Crowd Sourced Cause and Effect

CEDAC stands for Cause and Effect Diagram with the Addition of Cards. To many, CEDAC is a fishbone diagram with ribs that contain issues on one side of the rib and solutions on the other. But really, it was intended to be more than that. It’s inventor, Fukuda won a Deming Prize for its development. To him, CEDAC was a management technique. So, unlike many other techniques used by practitioners of lean that assume the answer/solution can be created from what is already available, Fukuda’s CEDAC can spawn experiments and research to gain better understanding.

The CEDAC tool is highly diverse and can be used to visualize and problem solve across a wide variety of issues. You can use it to understand issues with new product development, to discern why certain software features are not working as intended, to define possible failure modes in product design, or to comprehend why your accounts receivable backlog is growing (just to name a few). Perhaps the most interesting applications come in defining obstacles where the problem is “created” and the solution is not readily apparent. Created problems don’t necessarily look back historically at what happened to get us here but define a future state not yet achieved. Utilizing CEDAC it’s possible to visualize obstacles that must be overcome before reaching our defined target. These targets could be driven by a desire to increase market share, launch a new business, increase our customers spend per transaction, the list really goes on and on.

Using this tool in Miro you have the ability to gain insights from far more resources than what is available to you with a physical board. Perhaps you can make the board public and get insights from other industry professionals via a post of your favorite social media outlet. Or, you can imbed the board into a collaboration space that you use frequently and challenge your team members to add a number of cards throughout their workday. Think of the possibilities for crowdsourcing solutions!