Early in my career, I was fortunate enough to spend several years working in Ford Electronics' Divisional Quality Office as an internal quality consultant. During these years, I worked with a number of manufacturing facilities, engineering groups, and suppliers to provide training in quality and engineering disciplines, as well as work with them to solve problems and improve the quality of their processes and products.

Let’s talk for a moment about what I call “Systems Thinking”.
Most people do not think of cause and effect on what I call a “systemic level”. They tend to think in very narrow “chimneys” of thought. What happens in MY department is critical. The ability to see what the effect of an action is on the rest of the company is a rare ability.

Unfortunately, the lack of “Systems Thinking” significantly hobbles us in all walks of life.

Many times, we solve a problem only to have it recur either on the same product or process, or on other products or processes in our organization.

When this happens over and over again, it appears as if we are simply unable to let them go!  I sometimes call this “being addicted” to our problems.