How to frame a problem with a fishbone diagram

This article is part of the '4-week change management boot camp for public servants'. Sign up here.

You’ve just met Brian Elms — a former Denver public servant and founder of the city’s “Peak Academy” change management program.

You might remember that he mentioned the usefulness of fishbone diagrams to “tack the error or defect rate of a process or service”.

“If you use the fishbone diagram correctly,” he said, “you’re attacking stuff one at a time, instead of trying to grapple with the whole.”

Fishbone diagrams, also known as Ishikawa diagrams or cause-and-effect diagrams, identify the factors causing an overall effect. They can be a useful tool in the change management process to take stock of the current state (the first step of Brian’s process) or to brainstorm (the fourth).

As seen in this example from the NHS Institute for Innovation, the problem is shown as the fish’s head, facing to the right. The causes of the problem branch out to the left, becoming the fishbones.

Read the scenario below and create a fishbone diagram, diagnosing the problem and its causes, splitting them into equipment, process, people, materials, environment and management.

Scenario

You are the manager of a policy team in the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy in the UK, focusing on renewable energy. You have two junior public servants reporting into you.

You have been tasked to come up with several policy options for the UK’s approach to building onshore wind farms (groups of wind turbines that are built on land).

This is following an instruction that’s come in from your manager that your Minister is interested in learning how onshore wind farms could be built in the UK. They have previously been banned from construction for several years.

As such, there is no dedicated onshore wind farm team in the department, so the job has fallen to you to build a team to explore the different options.

You know very little about wind farms, having worked previously on the UK’s solar panel policy, so know that you will need to upskill yourself very quickly. Your two existing staff members are quite new to the Department and have never worked in wind farm policy either.

But you know that there are some staff members who have previously worked on onshore wind farms within the Department. There are others who have worked in the offshore wind space, which has been heavily built up over the past few years (offshore wind farms are built into the sea instead of on land).

Outside of the Department, there is an engaged onshore wind lobby group that has been trying to meet with someone in the Department for months. The group is angry that they have been unable to build onshore wind farms for several years. They would very happily speak to you about their demands. You are under strict instructions from your boss to keep the potential change in policy confidential.

You have a week-long deadline to draw up three different proposals for the Minister’s approval.

Using the fishbone diagram, explore what you think the main problem is here and what you identify are its causes.

(Picture credit: Unsplash)