Stop Chasing Raccoons

At around 5 am yesterday morning my cat, Pixie, found me (like she always does). She knows when I wake up and where to find me when she’s hungry.

So, like normal, I headed out to my barn to feed her. I keep forgetting my wife recently moved Pixie’s food closer to our house, which is why I couldn’t find her food bowl when I opened the barn door.

Anyhow, as I turned around to walk out of the barn I nearly jumped out of my skin when I heard a crashing sound over in the far corner of the barn. I hadn’t turned the barn light on yet so I did what any of us would do…I turned on my iPhone flashlight and investigated.

That’s when I saw it…a giant critter of some sort clung to the corner of the wall about 9 feet off the ground.

I had no idea what it was. So I did what any reasonable person does at 5:00 in the morning. I turned the barn light on, snapped an iPhone picture, and got out of there. The image at the top of the page is the photo I took!

Two AIs, One Answer

Once I was safely back inside, I did what I suspect a lot of us would do these days. I asked AI.

Actually, I asked two of them. I showed the picture to both Claude and ChatGPT, and they agreed without hesitation.

It was a raccoon!

Mystery solved. Well, sort of. Knowing what was in my barn didn’t tell me the more important thing. How did it get in? Neither AI could answer that one. But, sadly, I had a pretty good idea.

You see, the windows on my barn doors have been broken for some time. It’s one of those things that’s on the list of things to do but, for whatever reason, never gets done.

Don’t Chase the Raccoon

Here’s where my mind went next.

My first instinct was to focus on the raccoon. How do I get rid of it? How do I keep it away from the cat food? Do I need to set a trap?

But, obviously, the raccoon isn’t the problem. The broken window is.

I could chase that raccoon off every morning for the next year. As long as the window stays broken, it (or some other critter) will keep coming back. The raccoon is the symptom. The broken window is the root cause.

And if we’re honest, this is exactly how a lot of organizations operate. A defect shows up, so we sort and rework. A shipment is late, so we expedite. A customer complains, so we apologize and send a credit. Then we do it all again next week.

That’s chasing raccoons.

Now, don’t get me wrong, containment definitely matters. You don’t leave a raccoon in the barn. But containment is not a countermeasure. Dr. Deming taught that the vast majority of problems belong to the system, not the people working in it. Blaming the raccoon for walking through an open window is a lot like blaming an operator for a terribly designed process.

Every Organization Has Broken Windows

Back in 1982, social scientists James Wilson and George Kelling popularized what became known as the “broken windows” theory. I’ve actually written about this before.

Their idea was simple. When a broken window is left unrepaired, it sends a message that nobody’s paying attention. And that neglect invites bigger problems.

Our barn proved their point in a way I didn’t expect (broken window and all)!

In lean terms, broken windows are the small abnormalities we learn to live with. The oil drip under the machine. The missing label on the shelf. The workaround everyone knows about but nobody fixes. The report that’s always a day late. The meeting that always starts ten minutes behind.

None of them seem like a big deal on their own. That’s exactly what makes them so very dangerous. Each one quietly says, “This is acceptable here.” And sooner or later, something you don’t want walks right through the opening.

This is why good lean organizations take things like 5S and daily kaizen so seriously. It’s not about being tidy for the sake of being tidy. It’s about making abnormalities visible and fixing them while they’re still small.

Go and Watch

There’s a second lesson hiding in this story, and it might be the more important one. Earlier, I said I was confident I knew how the raccoon got in…but, to make 100% sure, I actually stood outside my back door and watched after turning the porch light on so I could see. And, sure enough, a few minutes after I left, I saw that raccoon climb out of the barn through the biggest broken window in the door.

In lean we call this genchi genbutsu. Go and see for yourself. In fact, Taiichi Ohno famously had new engineers stand in a chalk circle on the shop floor for hours, just watching, until they truly understood what was happening. Not because watching is glamorous, but because the real answers are usually out at the gemba, not in a conference room.

And notice something else. The raccoon was in that barn before I ever flipped the switch. The light didn’t create the problem. It revealed it. Leaders who make it uncomfortable for people to turn on the lights end up with very dark barns that are possibly full of raccoons.

So, What About Your Barn?

As for me, that broken window is getting fixed. Soon. But the bigger question isn’t about my barn. It’s about yours.

What broken windows have you walked past so many times you’ve stopped seeing them? And when problems show up, are you chasing raccoons…or are you going out to watch how they got in?

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