KaizenProof

Lesson 12 of 23 · 6 min read

Countermeasures, not solutions

In Lean: countermeasure, containment

Builds on: Should this step exist?, The 5 Whys in depth

In one minute

A countermeasure is a change aimed at one specific cause, made in the knowledge that it may need to change again. Lean prefers the word to "solution", because a solution sounds finished, and finished things do not get checked. A countermeasure names the cause it answers, the change, its owner and what will show whether it worked. If the check says it did not, you have learned something about the cause, and the next countermeasure starts from there.

The idea

When a why-chain reaches a cause you can change, it is tempting to say the problem is solved. Lean practice avoids that word on purpose. What you have is a change aimed at one cause, to be tested (in Lean: countermeasure), and the difference matters in three ways.

  • It answers a cause, not a symptom. A countermeasure is written against the cause the whys found. If you cannot say which cause a change addresses, it is a guess, however sensible it sounds.
  • It is a hypothesis. You believe that changing this will stop the problem coming back. You may be wrong: the cause may have a second branch, the change may be awkward to follow, the work may shift. The word keeps the question open until a check answers it.
  • It is for now. New tools, new people and new volumes change the work. A countermeasure that works this year may need replacing next year. That is not failure; it is how improvement keeps going.

A useful countermeasure states four things: the cause it answers, in the words of the why-chain; the change, concrete enough that someone else could put it in place; who owns it; and what to measure and when to look, so a check can tell whether it held.

Sometimes a problem must be stopped today, before the cause is fixed: someone checks every outgoing invoice by hand this week. That is a quick patch while you fix the cause (in Lean: containment). It is often necessary, but it adds work, and if it quietly becomes permanent it hides the problem it was meant to hold back. Call it temporary, give it an end date, and keep going until a countermeasure on the cause replaces it.

The word also changes how people talk. "Our solution failed" sounds as if someone got it wrong. "The countermeasure did not hold, so the cause is not quite what we thought" is simply the next piece of information.

Example

Illustrative example, not a real company.

A customer support team finds that refund confirmations keep going to old email addresses. The whys reach a cause: the refund form copies the address from the original order, not from the customer's current account.

Containment, the same afternoon: before sending each confirmation, the agent compares the two addresses. It works, but it costs time on every refund and nobody wants it forever.

Countermeasure: change the form to take the current account address. Owner: the support lead. Check: look at bounced confirmations after a week and again after a month. The team writes down that if confirmations still bounce, the cause is wrong or incomplete. Once the form change is in place, the manual comparison stops.

At the one-month check a few confirmations still bounce, all for customers who ordered through a partner site, where the account address is not used. A second branch of the cause, and the start of the next countermeasure.

Common mistakes

  • No cause named. "Introduce a checklist", with no link to a cause, is an idea, not a countermeasure.
  • Letting the patch become the fix. A containment step with no end date turns into permanent extra work.
  • Treating the first answer as final. If nothing is checked, nobody learns whether the change worked.

Words to know

  • A change aimed at one cause, to be tested (in Lean: countermeasure): kept until a check shows it failed or a better one replaces it.
  • A quick patch while you fix the cause (in Lean: containment): a temporary step that limits harm today.
  • Held: the problem stays gone after the change is in place.

Check your understanding

3 questions. Answer them all, then check. You can try again as often as you like; nothing about your attempts is kept.

Question 1 of 3Invoices are paid late because approval requests still go to an approver who left the company. Which of these is written as a countermeasure?
Question 2 of 3Which statement treats a fix as a finished solution rather than a countermeasure?
Question 3 of 3Since a wrong payment last month, a payroll specialist checks every overtime entry by hand. Which statements are right? Select all that apply.

Choose all that apply.

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Try it on your own work

Describe one recurring task that wastes your time, and see these ideas applied to it.

Report a friction (opens in a new tab)

Worksheet for this lesson: Countermeasure Plan Template (free download, no sign-up).

Where this comes from

Preferring "countermeasure" to "solution" is a habit of the Toyota Production System and the Lean tradition, which treat every fix as provisional until a check shows it works.