You run the risk of really annoying people around you, but it seems to work.
The tactic? Ask “why?” until you get to the root cause. Five times.

This is one of the key lessons I learned early in my career: don’t just respond to the symptom, figure out the cause. The classic case is when you’re dealing with customer service calls, errors, any increased volume of a “bad” transaction…something going wrong.

Most people react to increased volumes by asking for more people, investments, etc. But sometimes you have to step back and ask yourself what the root cause is to handle it correctly.

I was once in a budget meeting where a number of new projects were being requested. The mail room was getting too much undeliverable mail, so they needed more staff. The service center was getting more calls about statements. The statements area was getting more requests for duplicates. Each group came forward with their individual request to deal with their “symptoms.”

The cause? A corrupted name and address file. Once we fixed it, the volumes went back to normal. It would have been easy to just meet everyone’s legitimate request…but we wouldn’t have gotten to the right answer.