Work the Problem Back to Its Cause
The same seal, the same complaint, the same missed handover. A sequence for stating the problem properly, verifying the cause instead of guessing it, and closing with a countermeasure somebody owns.
The Problem You Have Already Fixed Before
The same seal fails, the same customer complains about the same delay, the same handover is missed on the night shift. Each time it is logged fresh, patched by whoever is on duty, and closed. Nobody wrote down what caused it, so nobody can tell whether the fix worked. This session teaches a sequence — state the problem, contain it, find and verify the cause, change something, check — and runs your own recurring problems through it.
What the Session Works On
Writing the Problem Down Properly
What, where, when, how often, and how you would know it had stopped. Most failed problem-solving is a sound method aimed at a badly stated problem.
Containment Before Cure
What protects the customer today while you work out the cause. Naming it as a separate step is what stops a temporary patch from quietly becoming the permanent fix.
Five Whys, Done Honestly
The method is easy and usually done badly — it stops at “operator error” or wanders into a story nobody checked. Practice in taking every answer back to something you can point at.
Fishbone and Issue Trees
Laying candidate causes out across machine, method, material, people and environment, so the group argues about the branches instead of about each other.
Verifying the Cause
Can you switch the problem on and off by changing the suspected cause? This is the step that separates a real root cause from the most convenient one.
Plan-Do-Check-Act on Your Own Process
Making the change small, checking whether it held, and only then standardising it. Including what to do when the check says it did not work.
Writing It So the Next Shift Can Use It
A one-page record: problem, cause, evidence, countermeasure, owner, review date — filed where the next person who meets the fault will actually find it.
What Participants Are Equipped to Do
Attack the Cause Instead of the Symptom
A problem worked back to a verified cause is less likely to return in the same form, and the team can say why they believe the fix will hold.
Spread the Firefighting
A written method lets a supervisor work a problem through without waiting for the one engineer who always ends up sorting it out.
End a Problem Meeting on a Countermeasure
The discussion closes with a change, an owner and a review date rather than a shared sense of frustration and a plan to discuss it again.
Leave a Record Behind
Each analysis produces a page, so the business accumulates knowledge about its own faults instead of relearning them every year.
How GullyHR Runs It
We Work Your Problems
Two or three recurring problems from your business, supplied with enough background to actually analyse them, become the session’s working material.
Written Output, Not Just Discussion
Groups produce a completed analysis and an action plan that you keep, whether or not you go on to implement the countermeasure.
Aimed at the People Nearest the Fault
Supervisors, technicians, storekeepers and quality staff, not only managers. The cause is usually visible to somebody who has never once been asked to write it down.
Blank Formats for the Next Fault
The analysis they produced, blank formats for the next problem, and a review structure a manager can use to check whether the countermeasure held.
Bring the Fault That Keeps Coming Back
Give us two or three recurring problems and your team leaves the session with a written analysis and an action plan for each.
Questions We Get Asked
Scoped at the needs discussion. Working a real problem through to a verified cause takes as long as the evidence takes to gather, so we agree the pattern after seeing the problems.
No. There is no belt, no certification and no statistical toolset here. It is practical training in a small number of methods a supervisor can use the next morning. A formal quality-system deployment is a different piece of work altogether.
Yes, and those are the best ones to bring. A problem that has survived earlier attempts usually has a badly written problem statement underneath it, which is the first thing the session goes after.
Not by itself. The session equips people to analyse a fault and propose a countermeasure; whether the fault actually stops depends on the change being implemented and checked afterwards, and that part sits with your managers. We would rather say that up front than imply otherwise.