“…building a root-cause problem-solving culture in the midst of our daily firefighting is incredibly difficult. Let me say this again: Building a root-cause problem-solving culture is incredibly difficult!”  

Leading the Lean Enterprise Transformation (2nd Ed.) by George Koenigsaecker (CRC Press, 2013) p. 14

Note from Ray: I’ll give a hearty “Amen!” to this from my experience over the past 15 years of Lean consulting. You simply MUST fight fires. But if you are serious about Lean, you MUST also devote some time to root-cause problem-solving. In my opinion, the best way is to list the problems that come up, then have a regular system to select the important ones for problem-solving. You can’t work on ALL of them. But you CAN work on ones that will make a big difference.