Yesterday’s World Cup quarterfinal between Scotland and Australia was one of the most exciting matches of Rugby I’ve ever seen.
The Finale
With less than 10 mins to go, Australia were ahead by 5 points and happily wasting time on the ball to kill off the game. The tartan squad, however, never gave up. Miraculously, with just over 5 mins to go, Bennett scored a try for Scotland, and suddenly the tables turned. Australia, one of the favourites for the tournament, were less than 5 mins from being knocked out by a team who’d lost all 5 of their matches in the 6 nations earlier in the year.
With stakes high, and end close, the game got rough and errors flowed from both sides. After a bit of toing and froing, the game ended up with a Scotland lineout with less than 2 mins to go. It was in the Scotland half, but they had advantage of throwing in the ball. All they needed to do was to pass the ball around safely, and then kick it out for a lineout in the Aussie half. But they bungled the lineout. Big time!
Somewhere in the confusing action after that sorry lineout, the referee awarded Australia a penalty for a foul that wasn’t. Australia converted the penalty in the last-minute of the match, knocking Scotland out by 1 point.
The Diagnosis
That crucial, deciding penalty was wrongly awarded. For such a critical decision, in such a confusing space, the referee should’ve1 gone to the TV referee (TMO) for confirmation. Yet, he made a decision in the moment, and ended up kicking Scotland out of the World Cup.
That’s all you’ll hear if you read the British Media, or any Rugby websites and forums:
Scotland cheated out of the World Cup because of a mis-awarded penalty
The referee, Craig Joubert, may be the most hated person in Scotland this week2.
Sadly, this popular outrage just hides the real cause:
Scotland lost because they bungled an easy, advantage play, while leading, with just 2 mins to go 3
Talking Business
Sport and business follow each other closely in many ways, and this event isn’t very different.
Just like in this game, when diagnosing problems in business, the first reasons pointed out are usually excuses, not causes. And just like in this game, these excuses are the most strongly backed reasons by the insiders, the people most closely involved – emotionally, financially, or in another way.
It takes experience, or sometimes an outsider, to look beyond the immediate excuses and issues, to disengage from emotion, and figure out the root causes. Even if we have neither the experience nor a trained outsider, there are frameworks that can help – my favourite being the immensely powerful, yet super simple 5 Whys 4.
These approaches work just as well whether you’re trying to figure out
- how Scotland managed to grab defeat from jaws of victory, or
- why flight delays go up in winter (no, it’s not the fog in Delhi or snow at Heathrow), or
- why product deliveries are always late despite design specs being submitted on time (it’s not always the manufacturer/engineers).
The Culture
Apart from just the obvious problem with identifying and targeting wrong causes, there’s a bigger issue at stake here – company culture.
When actions are taken on just the first or second level excuses/issues, this leads to a culture of covering the obvious bugs. It sends out a message to the employees influencing their behaviour in ways that, over time, escalate into bigger issues – Silo-ing, CYA-first decision making, technical/bureaucratic debt, and faster employee turnover, amongst others.
On the other hand, a deeper root-cause search, though more time & energy consuming, helps develop a sounder culture – both in engineering & bureaucracy, as well in terms of trust and coordination across the organisation.
Unless we’re in the content production business where ignoring root causes in favour of the most popular causes makes more financial sense, it’s critically important to put into practice the habit of looking beyond the first excuses.
P.S.: Yes, I wrote this post mostly to put down a memory marker for that fantastic match of rugby. Chapeau Scotland! Well played, Oz. C’mon All Blacks! ;)
P.P.S.: More rugby: I was supporting Wales from the beginning, despite living 25 miles from Twickenham, home of English rugby. The Welsh played bravely. They were strong, till the injuries depleted their squad, and playing well as a unit. Despite not supporting them as my first team, I also saw most of England’s matches. However, on basis of just the 2 of their matches that I saw – versus Japan and Australia – I believe Scotland had the best coaching team amongst all the home nations. The way the team’s playing tactics changed for each match, and in the Japan match’s case in each half, suggests deep thinking involved behind the scenes. Further to the coaching team’s credit – the tactics were not just changed on the drawing board, they were well executed on the field. This suggests the coaching staff wasn’t just smart in a geeky way, but also great at following up, training and ensuring execution of the smart plans. Great stuff, Vern Cotter and team! You may have a great future in corporate coaching if you want more moolah :)
- It appears that (found out after I wrote this post) according to rules governing the use of TMO, the referee couldn’t have sought help from TV replays in this particular situation. So, though he got the decision wrong, it wasn’t really his fault – he took the best decision he could, given the options he had. ↩
- Cameron / Osborne / Margaret Thatcher will back at the top spot next week. ↩
- This is actually not the real root-cause. The root cause, once the team management gets to it, may be on the lines of ‘not having practiced enough with wet balls at end of training sessions’ (i.e. when tired), or ‘not planning plays to hold the ball for defensively in own half’, or something else. That bad line out was just an outcome, not a process failure. ↩
- Quick suggestion: Don’t always go 5 Why’s down. Sometimes you need to stop short, at other times to go long, but usually the correct answers will have commonality: they’ll point to a ‘process’ failure rather than people or machines failing. ↩