Turn Up the Radio

I was in a meeting the other day and we were talking about a tech issue.  A problem.  One of our systems was running slow.  Now since we developed it, we are the ones responsible for troubleshooting the problem and fixing it.  Team thinking is always good for this type of thing since everyone on our team has pretty varied skill sets. We have a few minutes of discussion and a solution is proposed. Most seemed to agree (it's rare that everyone agreed and that's the value of a team) that while we couldn't be certain of the root of the problem, we could make things better by doing what one member suggested. Note I said better, not "problem solved".  As the team started to discuss the problem further, one team member while trying to both understand and relay to the team what was being suggested said; "Oh, I get it.  If we do this it's like turning the radio up in the car so you won't hear the engine pinging".  Immediately everyone laughed a little, the mood lightened and the analogy became clear. Since it wasn't possible to fully solve the problem in the time allotted for this meeting, what envisioning the analogy did was move us along with a workable, if only temporary "fix".  Brilliant!  Why?  Because we were able to mitigate the problem for now and continue on. Ok, it let us buy more time.  And more time is both necessary and many times incredibly useful when solving problems.

Working in this fashion just makes sense.  We need to be agile.  We need to be able to act quickly and decisively.  We need to be nimble.  We need to be responsive and adaptive.  To do so means we have to be willing to accept that we have to move forward even when things aren't really as we'd like them to be. Looked at from one person's lens the suggestion that we "turn the radio up so we don't hear the problem" could signal laziness, lack of attention to detail or worse.  But seen through the eyes of a pragmatic realist with a penchant for getting things done, the analogy makes perfect sense. 

Moving through problems, be they technical or not, is never a straight path.  First, there's always more than one way to solve a problem or issue.  It makes sense in most cases that you and I use the minimum distortion or distraction necessary to get the problem to go away, or at least partly away while a more complete solution is sought.  And this doesn't mean to suggest that it makes sense to always "take the easy way out".  It means that the best way to "look" at an issue is to find the small steps that can be taken to keep things on the intended track, while keeping the goal in sight.  So is "turning up the radio" a workable concept for you or are you more of the "head to the service station" type?