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I met a friend at 7:30 one evening and we talked until late.
The next morning my alarm went off and I hit snooze.
So I asked why, the way Toyota's engineers look for a root cause.
Why did I hit snooze? Getting up on the first alarm would've meant a whole day on even less sleep.
Why so little sleep? I got to bed late.
Why so late? At 7:30 I left the end time open.
The fix for my morning belonged at 7:30 the night before.
In 2012 the travel site Expedia was buried in phone calls. More than half of the people who booked a trip called customer service afterward.
Ryan O'Neill worked in the customer experience group. He went through the call logs to learn why.
The top reason was simple: they wanted a copy of their itinerary.
People called about 20 million times a year just to ask for one.
You've probably dug through your inbox for a booking confirmation yourself.
O'Neill and his boss took the numbers to the CEO. Expedia rewrote its confirmation emails and let travelers look up their trips online.
The share of bookers who called fell from more than half to about 15%.
The calls came in on the phone line, but the cause was a confusing email.
O'Neill found his cause in a call log. A pediatrician named Nadine Burke Harris had to find hers by asking.
In the mid-2000s she opened a children's clinic in Bayview, one of San Francisco's poorest neighborhoods. Kid after kid came in referred for ADHD.
Most of them didn't fit the diagnosis.
She asked about life at home. Again and again she found trauma or a major upheaval.
A colleague handed her a study of 17,000 adults that linked hard childhoods to illness decades later. After that she asked each child about hard experiences at home before treating them.
In 2019 California named her its first surgeon general.
The state now pays doctors to screen children for the same experiences she asked about in Bayview.
The kids acted out in her exam room, but the cause was at home.
A problem shows up at the end of a chain, the fix you need is upstream.
What problem could you fix at its root cause?