The SQA2 Blog: General
The Pursuit of Elimination
I’ve spent decades building and leading organizations, and somewhere along the way I started noticing the same pattern everywhere — in software quality, in business, in charities, in my own leadership. We are very good at solving problems. We are far less good at asking why those problems keep coming back.
I call the alternative The Pursuit of Elimination.
It’s a simple idea with uncomfortable implications: organizations exist to solve the problems they were created to solve — not to manage those problems indefinitely. Most organizations, without ever intending to, drift toward the second option. They get good at responding. They get rewarded for responding. And slowly, the problem itself becomes something the organization quietly depends on.
The Pursuit of Elimination asks a different question than the one most leaders are trained to ask. Instead of “How do we fix this faster?” it asks:
“Why does this problem keep appearing at all?”
Feeders vs. Symptoms
Early in this work I started distinguishing between two things that get confused constantly: symptoms and what I call feeders.
A symptom is the visible, painful thing everyone reacts to. A feeder is whatever is quietly and continuously producing it — a policy, an incentive, a belief, a habit, a system. Root cause analysis usually looks backward, at how a problem began. Feeders are about what’s actively sustaining a problem right now. You can solve a symptom a thousand times and never touch the feeder underneath it — and the problem will keep coming back, right on schedule, because nothing that was actually feeding it ever went away.
Most organizations become excellent at symptom management. It’s safer. It’s visible. It gets rewarded. Removing a feeder is harder, because feeders usually exist for a reason, and removing them often means changing ourselves, not just our processes.
Invisible Success
One of the strangest discoveries in this philosophy is that the better an organization gets at elimination, the less visible its value becomes. Nobody applauds the crisis that never happened. Nobody notices the release that shipped clean because a problem was prevented three steps upstream. We reward the firefighter. We rarely notice the person who made sure there was never a fire.
The absence of a problem is routinely mistaken for the absence of value. That’s not a minor side effect — it’s one of the central paradoxes any organization committed to real prevention has to reckon with.
Perfection Is Not an Expectation. It Is a Compass.
This phrase has guided my thinking for a long time, and it gets misunderstood constantly. It doesn’t mean anyone is expected to be perfect. It means perfection functions as a direction, not a destination — something that continually points you toward the next unnecessary layer, the next feeder, the next assumption worth questioning. You never arrive. That’s the point.
Some of the Ideas That Came Out of This Philosophy
Over the years, this way of thinking produced a number of specific practices and frameworks inside the organizations I’ve built, including:
- Pods — small teams built deliberately to eliminate hero culture and knowledge silos, so no single person’s knowledge, leadership, or relationships become a single point of failure.
- SQaaS (Software Quality as a Service) — a model for redistributing work so that expensive expertise is spent only on work that actually requires it, while disciplined, repeatable work is handled elsewhere.
- Knowledge Returning Home — the principle that experience gained out in the field should circulate back into the organization rather than staying locked inside one person or one client relationship.
- The Virtue Test — a way of asking whether an organization would truly choose its mission over its own self-preservation if the two ever came into conflict.
None of these are the point on their own. They’re all just different expressions of the same underlying pursuit.
Why I’m Writing This Down
This philosophy has shaped every organization I’ve built, and I’m currently developing it into a full-length book. I wanted to put a stake in the ground publicly, in my own words, before going further: The Pursuit of Elimination is a philosophy and body of work I’ve been developing and will continue to develop in writing, speaking, and consulting.
More to come.
