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I have a closet off my office that has (actually had) a draggy door. By that I mean the door scraped the floor severely when one opened it and closed it. I have an old painted wood floor that shows the arc of the openings and closings over the years.
It was a pain, though reasonably functional. So I kept meaning to remove the door, plane off the bottom, and put it back up to end the floor's catching and scraping.
Every time it dragged, which is every time I opened it, I thought, you know I really should fix that. But it's one of those things that simply never found its way to the top of my priority list...
I have an old stuffed recliner that I seldom use on the opposite side of my office from the closet. Every now and again I may sit there to read something just for a change of pace. Last week was one of those times.
I sat myself down, organized the material in my hand, read for a short bit and at some point looked up in thought. When I did, I happened to glance over at my closet door. And I noticed something that in ten years of being here I had not noticed before.
This old wood closet door was actually coming apart at the top.
To try to explain this I'll just say that the center panels at the top of the door were pulling away from the spine panel (the panel closest to the hinges) creating a slight gap. This caused the door knob side to tilt downward toward the floor thus causing the scraping on the floor.
The door didn't need planing at all.
I went down to the basement to find my old trusty rubber mallet that I have for just an occasion, gave the top of the door about ten firm raps, the top slid into place, the bottom leveled and the scraping and catching disappeared.
Looking at the problem from an angle I never had before allowed me to see the real issue and apply a more appropriate (and far less strenuous) solution.
Door swings nice now...
Do you know that for centuries human beings had the idea that cold weather causes colds? People looked at a surface fact: In the winter months there are more colds and flus than during summer months.
At first blush the remedy would seem to be to stay inside, warm and dry during those months. And so we did.
However, the actual reason for the increase in colds and flus in the winter months is because we're all inside with greater and more frequent access to each other and each other's germs.
So cold is only the cause in that it drives us inside to the real cause. And the real solution then is to employ human behaviors that will best avoid the spread of those pesky germs.
To find the solution we had to dig a little deeper, understand the problem from a different angle...
Do you know that one of the best ways to proofread something you've written is to scan it backwards?
Sounds weird doesn't it? But it's true.
Scanning or reading your words backwards takes your brain and eyes out of their normal rhythm and allows you to see irregularities that you miss with what I like to call "patterned vision."
You're so used to looking at things in a certain pattern and when anomalies don't fall into that arrangement you tend to skip right over them.
I can't tell you how many things I've written and read over zillions of times only to still miss something. (This is why I have great proofreader for these Advisories.)
Leaders can't be waylaid by patterned vision. We can't be lazy and rely on a traditional rhythm. We have to be open and willing to look at problems from angles we never have, through a scope of reality so that we can have real solutions.
We can't take a cursory view of problems and end up with only anecdotal answers.
Otherwise we might find ourselves with a terrible cold, planing a door for no reason and writing about it with all sorts of typos.
We can't have that can we?
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