If you have followed many of my posts, you know that I believe that all of us – managers, individual contributors, whatever – are problem solvers in our work at it’s core. Interestingly, we are typically reactive problem solvers. What does that mean? Day after day, most of us wait to hear of a novel problem and then jump into solution mode. We may spend minutes, hours, days, or more trying to solve the problem (or problems) that pops up. When we get to a solution, we feel like we’ve really accomplished something…which we have! The bad news is that reactive problem solving, leads to us always chasing the issues which is exhausting for a team and terrible by those impacted by the problems – customers, employees, partners, etc.
One observation I have had is that most reactive problems are a breakdown of something existing – they aren’t problems with new products, projects, etc. Surprisingly, we have enough attention on and foresight of new products/projects to be proactive problem identifiers and solvers fairly rigorously. Of course there are exceptions, but overall the focus on “new” helps us find and fix problems in that space consistently early – often before it becomes a pain for many customer, employees, etc.
So why are we so reactive outside of the new, shiny things? As a collective, it becomes a psychology problem: once something goes through it’s highly focused “new” stage and into more stable production/steady state, we feel like that thing is “solved”. It’s been vetted and it works. We have other demands on our time and attention, so it becomes an entity (product, project, process, etc.) that is lightly maintained, rarely reviewed, and never revisited. Thus very, very often, we forget about said “thing” until it breaks weeks, months, or year later – when we reactively start the cycle above. Or at least that is the simple version. The reality is a bit more complicated and a little more concerning.
Think back to something you completed a year or two ago: a project, process, product, etc. You imagined and built XYZ to use to fill a gap, add value, or solve an unsolved problem. How often do you go back and think about XYZ? If you did it 2 years ago, think about how much you’ve learned and changed in 2 years. Think about how much technology changed in that time. The world, even. The absolutely best solution 2 years ago may still be amazing today…or it may be woefully outdated or even inadequate, but not yet broken. If you are like most of us, you’ll do it when something breaks and not until – again, we are reactive problem solvers.
Let’s continue down the path that something in XYZ has now broken. It’s a material issue that needs to be addressed. What do most of us do? We narrow on the current issue (that is broken) and come up with the best possible solution for the problem. It’s “firefighting” 101 as so many professionals love to talk about. We identify the exact issue and fix it as best as we can applying the smallest band-aid we can muster to prevent further bleeding…and then move on to the next thing. And THAT is where we make both a crucial mistake and miss an excellent opportunity.
Id like to offer another approach – and the idea is not mine alone: there are plenty of good books on the topic. Id suggest that we take these opportunities to rethink the problem at hand and the solution that we’ve employed. Again, the world has changed, technology has changed, our company has changed, and we have changed…was the solution from the past still the best way to do it today? The answer is very rarely a resounding “YES!!!!”
Yet, we very rarely do anything but the lowest possible effort break/fix. Why? That is the question Ive asked myself at a few organizations over the last 10+ years. Why don’t we take the time to rethink both the problem and the solution to see if we can improve the future? For me, it comes down to the fact that we’ve erected a series of barriers to exit our existing way of being/doing things. I’ve been able to identify 5 of these barriers both in myself and in organizations…Ill be interested to see if they resonate with you.
Reluctance to admit there is a better future: Many people believe that if they rethink a problem and/or a solution that they are saying that their past self was wrong in the definition of the problem/solution. That doesn’t seem likely – knowing that they’ve changed, the org changed, tech changed, etc. but it is a conscious or subconscious fear that I see play out regularly when it comes to rethinking a previously solved problem.
Sunken Cost Fallacy: More projects than Id like to count either continue with lots of break/fix solutions for a longggggggg time because the belief is that there was such an investment up front on the project/process/product, that it can’t possibly be scrapped/rethought now. Not only would that be a big resource blow (the sunken cost could be in money, time, people hours, etc.), but see the last point looms just as large for the owner of the project/process/product (someone would feel like they had to admit they made a mistake).
“It’s working fine”: One of the largest impediments to rethinking an entity is the stubborn thought that it is mostly working now and there are other priorities that deserve the attention. It’s true that we can’t rethink everything we do every day, day after day. But on things that are mission critical, we absolutely should be able to make time to consistently reevaluate what we are doing. And oh by the way, periodically reviewing and rethinking our work will likely save us organizational time and energy in the long run as we will stay ahead of the vicious cycle of break/fix.
“It’s too expensive to change and/or redo relative to the cost of fixing”: Another fixture to enable avoiding rethinking. People and organizations dislike change and they dislike feeling “wrong” even more. That makes this statement be nearly a blanket “get out jail free card” intellectually when you don’t want to do the hard work of reevaluation of the problem and/or solution and asking the necessary questions about where you are versus where you want to go.
Ego/Expertise: The fifth and final barrier I have observed (although less than the others) is the moment when the combination of ego and expertise won’t allow a person to contemplate the idea that their own knowledge may be stale or lacking in any significant way. Most of us know we don’t know it all. We also know that new information is created every day. But some times, some of us are not willing to accept the idea in certain contexts that we may be wrong even though we have spent plenty of time in a specific intellectual space.
It must be noted that there is overlap within these 5 barriers, and you will often experience resistance (internally or externally) across more than one barrier. For example, “it’s too expensive to change” is often paired with the sunken cost fallacy around how much has already been invested to create an even higher barrier to exit. All of this is completely normal and natural. But it doesn’t need to be the end of the story or the end of the journey. Barriers are there to be overcome.
To give you an example of exactly that, let’s imagine that you and I are the co-GMs of a 3 year old semiconductor chip factory. It’s a multi-million dollar facility that churns out the highest quality chips for high end electronics. We could easily run into all 5 barriers when it comes to any suggestion of upgrading our facility:
- Reluctance to admit there is a better future: Our chips are world class. We are profitable. No one is doing it better than we are, so why change?
- Sunken Cost Fallacy: We’ve invested millions in a state of the art facility that our competitors envy and don’t want to trash that investment.
- “It’s working fine”: Our production line is currently as efficient and effective as anyone in the industry; that’s how we stay on top.
- “It’s too expensive to change and/or redo relative to the cost of fixing”: Retooling or reconfiguring our production facility will not only cost us millions in expense, but it will cut into how much product we can ship hurting both the top and bottom lines.
- Ego/Expertise: We built the most technologically advanced facility in the world using the most innovative architecture, engineering, and equipment when we designed this place.
You can’t deny that all those points in isolation make perfect sense. Yet, we see companies in the semiconductor industry continuing to uphold the spirit of Moore’s Law year after year (if not the exact computational output). You know that there are GMs of those facilities that think exactly what we just did above.
However, the key players in the semiconductor business all overcome these barrier every day! Why/how? Simple: the cost of not innovating and competing outweighs the cost of proactively rethinking their products and overcoming the barriers to exit that status quo. They must rethink, innovate, and evolve to survive. They are forced to overcome the barriers to exit the current reality and stay relevant.
Individually we may not have that same forcing function to require us to rethink something that is working today (largely because we may not have competition threatening to do our work for us!), but we can still learn really important lessons from the industry. Being willing to intentionally rethink our problems/solutions then overcoming the barriers to exiting our existing situation can be one of the underappreciated ways to “disrupt yourself” and achieve more in your role, career, and life than you would have ever reasonably expected.
View from the Middle 