Why Your Projects Keep Failing (It's Not Bad Luck, It's the Root Cause)

Your project failed. Despite your best efforts, it was over budget, late, and didn't deliver the expected results. Leadership is asking what happened.

The "post-mortem" meeting is scheduled. This is the moment where most teams identify the wrong problem and guarantee the next project will fail in the exact same way.

The Common (and Flawed) Approaches

1. The "Bad Luck" Excuse (Reactive Thinking)
"It was a perfect storm. The vendor was unreliable, the timeline was too aggressive, and we had bad luck. We did our best with what we had".

• Why it fails: This is a diagnostic dead-end. It blames external, uncontrollable factors ("luck") and prevents any real learning.

2. The "Try Harder" Solution (Deliberate Thinking)
"We should have communicated better with stakeholders and caught the scope creep earlier. We also needed more buffer time".

• Why it fails: "Communicate better" is the most useless phrase in business. It's a vague solution to a symptom. It doesn't ask why communication failed or why scope crept in the first place.

3. The "Symptom List" (Structured Thinking)
"Here's everything that went wrong: vendor delays, 20% scope creep, a key person left, and we underestimated the budget by 15%".

• Why it fails (subtly): This is a good list of symptoms, but it's not a diagnosis. You've listed what broke, but you don't know why. It's like a doctor listing "cough, fever, fatigue" but never identifying the virus.

A Better Way: The Systematic Approach

The systematic move to stop this pattern is Backward Time Travel. You must trace the causal chain backward from the symptoms to the single, underlying root cause.

The most powerful tool for this is the "5 Whys" technique.

Step 1: Start with the Surface Problem.

• Problem: The project was 3 months late and over budget.

Step 2: Ask "Why?" Repeatedly.

1. Why was it late? → Because the scope kept expanding mid-project.

2. Why did scope keep expanding? → Because the requirements weren't locked down before we started.

3. Why weren't requirements locked down? → Because the discovery phase was rushed (we only had 2 weeks).

4. Why was discovery rushed? → Because leadership was under pressure to show visible progress quickly.

5. Why this pressure? → Because the organization’s culture values starting fast more than finishing right.

Step 3: Identify the Root Cause.

• The Root Cause: The project failure was a systemic organizational misalignment between the project's actual needs (a solid foundation) and leadership's expectations (a quick, visible win).

The fix isn't "communicate better." The fix is "change the way we approve projects to include a mandatory, protected discovery phase."

The "Aha!" Insight

Stop putting bandages on symptoms. A "vendor delay" or "scope creep" is never the real problem. Trace the chain of "why" all the way back until you find the single, systemic root cause. You cannot fix a problem you haven't correctly diagnosed.

Your Next Move

This scenario is just one of 12 from the Systematic Thinking Scorecard.

The ability to diagnose root causes is one of the four key moves of a systematic thinker. To see how you score on this and the other three capabilities, download the free scorecard. It’s a 5-minute diagnostic to find your starting point for a major upgrade.