Why the need of SPPA?
The short answer is that SPPA - Systemic Problem Picture Analysis™, is needed since there today is no other method available for truly finding the root causes to problems in organizations.
Today there are many persistent and also increasing number of problems or impediments in our organizations, like; too many meetings, wrong culture or values, problems despite following the recipe, transformations that take too long time, too many transformation coaches, people not included in the transformation, efficiency problems, decreasing long-term planning, lost Big Picture, etc. And there are an increasing number of methods and frameworks that want to help us taking care of the problems, but still these organizational problems do not seem to be conquered. Why?
We need to remember that changing context for a method, especially when going from an easy context to a complex context is treacherous. This also goes for methods trying to find the root causes. Traditional root cause analyses have their origins in production and products, and the problems are normally incidents, which means reactive handling. This is very different from organizations with people, where our people see the problems daily. This means that we can collect them individually in parallel, and since all problems have a cause or a root cause, this means that we can ask why to connect the problems all the way down to their root causes. And this is what SPPA is all about. Collect the problems and connect them down to the root causes, all in order to detangle the mess, the system of problems, as Dr. Russell Ackoff would have put it.
Here below is a clickable picture of SPPA, where the objects in the picture links are the start for getting deeper information about, HOW it works, its different parts, and then even deeper and deeper knowledge about WHY it works, all the way down to the research behind.
For a deep-dive into SPPA, please see this introduction.
Warm welcome!