What Does It Mean To Close The Loop?

You must close the loops.

Hello, wonderful humans striving to be better leaders. My name is Dan and I empower organizations to improve. While every organization is different, the problems they encounter are the same. One of those problems how how you handle errors. Let's say you're at a digital marketing company and you receive an email from an unhappy customer. Turns out the wrong image made it to one of their display ads.

Yikes.

Not good, but it happens. So what do you do? You fix it. You open the software, you update the image, you call your customer and you profusely apologize. Done, right?

No, not even close.

You solved the short term problem, but you left an open loop, so the problem is going to happen again. So what do you do? It's time to get curious. What caused the problem in the first place?

Einstein was once asked, "If you only had an hour to solve one problem, how would you do it?" He replied, "I would spend 50 minutes understanding the problem and ten minutes fixing it." So how does this apply to you?

You have to look past the short term fix. You need to invest your time in really understanding the problem so that when you come up with a solution, you have fixed it permanently and you have closed the loop. You need to perform a root cause analysis that evaluates the processes and the systems that you employ. This requires three things ownership, tenacity, and follow up. An owner is required to drive the solution forward. They need tenacity to ensure that an action item is in place to address the problem. Follow up is required to review the solution to know if it is fixed for good. Whether you're in digital marketing, software development, biotech, pharmaceutical research, or any other type of business, there are some questions you must answer to improve and grow.

• How do you track your defects?

• Do you perform root cause analysis?

• Do you have a system to track your fixes?

• Do you assign owners to fixes?

• Do they follow up to make sure the actions are complete and working the way they were expected to?

My clients improve because I require them to answer questions like these and many more like them.

Who's holding your organization accountable?