Lean Pioneer: Mapping the Problem No One Owned
How Valerie Orick mapped the hot potato that twelve teams kept passing and no one could catch
"A problem clearly stated is a problem half solved. The first step in improvement is making the problem visible." — Taiichi Ohno, the Architect of Modern Lean Thinking
In a Lean culture, making a problem visible is not an act of exposure. It is an act of leadership. You cannot solve what you cannot see. And a problem that lives only in people's frustrations has nowhere to go.
It takes a particular kind of curiosity to do what Valerie Orick, MHR, PHR, Director of HR Applications at UC Davis, did: take a persistent, unresolved cross-system problem and chase it down herself. Not because a project charter said to. Not because it was in her queue. But because her Lean training gave her the instinct to ask, "What is actually happening here, and where does this thing keep going?"
The problem: employees' work and business emails were not syncing with the UC Davis Directory and/or UCPath and downstream systems, breaking employee access and notifications, onboarding, and communications across campus and UC Davis Health.
The issue touched twelve or more teams and six or more systems. Each team held a piece of the answer. None held the whole picture. So when Valerie went looking for an owner, she got handed off, again and again, sometimes to two teams pointing at each other at the same time.
"I'm almost to the top of the mountain and gaining a lot more clarity, but not yet at the peak." — Valerie Orick
Piece by piece, conversation after conversation, Valerie took that tangle of pointing fingers and distilled it into something usable: a clean, single flow process map specific enough to pinpoint exactly where the breakdown happens.
You cannot solve what you cannot see.
Valerie did not just map a process. She mapped a chase, twelve teams and six systems long, and gave it a shape for the first time. That is how a problem nobody owned finally became one somebody could fix.