No one said a word in the Boston Celtics locker room until managing partner Wyc Grousbeck stormed in.

“I’ve spent 20 years building the franchise and wanted them to play with some guts,” Grousbeck, a rower for the 1983 Princeton Tigers’ National Champion crew team, said.

When he exited, the players were left to contemplate his words.

Down 3 games to 0 against the Miami Heat in the Eastern Conference Finals, the Celtics faced seemingly insurmountable odds to win the series. After all, no team had ever come back from that deficit in NBA history.

The next day, Al Horford, a seasoned veteran, suggested instead of watching video of their embarrassing Game 3 loss, the team should go to Top Golf, hit some golf balls, get their minds off the game, and have a bonding session.

When the Celtics won Game 4, that Top Golf experience became the narrative all over the sports world. And when the Celtics won the next two games as well, Top Golf became legendary.

Meanwhile, everyone ignored what actually occurred on the court, rationalizing the golf outing more than explained the turnaround.

Solving problems for any leader or individual is never easy.

Making a connection between an event and a positive result might appear logical; yet, unless there’s an understanding of the “Why,” there can never be an accurate conclusion.

Taking the easy correlation path toward reasoning will almost always lead to failure sooner rather than later.

To understand the root cause of why something works or why it doesn’t, our decisions must be put under the microscope.

For example, when Danny Meyer, the chairman of the board of Union Square Hospitality, receives a note from a consumer — good or bad — he never follows up with a thank you or an apology.

Instead, he asks specific questions to either find ways for improvement or to understand how he can address the problem. Meyer is constantly searching for the correct correlation applied to the causation.

How we improve as individuals or teams can only come from understanding the true causes for the result. This takes honesty, objectivity, and, most of all, persistence toward believing we can improve.

When things are going well, it’s human nature not to question or search for answers. But if we strive to reach a higher standard, asking how to improve is the most important step.

Legendary Green Bay Packers Coach Vince Lombardi once said, “Gentlemen, we will chase perfection, and we will chase it relentlessly, knowing all the while we can never attain it. But along the way, we shall catch excellence.”

But we won’t come anywhere close to perfection if we don’t understand correlation to the causation.

And Top Golf isn’t our answer.

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