Find the cause, find the cure.

How fixing a window changed my perspective

I walked into my room, chilled by the cold breeze circulating through it. The window had been open for hours, and my room was nowhere near as cozy as I prefer.

When I tried to close it, I realized it was jammed. No matter how hard I pushed, the window stubbornly collided with the frame.

My first thought was that something had come loose and gotten stuck between the frame and the window panel. After all, this had happened before with our living room window.

So I studied every corner of it.

I opened and closed it repeatedly, trying to identify the main point of friction, but the closer I looked, the more confused I became. Eventually, I convinced myself the entire window had somehow migrated downward or shifted out of place.

Was it the hinges?
The frame?
The bottom track?

While shining a flashlight toward the corner, I noticed a small button-like screw. For a moment, I thought, “Maybe this is the clue.”

But I dismissed the idea after some thought. Something that small couldn’t possibly be causing this much dysfunction to the entire window.

Half an hour later, I was still lost, feeling frustrated from the sunk cost of this spontaneous project. 

I take pride in fixing things on my own, treating each obstacle like a puzzle to solve, but I begrudgingly accepted that I would probably have to call maintenance for specialized tools or expertise.

So I walked away to wash my hands, which were dusty and stained from toying with parts of the window that clearly hadn’t been disturbed in months.

And that’s when it hit me:

“If you find the cause, you can find the cure.”

Suddenly, I remembered the day before, when my friend came over and struggled with the window too.

My apartment windows are deceptively complicated. They’re called tilt-and-turn windows, and they open in two different ways: from the top and from the side. The handle changes the mechanism depending on its position. Turn it upward, and the window opens from the top. Turn it sideways, and it swings open from the side. Push it downward, and it locks. 

The day before, she spent several minutes forcing it open while we laughed about how she was probably going to break it.

At the time, it seemed insignificant.

But at 11 p.m. on a Wednesday night, it felt like a groundbreaking revelation.

Eureka.

The handle must have gotten stuck between locking positions after being forced open awkwardly.

So I returned to the window.

This time, instead of staring at the entire system as one overwhelming problem, I focused on interaction. When I moved the handle, what else moved with it? Which mechanisms responded? What seemed slightly out of sync?

That’s when I noticed the middle latch barely moving compared to the range of motion it was supposed to have.

So I tried closing the window again, but this time I manually held the latch down as I pushed.

Immediately, the handle snapped back into place.

The window shut perfectly. It opened smoothly from both directions and locked with ease.

I sat back, disproportionately proud of my achievement, but what struck me afterward wasn’t the repair itself. It was how quickly my thinking had escalated the problem into something far more catastrophic and complicated than it actually was. The more resistance I encountered, the more convinced I became that the issue was structural beyond my bandwidth. Somehow, a tiny stuck latch didn’t occur to me before assuming the entire window shifted out of place. In hindsight, that instinct seems irrational. But I suspect it's a common one.

I think this happens constantly in leadership, strategy, and communication work.

Organizations often focus intensely on visible friction points — declining trust, disengaged audiences, ineffective messaging, poor retention, internal dysfunction — while overlooking the smaller, underlying mechanisms that create those outcomes in the first place.

But if you find the cause, you can craft the cure.

Most of the time, our energy is spent reacting to the visible failure rather than understanding the subtle misalignment beneath it. And often, the longer we stare at the symptom, the larger the problem appears and the more impossible the solution begins to feel.

But going down the rabbit hole is not wasted effort.

Exploration and curiosity matter. Deep analysis is often how we learn the contours of a system well enough to eventually identify what truly matters. If I hadn’t walked away confused, I might not have returned with enough context to recognize the solution when I saw it.

The danger arises when analysis becomes fixation, and we lose the ability to step back and reassess the problem’s frame.

Some problems require zooming in, others require zooming out.

The skill is knowing when to do each.