All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.
-Blaise Pascal
Recently, I had an opportunity to audit a course on a management topic in graduate school. One of the topics covered was how to use a management tool called Fishbone to do the root cause analysis. I was sitting there and listening but slowly my mind started drifting towards the day on which I came across this tool for the first time. It was about 6-7 years ago…
The subject line read “Talent acquisition and retention.” The email indicated that our new CIO picked one individual from each area to attend this recurring meeting on a Friday evening. Unfortunately, the attendance was not optional.
“Screw my plan leaving 30 minutes early that Friday,” I told myself.
I wasn’t sure why I got picked for this. Did HR hint that I could be the next one leaving the dwindling pool of developers? I started the process of mentally forming the future state already: more talents leaving the pool if ‘the new guy’ pushes for more meetings taking place on Friday evenings.
“I apologize for keeping you waiting on a Friday evening. My schedules were so messed up and I couldn’t find a better time than this. CIO told us in his southern accent while entering the conference room.
He was flying from Dallas in alternate weeks. I knew that he was staying very late in those days he was in office. He took his seat and then looked at us.
“How can we stop all these good people from leaving us?”
I saw some of us rolling our eyes but most of us took the pleasure of treating it as rhetoric and assumed he was going to fill in us with what is he going to do about it.
“I called you here so that we can brainstorm some ideas to see how we could retain our talents”. He then asked one of the HR representatives to present her case.
She was quick to connect her laptop to the projector and started flipping slides while talking.
One specific measure caught my attention.
The average time spent by developers in the company is less than 2 years. I wasn’t very far from hitting that mark.
“Now I know why am I here,” I whispered.
I could tell from the CIO’s face that brainstorming did not go well as he initially planned. There were only noises but no signals.
CIO got up from his seat.
“Let’s see if we could use a tool to help figure out the root cause.” He said as he moved towards the whiteboard.
He wrote the problem statement on the right side of the board. Talented developers are leaving the company on average within 2 years. He drew a long line left to it from where he wrote the problem statement.
He encouraged the group to come up with specific areas that were contributing to this problem. This created more noise. Some started listing action items our management is not taking to fix it. Others started pointing fingers to a couple of performance-related policies introduced by HR that backfired.
He kept his cool demeanor and said. “Look, let’s focus first on the root causes. I am not looking for a solution today.”
He first asked whether the company’s compensation package had anything to do with it? Seeing many of us nodding our heads, he started drawing a box and wrote “Compensation” in it. He connected the box with a line to the mainline he drew earlier.
He was looking for the group to tell him what specific items under the compensation package causing the talent drain out. After the initial surge of dust was settled, a voice from one corner suggested: “Our compensation package is at least 30% less than our main competitor.”
It looked like we found common ground in that statement as I saw most of us were nodding.
“Great!” Our new CIO interjected.
“I liked the way you quantified it. I am not sure though where did you get that 30% number from.” She replied to him, but he showed no further interest in getting into that detail.
He added her suggestion as one of the root causes that potentially driving our talents away. He then asked if we could think of any other areas or any other root causes.
They were coming from all sides and corners of the room.
CIO had a smile on his face, he then turned back and added two more boxes to wrap the “Competition” and “Management areas.” He drew a line from these boxes to the mainline. The whole thing started looking like a fishbone.
The exercise continued for another 45 minutes. I did not see anyone looking at their watches. All of us were contributing to the root causes in a more systematic way than anytime I could think of in my tenure with this company. At the end of the day, we had a fishbone begging for taking action.
“In our next bi-weekly meeting, we will use another tool to work on an action plan.” He ended the meeting.
The clock at the train station reminded me that I was 2 hours late that day to catch the train.
“I won’t be complaining about late meetings if he is going to introduce tools like this.” I started thinking during my long commute back home.