Information extracted from real-world contexts that has been organized for analysis
in forms that can be used to inform decision-making.
Consultant/Business Manager
A person who is paid to propose solutions that are based
upon the collection and analysis of pertinent data.
Perceived problem
What the supervisor or employee or customer or client thinks is
happening, which may or may not be the actual problem.
Problem situation
The circumstances in which a problem takes place and that give rise
to the problem
Cause
The cause of a problem is often very unclear. The cause is what is really keeping
your situation from being ideal. Very often, you will need to brainstorm possible causes
and then collect data in order to rule out one or more of them.
Effect or symptom
This is the real problem, the result of the cause of the problem. It
may be something obvious like lost revenue, and there may be several effects from a
single cause.
Chain of cause and effect
Very often, a single root cause will ”ripple” through the
situation, leading to an intermediate effect, which itself becomes the cause of another
problem, which has an effect, which causes another problem, and so on. Identification
of the real problem and its cause then becomes more difficult because you are forced
to backtrack from the obvious problem all the way to the root cause in order to most
effectively solve the problem. For example, you may be experiencing the symptom of
abdominal pain. In order for the doctor to help you, she must determine why you have
the pain (the cause): it could be something you ate, an ulcer, a broken rib, a bruise,
or something even more serious. Each possible cause has a very different solution.
However, if the cause of the pain is, say, an ulcer, what is causing the ulcer? Stress?
Spicy food? Poison?