Amtrak asked design firms to submit proposals for redesigning the interiors of the trains to attract more riders. IDEO’s response was to say “no.” That is typical of design companies, by the way. IDEO was practicing what designers call “design thinking,” which means, among other things, to start by first determining what the real problem is. I often explain it this way: Never solve the problem the client has asked you to solve. Why? Because the client is usually responding to the symptoms. The first job of the designer, sometimes the hardest part of the entire task, is to discover what the underlying problem is, what problem really needs to be solved. We call this finding the root cause. In the case of train service, because riders and nonriders alike complained about the experience, Amtrak assumed that this meant that the interiors of the trains should be redesigned. This description tries to solve the symptom, not the cause. The proper solution requires a systems approach, not just the redesign of one of the many parts, such as the train interiors. Amtrak, to its credit, agreed with this analysis and allowed a complete reconceptualization of the entire service experience, a task that IDEO was happy to work on. IDEO and its partners, Oppenheimer and Company Brand Consultants (O+CO) and Steelcase, recommended that Amtrak treat the travel experience as an integrated system, starting with the decision to travel by train rather than airplane or car and then continuing on through all the stages of the trip: purchasing the ticket, the experience at the station, both on departure and arrival, and the experience on the train. They identified ten steps to train service: Learning about routes, timetables, costs Planning Starting Entering Ticketing Waiting.
Most of the time, what we really think is the problem might just be the symptom of what is actually wrong. So the solution to this “problem” would be always to look for the root cause no?
If only life would be so simple! In many cases, sometimes, the root causes are not clear or may never be apparent. Sometimes, they only reveal themselves after many months or years of hard work on solving the symptoms.
What we can do is to be more mindful whenever something goes wrong. Toyota used to adopt this system for manufacturing called, “5 whys”, which is basically an interrogation system where you keep asking “why did this happen” (5 times) which is a good heuristic to help you get closer to the root cause.
