Fixing Symptoms Feels Like Progress

Category: Incentives, metrics, and consequences Treating effects is easier than addressing causes.

A support team is overwhelmed with tickets about the same confusing screen. People cannot find the button they need, so they raise a ticket, and the queue grows. Something must be done, and something is: the team is given more headcount. The queue comes down. Everyone is relieved, and the manager who pushed for the hire is thanked.

A few months later the queue is back up, because the screen is still confusing and the volume of confused people has, if anything, grown. So more headcount is requested. It is granted again, because it worked last time. The support team is now four times the size it was, the screen has never changed, and the cost of the confusing button is now a permanent line in the budget that everyone has quietly accepted.

The button could have been moved in an afternoon. Nobody did, because moving the button was nobody’s emergency, while the queue was everybody’s. The symptom screamed; the cause sat quietly upstream, doing its damage and drawing no attention to itself.

Each decision to add support was sensible. Each one worked, briefly. And each one made the real problem a little more permanent by making its symptom a little more survivable.

The Principle

Treating the symptom relieves the visible pain, which feels like progress — and that relief removes the very pressure that would have forced anyone to find the cause.

A symptom is loud, immediate, and in front of you. A cause is usually upstream, abstract, and someone else’s territory. Acting on the symptom is faster, safer, and produces an instant, visible result. So that is what gets done, again and again, while the cause survives untouched.

Why It Is Inevitable

Symptoms create urgency and causes do not. The overflowing queue, the angry customer, the failing check — these demand action now, and any action that makes them stop is rewarded immediately. Root causes generate no such pressure; they sit upstream and let their symptoms do the shouting.

Symptom-fixing is also easier to attribute and to credit. “We cleared the backlog” is a clean, claimable win delivered this week. “We removed the reason the backlog forms” is slower, harder to measure, and often requires changing something owned by another team who has no backlog and therefore no motive. The incentives point at the symptom every time.

And worst of all, treating the symptom works — temporarily. That short-lived success is exactly what makes the trap close, because it confirms the approach and buys just enough relief to defer the harder question. The cause is never quite painful enough to fix, precisely because its symptom keeps getting managed.

How It Shows Up

• The same problem returns on a cycle, each time met with the same temporary fix.
• Resources quietly accumulate around coping with a problem rather than removing it.
• “We’ve got really good at handling X” — where the goal should have been not needing to.
• Quick wins celebrated; the recurring cause never appears on anyone’s plan.
• Effort scales with the symptom while the cause stays exactly where it was.

Why It Causes Damage

Symptom-fixing entrenches the cause. Every successful workaround makes the underlying problem more tolerable, and a tolerable problem is one nobody has to solve. The organisation slowly builds permanent capacity — people, budget, process — whose only purpose is to absorb a problem that could have been removed, and that capacity then becomes a constituency that quietly depends on the problem continuing.

The cost compounds invisibly. Because each fix is small and each works, no one tallies what is being spent, year after year, on not solving something — and by the time anyone might, the alternative has been forgotten and the coping looks like simply the way the work is done.

How To Counter It

• When a problem recurs, treat the recurrence itself as the signal: a returning symptom means the cause is still upstream and untouched.
• Ask “why is this happening?” enough times to leave the symptom behind. Stop when the answer points to something you can actually remove.
• Separate the people fighting the fire from the people asked to find why it keeps starting — the firefighters will never have time.
• Count the cumulative cost of coping, not just the cost of each fix. The instalments hide the total.
• Be wary of getting good at handling a problem. Competence at coping is how a cause becomes permanent.

What Good Looks Like

Organisations that distinguish between relieving a symptom now and removing its cause, and that resource the second even though it lacks the urgency of the first. Where a recurring problem triggers a search upstream rather than another round of coping. Where someone is allowed to spend the afternoon moving the button, instead of the year staffing the queue it creates.

The symptom still gets handled — you cannot let the queue overflow — but handling it is understood as buying time, not as the solution.

A Reflective Question

What problem has your team become impressively good at handling — and what would it take to make handling it unnecessary instead?