A step-by-step worksheet for tracing a court process problem back to its actual cause.
Built for the Commission on Fairness and Public Trust's 2026 Court Leaders Meeting, this two-part worksheet walks a court through diagnosing and fixing a broken process, using Ed Muzio's 7-step problem-solving framework.
The first sheet, Identifying Symptom, Root Causes & Potential Solutions, starts with a symptom you're seeing — aging traffic tickets, a flood of confused calls, whatever it is — and works backward: who else has hit this, what's actually causing it, what data would test that theory, and what solution follows from the real cause rather than the assumed one.
The second sheet, the Solutions Pre-Implementation Checklist, is for once you have a proposed fix. It maps out every step of the current process, how each stakeholder (pro se litigant, defendant, court staff, judge) actually experiences it, whether the process holds up against legal obligations and individual circumstances, and whether the proposed change is actually simpler — not just different — before you roll it out.
Both include a worked example: a court's aging traffic-ticket warrants and bond-waiver bottleneck, traced from symptom to root cause to a concrete proposed fix.