One Utah

A while back, I posted about problem solving and the way in which many people seem to believe that doing something is the same as solving problems.  The thinking seems to be “If I’m taking action, I must be solving the problem.”  Such thinking misleads people into frantic activity when confronted by a challenge, activity that as often as not accomplishes nothing other than keeping them busy.

I ran into that again today - a coworker needed to print a document.  The printer nearest her desk was broken.  So she started calling around trying to find a printer on the network.  After an hour of calls, she printed her document.  In the meantime, the main printer was still down.  It’s not so much that my coworker hasn’t solved a problem (printing her document on a working printer) but that she solved the wrong problem.  The main printer is still down, no one can print to it, meaning (you guessed it) the queue is overflowing with jobs waiting. The minute the printer is fixed, it will start spitting out print jobs.

The tendency toward “Do something” thinking when confronted with problems is a mistake.  Usually, the best first thing to do when confronted by a problem is to ask, “What is really going on here?  What is the real problem?”  If you know what the actual problem is you then fix the actual problem.  If, however, you waste your time running in place, at the end of lots of time and energy, you are still facing the original problem.

In the case of my coworker, the problem wasn’t that her job wouldn’t print - the real problem was a broken printer.  Get the printer fixed and both the real problem and the immediate challenge are resolved.  By finding somewhere else to print her document, she failed to fix the real problem.  See twenty  minutes later, she had another print job to run.  Guess what?  The printer was still broken.  Had she called the printer repair company, by the time she finished calling around and finding a networked printer, the repair person would have been here.  By the time her second job needed printing, the printer would be fixed.  My coworker’s analysis was only partial and so her solution didn’t address the cause of her problem - the broken printer.  She defined her problem as printing her document.  Once that was done, she figured the problem was solved.  Then she needed to print another document and could not.

Reflecting on this incident, I realized how often I encounter such scenarios.  How often do people begin doing frantically hoping that somehow they will hit on the right response without first thinking it through, without first asking what is actually happening here? will this actually make things better? 

The outcome is lots and lots and lots of activity, but very little by way of effective action. 

This entry was posted Friday, April 25th, 2008 at 3:42 pm and is filed under This Blog. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.