Your organization has been disturbed by late launches in its last few new products, and now management has charged you with “getting to the bottom of the problem.” You schedule a series of management team meetings with the goal of uncovering the source of the delays and redesigning the launch process to create on-time product releases. You now will have to commit to the entire team that you won't miss the deadline moving forward. Sound familiar?

Everyone wants to solve the problem by going deeper into its root cause. The first meeting begins with a “post-mortem” on the latest release crisis. The team members tackle the issue with enthusiasm, jumping in with their own perspectives of what went wrong and why. At first, the meeting seems to be going well, since everyone is obviously engaged in solving the problem. But as the meeting progresses, you start to feel like the group is spinning its wheels. The stories begin to resemble a jumble of personal anecdotes that share no common elements: “Well, in our team, we tried doing something new, and this is what happened…” or “This reminds me of the time when we implemented process Y and we were carrying spare parts in brown paper bags…” Lots of interesting stories are being exchanged, but they do not seem to be leading to a common understanding of the root causes.

https://www.scrum.org/resources/blog/systems-thinking-local-optimization-global-optimization