The price of a fix often has little to do with the size of the problem. Much more likely, it depends on the quality of the diagnosis.

This runs against corporate instinct. A serious problem should require serious response, and a cheap answer to an expensive-looking problem feels irresponsible.

So, organizations reach for the proportionate fix. Complaints about speed? Let’s increase the speed. Complaints about service? Let’s buy more service. The budget now matches the apparent weight of the problem, and everyone leaves the room feeling the matter has been taken seriously.

Two old stories stand against this practice. In both, a real problem produced a stream of real complaints. In both, the obvious fix was the expensive one. And in both, the eventual answer cost close to nothing — not because someone got lucky, but because somebody finally figured out what was wrong.

The airport that made the walk longer

Some years ago, executives at a Houston airport had a problem. Passengers complained about long waits at baggage claim.

The response was the obvious one: put more baggage handlers on the shift, and it worked exactly as intended: the average wait time fell to eight minutes, comfortably within industry norms. But the complaints kept coming.

Finally, someone looked at the problem carefully. It took a passenger about one minute to walk from the arrival gate to baggage claim, and another seven minutes to wait at the carousel.

The fix was to move the arrival gates away from the main terminal and route bags to the furthest carousel. The walking time increased to roughly six minutes. (The bags did not arrive one second sooner.) Complaints dropped to near zero.

Notice what the money bought and what it didn’t. Extra handlers were a real improvement that changed nothing people cared about. Rerouting was a purely scheduling decision.

The building that hung mirrors

Tenants in a large office building complained that the elevator service was slow. A specialist consulting firm that was brought in established that the average wait really was long — the complaint was accurate, not imagined. The firm then worked through the options: add elevators, replace the existing ones with faster models, install computer controls to use them better. Each was examined. None was workable. The engineers concluded the problem could not be solved.

A young psychologist in the building’s personnel department heard about the problem and saw something different. The engineers heard a complaint about time. He heard a complaint about standing in a crowd with nothing to do. His suggestion was to place mirrors in the elevator lobbies, so that people waiting could look at themselves — and at each other.

As mirrors went up, the complaints stopped. Someone even congratulated management on the improved service.

What the two have in common

What unites these cases is that both named a cause rather than experience.

“The baggage claim is slow.” “The elevators are too slow.” Both complaints sound like descriptions of a fact. Neither is. Each is an ordinary person’s best guess at why they feel bad. The feeling is real. The explanation attached to it is a guess, and it arrives sounding like evidence.

And in both cases, the organization bought the guess wholesale. Houston hired more handlers. The building considered new elevators. Nobody was careless; both responses were competent, reasonable, and aimed squarely at the stated cause.

What happened next? Houston hit eight minutes, and the complaints kept coming. The elevator engineers exhausted every mechanical option and declared the thing unsolvable.

That moment is worth reflecting upon, because it is the most common ending of all. Not an expensive failure, but a confident conclusion that nothing can be done. Most misdiagnosed problems don’t just blow up. They get quietly reclassified as facts of life, and the organizations learn to live with them.

What broke the deadlock in both stories was the same move: somebody asked what the person complaining was actually going through. Not whether the complaint was justified or not — it was — but what the experience consisted of. Seven minutes of standing. A crowded lobby with nothing to look at.

Once you have that, the fix isn’t clever. It’s obvious, and usually cheap, because you are no longer buying a solution to a problem nobody has.

This is the part that should be encouraging and usually isn’t. Diagnosis is the cheapest thing an organization can do and the thing it does least.

So, the next question is an obvious one. If correct diagnosis is so much cheaper, why is it so rare?

I’ll return to this question in my next piece.