• Baker/s: The people essential in making the system work. If we use the example of sick employees returning to work before they are better, then the bakers would be the sick employees, their bosses and colleagues. • Ingredients: These represent the things that interact within your system. A good place to put the company leave policy and standard operating procedures for when someone is off ill, such as who checks their mail and responds to their clients etc. • Oven: Here we have a very apt analogy for the environment in which a problem is baked. Are sick employees faced with a hostile, judgmental or competitive environment or a supportive, collaborative team? There may be many different views on the environment within which the problem has occurred. All views are important and should be considered in turn. It will soon become clear which one is most likely to be the prevailing one. • Layers of sponge cake: Is your problem a couple of layers deep? Sometimes the symptoms we can see are really only the tip of the iceberg and there may be a lot more going on than what meets the eye. Could employees be coming back to work too soon for reasons that are not obvious? You may need to dig a little bit and speak to a few people to find out more. Perhaps there is some kind of social reward for returning to work as soon as possible? • Icing sugar: Maybe your problem doesn’t have too many layers. Instead it could be draped with icing sugar, giving it a smooth sugar coating over time. If it has taken some time for the problem to come to light or to be addressed, what has been keeping it off the radar screen? Have line managers been encouraging ill staff to return to work as soon as possible to avoid having extra work on their desks? The icing sugar may even be something as simple as the status quo that never gets questioned. • Candles: Candles make a birthday cake special — at least until one’s 21st birthday, after which they become a fire hazard. The