The Problem Wasn’t in the Jar

I’ve tasted a lot of moonshine over the years. Some of it has been exceptional. Some of it has been… memorable for different reasons.

One jar in particular comes to mind.

It looked exactly the way good moonshine should look. Crystal clear. If you had lined it up beside a dozen other jars, nothing about it would have suggested there was anything unusual inside.

Then I took a sip that told a different story.

Making good moonshine takes time, patience, and practice. Every distiller hopes the finished product is worth sharing. This batch simply wasn’t what it could have been.

The first sip told me there was a problem. It didn’t tell me where the problem started. And that reminded me of something I’ve seen throughout my career.

The place where a problem becomes visible is rarely where it began.

The Same Thing Happens in Business

Business has a way of drawing our attention to the symptom instead of the source.

Sales begin to slow, so we focus on the sales team. A customer has a poor experience, so we look at customer service. A project falls behind schedule, and everyone starts asking questions of the project manager. Sometimes those are exactly the right places to look.

Just as often, they’re simply where the problem became visible.

Look Upstream

By the time moonshine ends up in a mason jar, dozens of decisions have already been made. The grain bill. The water. The fermentation. The cuts. Every step leaves its fingerprint on the finished product. If something goes wrong along the way, the whiskey eventually lets you know.

Business works much the same way.

The results we’re seeing today are usually the product of decisions made weeks, months, or even years ago. A process that never quite worked. An assumption no one challenged. A shortcut that slowly became standard practice. The finished product simply reveals the outcome. It rarely tells you where the story began.

That’s why one question has served me well throughout my career:

Where did this actually start?

That question changes the conversation. It shifts the focus away from treating symptoms and toward understanding the process that produced them.

‍Before You Reach for a Solution

‍One sip was enough for me to know something wasn’t right with that jar of moonshine (and reach for something to get the bad taste out of my mouth). Finding the reason required looking much farther upstream.

The next time you run into a problem, resist the temptation to solve the first thing you see. Spend a little more time understanding how you got there. You may discover the real opportunity isn’t fixing the outcome. It’s improving the process that created it.

‍Call to Action

‍Can you think of a time when the obvious problem wasn’t the real problem? What helped you find the root cause?

Let’s discuss in the Comments section at the bottom of this page.

Enjoy business lessons from the history and craft of moonshining? Explore more articles in The Stillhouse Blog, listen to the Against the Grain Podcast, or learn more about my upcoming book, Against the Grain: Business Lessons from the Still.