Stop Fixing Symptoms: A Practical Way to Diagnose Hidden Causes

In this article10 min read

Imagine a home renovation where a damp patch appears on the living-room wall. Fixing symptoms looks like plastering and painting over it every month, while the stain keeps returning because the real problem is a cracked roof tile.

No amount of paint fixes a structural leak.

Organisations frequently make the same diagnostic error. When a project slips or team relationships begin to fray, the instinct is to apply a cosmetic cure. Mandate communication workshops. Schedule more status meetings. Tell people to manage their stress.

These interventions may be useful in the right conditions. Fixing symptoms is useless when it leaves the operating cause intact.

You need to take recurring friction apart. That means separating the facts from the interpretation, identifying the background conditions and distinguishing what you cannot control from the variables you can change.

The point is not to turn delivery leaders into therapists. It is to make diagnosis part of delivery.

Why fixing symptoms costs so much

The chapter that prompted this article, “Unravel the Causes” from The 12 Levers: The Complete Psychological Toolkit for Improving Your Life by Spencer Greenberg and Jeremy Stevenson, begins with a clinical example. Andrea Petersen spent a year seeking answers for debilitating panic attacks before receiving a diagnosis of panic disorder and agoraphobia. Understanding the problem did not complete her recovery, but it gave her a suitable place to begin.

The organisational parallel is straightforward. When delivery slips, leaders often jump from a visible outcome to a familiar intervention:

• Capability problem? Run training.
• Cultural problem? Organise a team-building day.
• Missed milestone? Add another reporting meeting.
• Quality problem? Tell people to pay more attention.

But the apparent capability problem may be a broken governance gate. Conflicting incentives may create the supposed cultural problem. The missed milestone may originate in a dependency that nobody owns. The quality problem may be the predictable result of an environment in which testing remains manual and schedules repeatedly take time away from verification.

I have watched this pattern hold across four platform shifts now — mainframe to client-server, on-premise to cloud, waterfall to agile, and now AI. The technology changes completely every time. The diagnostic error does not. Each shift arrives with someone insisting the team needs to be more adaptable, when the real constraint is that nobody has redesigned how the work actually gets approved.

This is part of the outcome gap described in Stop Owning People. Start Owning Outcomes: accountability is weak when leaders own people but nobody owns the path to value.

Better understanding must come before a solution. Otherwise, fixing symptoms becomes theatre: visible activity that leaves the cause untouched.

Fixing symptoms becomes theatre: visible activity that leaves the cause untouched.

The anatomy of a workplace spiral

One way to deconstruct a recurring problem is the ABC framework associated with Cognitive Behavioural Therapy:

• Activating event: the observable facts of what happened.
• Beliefs: the interpretations attached to those facts.
• Consequences: the resulting emotions and behaviours.

NHS guidance on CBT describes situations, thoughts, feelings and actions as connected. That is the useful idea for delivery leaders. Events matter, but so does the meaning people attach to them.

Consider a team that receives a critical email from a sponsor.

The activating event is the email. One interpretation is: “Leadership is micromanaging us and does not trust the team.” The likely consequence is defensiveness, slower communication and selective reporting.

Another interpretation is: “The sponsor is defending the budget and needs clearer evidence.” The likely consequence is a more deliberate response and better data.

The event is unchanged. The interpretation influences what happens next, which is why fixing symptoms at the level of behaviour so often fails.

This does not mean leaders should use positive thinking to explain away a genuinely hostile message. The first task is to separate what the communication actually says from the story forming around it. Sometimes that story is inaccurate. Sometimes it is an entirely reasonable reading of repeated behaviour.

CBT itself has a substantial evidence base. A 2023 meta-analysis examined 409 trials involving 52,702 patients with depression. That supports CBT as a complete therapeutic approach; it does not independently prove that an ABC exercise will resolve a workplace problem. Here, the framework is a diagnostic lens, not a clinical treatment claim.

Mapping the hidden vulnerabilities

Interpretations do not happen in a vacuum. The same event can produce very different reactions depending on the conditions surrounding it.

Dialectical Behaviour Therapy uses behaviour-chain analysis to examine events, vulnerabilities and the sequence leading to a response. A 2021 meta-analysis found evidence for DBT as a broader treatment for reducing self-harming behaviours and negative emotions in people with borderline personality disorder. Again, that evidence applies to the complete treatment rather than proving that chain analysis works independently.

The distinction is still useful for teams. You can map vulnerabilities across two time horizons:

• Short-term vulnerabilities: fatigue after a 12-hour launch day, poor sleep, excessive workload or an unresolved incident.
• Long-term vulnerabilities: a previous restructuring, a history of blame-heavy post-mortems, repeated budget uncertainty or a leader who used minor mistakes to punish people.

When an engineer reacts defensively to a small review comment, the easiest diagnosis is attitude. A background-integrated view asks what else is present. They may be working on four hours of sleep. Their previous project may have treated every defect as evidence of individual failure.

Not every reaction is acceptable, but a reaction you can explain is one you can actually do something about. That changes the leader’s response from judging character to examining conditions, boundaries and behaviour.

Focus on the levers you can move

When a project slips, teams can spend considerable energy fighting variables outside their influence. A more useful diagnosis separates what you must accept from what you can still change.

What cannot be changed directly

• Past events: failed projects, historical mistakes and previous reorganisations.
• External decisions: budget reductions, stakeholder choices and market shifts.
• Initial emotional reactions: the first spike of fear, frustration or anger.
• Fixed constraints: legislation, contractual commitments and immovable deadlines.

What can be influenced

• Interpretations: the assumptions being made about a setback or decision.
• Immediate behaviour: whether people hide, escalate, investigate or collaborate.
• Working conditions: workload, rest, sequencing and access to support.
• The local environment: team channels, decision rights, approval paths and meeting design.

Fixing symptoms tends to burn attention on the variables nobody can move. Acceptance here has nothing to do with resignation. It stops teams burning limited attention on rewriting history or wishing away a constraint, and points that attention at a lever that can still move.

Hunt for bright spots in the system

Delivery systems are usually better at recording failure than examining success. Risk registers, defect logs and retrospectives create a detailed history of what went wrong. The weeks when delivery worked unusually well often pass without investigation.

Solution-Focused Brief Therapy uses “exceptions”: occasions when a problem did not occur, was less severe or lasted for less time. A 2024 meta-analysis found positive evidence for solution-focused brief therapy across psychosocial outcomes. It assessed the complete approach, not exception analysis as a standalone technique.

The operational question remains valuable:

What was different when things went better than usual?

If late, unstable releases plague a delivery team, examine a rare release that went smoothly rather than running another generic retrospective.

Ask:

• Who clarified the requirements?
• When were dependencies identified?
• How did developers and testers communicate?
• What was different about workload and work in progress?
• Which approvals came through earlier than usual?
• What did the team deliberately choose not to do?

None of this is about romanticising one good week. Look for the conditions you can reproduce, then test whether they hold up on the next release.

Scaling a local success is often more credible than importing a framework whose assumptions have never been tested in your environment.

Scaling a local success is often more credible than importing a framework whose assumptions have never been tested in your environment.

Fixing symptoms when the cause is environmental

Sometimes an apparent behavioural or motivational failure has a physical cause.

The chapter recounts Carrie Poppy’s experience of feeling watched, experiencing chest pressure and hearing whispers while living in a Los Angeles guesthouse. A gas technician identified a serious carbon-monoxide leak. Her case is an anecdote, not a prevalence study, but it carries a useful warning: an incorrect frame can make an obvious intervention invisible.

UK Health Security Agency guidance confirms that carbon-monoxide exposure can cause weakness and confusion, as well as serious heart, lung and neurological effects. Anyone who suspects exposure should leave the affected area and seek appropriate medical advice.

Delivery leadership has less literal versions of the same mistake. Leaders diagnose a demotivated team as having a poor attitude, then send it to a communication workshop or lecture it about productivity.

Look closer and the environment may be doing exactly what it was designed to do:

• Development environments take three hours to start.
• Testing remains manual, making every deployment fragile.
• A minor content change needs six approval levels.
• Teams carry more simultaneous work than they can complete.
• Priorities change faster than teams can finish the work.
• People are held accountable for dependencies they cannot control.

No mindset workshop can compensate for an operating system that repeatedly obstructs the work.

No mindset workshop can compensate for an operating system that repeatedly obstructs the work. Fixing symptoms at the attitude level leaves those conditions untouched. Inspect them before trying to change the team.

This is also why making one part of delivery faster rarely fixes transformation. Local optimisation cannot clear an end-to-end bottleneck.

Practical implications for delivery leaders

Moving from firefighting to systemic analysis changes what leaders notice, question, change and measure. It is the difference between fixing symptoms and improving the system that produces them.

Notice: find the point where the climate changed

Pay attention to sudden shifts in a meeting or delivery cycle. When defensiveness or anxiety rises, ask: What changed just before the tone shifted?

The answer may be a phrase, an unexpected decision, a missing person, new information or the return of an old pattern. Capturing the trigger while it is fresh is more reliable than reconstructing it several weeks later.

Question: test more than one diagnosis

Ask whether the problem concerns skill, interpretation, incentives, tools, workload, authority or environment. A soft-skills diagnosis should compete with operational explanations rather than becoming the default.

Change: work on the nearest controllable cause

Historical analysis is useful until it becomes a substitute for action. Once you understand the relevant pattern, identify the closest variable you can change now: a decision right, work-in-progress limit, approval path, meeting, test environment or reporting expectation.

Measure: create a bright-spot record

Record successful delivery exceptions alongside risks and failures. Note the conditions present during the team’s best weeks, then test whether deliberately recreating those conditions produces a repeatable effect.

This is more demanding than asking whether morale improved. It requires leaders to connect interventions to observable changes in flow, quality, predictability or customer outcomes.

Stop fixing symptoms and solve the system

Cosmetic cures cannot repair high-stress delivery environments. Fixing symptoms merely delays the problem’s return while asking people to absorb the cost.

Breaking a challenge into events, interpretations, vulnerabilities and consequences does not produce a perfect diagnosis. It produces a better set of questions. Bright spots then reveal what the system can already do under more favourable conditions. The controllable-cause test turns that evidence into action.

The strongest delivery leaders do not begin by demanding harder work from a struggling team. They first examine whether the system is making good work unnecessarily difficult.

Pressure reveals the system people work inside.

Diagnose that system before asking people to adapt to it.

Sources used

1. Spencer Greenberg and Jeremy Stevenson, The 12 Levers: The Complete Psychological Toolkit for Improving Your Life. Chapter: “Unravel the Causes”.
2. NHS, Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT). Overview of how situations, thoughts, feelings and actions interact.
3. Pim Cuijpers et al., “Cognitive behavior therapy vs. control conditions, other psychotherapies, pharmacotherapies and combined treatment for depression”, World Psychiatry, 2023. Comprehensive meta-analysis of 409 trials with 52,702 patients.
4. Chen SY, Cheng Y, Zhao WW, “Effects of dialectical behaviour therapy on reducing self-harming behaviours and negative emotions in patients with borderline personality disorder: a meta-analysis”, Journal of Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing, December 2021.
5. Vermeulen-Oskam E, Franklin C, Van ’t Hof LPM, “The current evidence of solution-focused brief therapy: a meta-analysis of psychosocial outcomes and moderating factors”, Clinical Psychology Review, December 2024.
6. UK Health Security Agency, Carbon monoxide: general information.

Related reading

• Stop Owning People. Start Owning Outcomes
• Speeding Up the Builder Won’t Clear the Jam
• Difference Isn’t the Landmine. Justification Is.