Solving the Same Problem Only Once

Some of us whine about being endlessly in the loop, but we don’t really do anything to fix that. Let me illustrate. Say you’re a Canadian or European firm and you’re ready to “go on holiday” for a month (we do a week at a time over here and struggle to make that work).

The Usual Struggle

You spend the week before you depart getting everybody every single piece of information they might need while you’re gone…so they don’t interrupt your margarita.

Then you get back, relieved that you weren’t needed, and ready to face work again. You dive right back into the same place, deep into every loop, needing to sign off on everything or give your feedback, often too late in the process.

Why? Because—in spite of your whining—you want to be in the loop. It feeds your significance.

The Alternative

But let’s say you decide to let your capable staff run things. You’ve adapted to a new hiring strategy that fits your firm’s maturity, and they are ready. But you still get problems to solve. What do you do then? That’s what this is about, and it’s where process comes into play.

But first a note about you and process. I’ve talked about how the same personality attribute that gives you an aptitude for entrepreneurial risk is also responsible for making you skilled at forming helpful processes which your firm will follow in order to thrive. (You won’t be good at following them yourself, but you’ll be good at formulating them.)

So when a problem presents itself, and someone wants your opinion about what to do, you have two choices:

• Give your opinion quickly, move on, and leave them dependent on you the next time it surfaces, keeping you inevitably in the loop until your next vacation.
• Take some time, figure out why it happened, help the people involved to develop their decision making muscles, and put a (flexible!) process in place so that you only have to solve that problem once.

It takes longer, but you want to do the second, and then you’ll be solving big problems only once, and teaching your team in the process. Solving the same problem over and over again is annoying. Taking the time to solve a problem once and for all is fun and your team will appreciate you.

A Cart at Publix

The Publix grocery store where we shop replaced half of their shopping carts recently, and it’s easy to get one of the nicer ones because they are dark brown. I chose one of those nice ones last week, and as soon as I passed the cut flowers section I knew I had a problem. A big problem. A wobbly-wheeled cart, or one that pulls to one side, is a big problem.

I was thinking about this article, though, and I decided to figure it out without looking down. If it was a bad wheel, the bump would occur at the same interval each time the wheel rotated. If it was the floor, the bump would be random.

It was the wheel, dang it, and I went back and swapped carts. Whew. If you’re solving the same problem every time, change the wheel. Then fix the floor.

The shopping cart is an imperfect metaphor, but you see the point I’m trying to make, and I didn’t want to waste the metaphor!