or three days on the fixes. Afterwards, we found she was down to around 20 emails a day.

That was what I wanted to get at. You can keep answering the same question, or take a short break from firefighting and work out why people keep writing in the first place. Also read Min vej som leder about my experiences of leading people and developing a business.

Repetition tells you where things break down

If customers call or write about the same things, something is probably breaking down somewhere. Perhaps something on the website needs changing. Perhaps the communication is unclear. Instead of only working faster at replying, you can try making it easier to move forward without asking.

I also drew a parallel with a colleague who keeps irritating you. You could approach the person and sit down to work out what the problem really is, instead of swallowing it and taking the irritation home. I used some rather crude images of throwing pens and taking frustration out on the dog. My point was to talk about the cause.

Grasp the nettle. Drop the sticking plasters and temporary solutions when you can do something about the problem itself. I thought constantly handling the symptoms became too expensive and time-consuming. Look through your business and ask how the problems are created.

The programme, prices and terms below are the original announcement from 2011.

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