I spend a lot of time convincing companies that it’s important not to ‘hide’ problems, but to actively seek out and unearth anything that is – or could – get in the way of their customers getting exactly what they want, when they want it, right the first time. Not only because preventing and fixing problems helps us better satisfy customers, but because it also helps us to dispel our own fears about mistakes and failures. When a problem – something ‘unexpected’ – happens, if we have the attitude that ‘a problem is a buried treasure’ instead of feeling worried and fearful, we can simply see that we’ve been handed a ‘golden opportunity’ to dispel our own assumptions about how things ‘should’ or ‘could’ work and see how they really are…and that’s the biggest ‘treasure’ I can think of!
