Written by JD Davenport, who still sells for a living. Updated 4 November 2026.
A problem that keeps coming back is not a problem. It is an output, and whatever produced it is still running.
Most recurring problems are not problems at all. Incentives, processes, assumptions and constraints produce predictable results. Change the symptom and you will keep fighting it. Change the system and the symptom often disappears on its own.
Most people spend their time studying the footprints. The missed number. The dropped ball. The same argument in the same meeting for the third quarter running.
Events are interesting. The invisible rules that produced them are where the understanding is.
So when something goes wrong the useful question is not who did it. It is what arrangement made that the likely outcome. Assume competent people inside a bad structure until the evidence forces you somewhere else, because that assumption is right far more often than it is wrong, and it is the only one that leads anywhere.
If the fix requires somebody to remember something, it is not finished.
That one sentence will do more work than any policy you write this year.
A written instruction relies on recall and creates an audit burden. A setting cannot be forgotten. One of those is a policy and the other is a mechanism, and only one of them survives a busy Tuesday.
The instinct when something breaks is to tighten enforcement. Add a reminder. Have a conversation. Put it in the training.
More reminders is how you end up with a company where everyone is being reminded and nothing is remembered.
Training is the same move wearing better clothes. If a process only works when the person running it recalls a step correctly under pressure, the process is the defect and the person is the evidence.
A field that cannot be left blank beats a rule that says fill in the field.
An order that cannot be placed without the job number attached beats a weekly reminder to attach the job number.
A form that will not submit without the measurement beats a standard that says always take the measurement.
None of those require anybody to care, remember, or be having a good day. That is the entire point.
This is harder than it sounds, because the structural fix is almost always slower, less satisfying and less visible than the conversation.
The conversation takes twenty minutes and feels like leadership. The mechanism takes a week and feels like paperwork. Then the conversation has to happen again in March, and the mechanism never does.
Pick the one that does not come back.
Adapted from the argument behind both books. More in the books. Other notes on the notes page.