The other day, I was asked by a friend of mine to help him with a problem at work. His team was struggling with a technical problem, and they weren’t able to get to the root cause. I was pretty much tickled since these opportunities are rare, despite my best efforts to try and seek them out. Day-to-day, I work in a finance department – an unfortunate outcome of not quite knowing what I wanted to be at 19 years of age and choosing a major that, ultimately, resulted in a Master’s Degree in Comparative Political Science. Now, while this work pays the bills, it doesn’t lead to many opportunities for collaborative work, creative problem solving, or many of the other things I’d rather be doing with my time. (All of which explains why I went back to school last year and now I’m almost done with that MBA degree. Yes, that was a shameless plug. Call me! Nonetheless, back to my post…..)
I started poking around at just what was going on. I asked him what the problem was. He launched into some strange, rare, martian-like language apparently known only to engineers. He mentioned something about an intermittent something-or-other in the wickitty widget that flopulates when the discombobulator does the whats-a-doozit. I stopped him in his tracks. ”The intermittent doohickey isn’t your problem,” I told him. ”The real problem is that you don’t know how to solve the problem. Simply put, you’re stuck, and you don’t know how to get un-stuck.”
We went to the nearest white board to start diagramming some things out. As we went through an ad-hoc brainstorming session over who we should rope in to help with the problem, another engineer came by and we brought him into our session. I kept them focused on the immediate problem with not knowing how to diagnose the intermittent whatty-what. No “naming-blaming-shaming” other groups or people was allowed. Not that those aren’t legitimate problems, I reminded them, it’s just that THOSE problems aren’t THIS problem. Since we were working on THIS problem, we needed to keep ourselves focused RIGHT HERE.
Eventually, another engineer heard us and offered a suggestion to Engineer #2, and he ran off to test it. Engineer #2 was now un-stuck and moving once more. I continued to work with my friend who started this whole thing, and he developed a few options of his own that he could pursue at the organizational level, too. He was now, also, un-stuck.
This situation is something that I call the “Problem-Problem.” When we are focused on something that we are very familiar with, we tend to see the problem in the way we’ve always seen it. If we don’t know how to step outside the situation, we just repeat the same behaviors, and never learn to re-define the problem. By learning to change perspectives or simply to invite in others with a different take on things, we gain a new understanding of the situation and the ability to re-formulate.
If we never seek the outsider’s viewpoint, we will just consistently re-create the problem-problem.
Copyright © 2011 David Kasprzak
