What do you do when things in your business go exactly opposite to plan? If your launch goes splat or the marketing campaign that was supposed to make the hockey-stick happen falls on deaf ears, you may find yourself wondering where exactly everything went wrong. Unfortunately, many businesses simply charge ahead to the next project rather than diagnosing what happened, which significantly increases their chances of the next big project going splat too.
Instead of charging forward and risking another disaster, many businesses would be better served by taking a couple of days to think about and diagnose what happened. Based on my own experiences with ho-hum launches and ugly rollouts, I’ve come up with a simple framework for disaster diagnosis. While I’ve used the 5 Whys before, I find that this framework digs deeper into the disaster, helps identify problems with both strategy and execution and produces more effective learnings and action items.
One caveat before we look at this framework — the beginning steps of this process will be massively frustrating at first for people who identify more as “fixers” than “understanders.” Fixers are people who get most of their professional satisfaction from jumping right in and coming up with solutions, versus understanders who get more satisfaction from understanding how every piece fits together. Because I am a fixer myself, it took me a very long time to see the value in suspending my problem-solving mode until we wallowed in the problem for a bit.
With that caveat out of the way, let’s look at the six-step process that will help you diagnose a disaster:
Step 1: What happened?
Without agreement on what exactly happened, your diagnosis won’t get anywhere. Even if your process starts with an email from your CEO that says, “Hey guys, the bobby sock marketing campaign isn’t getting any press. What happened?” — your stakeholders still need to agree that the problem was with the bobby sock campaign and that the fundamental issue is lack of press, rather than lack of adoption. In other words, you need the problem statement.
In this step, you need your stakeholders to agree on the problem statement, and define the gap in the metrics between what you expected to happen and what actually happened. Of course, you may discover that you never set clear objectives and metrics to start with, which you should remember for step four. However, for an example with metrics, your bobby sock problem statement and metrics might read something like, “We launched the bobby sock marketing campaign, and it fell short of our expectations. We expected a 10 percent month-over-month increase in site visits, a 10 percent lift in inbound leads and three press write-ups. We saw a two percent month-over-month decrease in site visits, zero lift in inbound leads and only one press write-up.”
Step 2: What did we do?
The second step is to figure out how you executed the project, and make sure everyone in the room understands the steps that lead up to it. Things can get a little touchy at this step. To try to avoid shouting matches, don’t talk about what process you were supposed to follow — document what actually happened. This isn’t a time to start pointing fingers or talk about why your original process broke.
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