Tag: problems

Some things work

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Before you set out to change something, make sure it needs changing.

Elevators, for example, probably do not need dramatic improvements. Particularly in their user experience, they work fairly well. You are at a certain floor, you press a button to call the elevator, you enter it, you select the floor you want to go to, it moves and stop, you exit the elevator, done. It is a pretty well oiled dynamic, and trying to make it more efficient – say by asking people to select the floor they are going to at the same time they call the elevator – might create funny confusion and make the process slower.

Similarly, the process of listening to music on a mobile phone was fairly smooth without needing to remove the jack and forcing people to use bluetooth headphones. Of course, improving the user experience was not primary in this case, and so eventually the whole process now feels more clunky and unreliable.

Not everything needs changing, not everything needs improvement. And if eventually your decision is that yes, this thing does really need to be better, put the users first when designing the betterment.

Take a step back

Fabrizio1 Comment

When you get stuck, your instinct tells you to find a way out.

And so you delve deeper into what you were doing and got you stuck in the first place, you wrestle with what you don’t get, tirelessly digging a path in the hope that the answer is at the end of it. You spend time, energy and focus looking at the problem, and the more you do it, the less it seems feasible. Not once I have managed to get untangled this way.

Instead, you could take a break. You could go for a walk, call a friend, have a cup of coffee. And then, when you go back, you could look at the problem’s contours, trying to refine them, make them more comfortable for you, even finish something around the problem you said you would have finished later. You are making it more presentable and ready to be tackled.

At this point, one of two things happen.

Perhaps you get your answer. It might come unexpected, as your mind was not really looking for it.

Or you realize that the problem was not really THE problem. That you had fears, expectations, doubts, concerns. All preventing you to look at things for what they really were. A mere block. And then you can continue with your work.

Until you get stuck again.

Repeat.

Emotions and rationality

Fabrizio1 Comment

If you are using emotional tools to address a rational problem, chances are you are going to struggle in the medium/long-term.

Say you are at a meeting discussing how many new hires you need for the next project. Since you know that hiring people, onboarding and training them is a lot of work, and you’d rather focus on something different, you leverage the fear of taking risks of your boss, throw some numbers in the air to make your point, and end up scoring a point. In the medium term, your team will be understaffed.

This is the same mechanism we are seeing at work with Brexit and most of the populism around the World. A real, concrete, rational problem (i.e. an increasing part of the population is being left behind) is addressed leveraging emotions (fear, anger, hatred). Good results in the short-term (Brexit was voted, many populists are being elected), but when it comes to putting together concrete acts to move past the feelings, not much can be done.

Something similar happens with the opposite. If one of your team members is struggling to share ideas and participate in team meetings (an emotional problem), and you decide that from now on meetings will feature a “let’s go around the table” moment (a rational tool), you will force the team member to speak, yet not necessarily get the best ideas out of them.

Facebook is in the process of understanding this very thing. In trying to cope with the spread of hate speech and inappropriate content on their platform (emotional problem), they have decided to ramp up the number of moderators and feed them 14,000 pages of instructions on what is acceptable and what is not (rational tool). Clearly, it is not working.

Beyond malice and opportunism, make sure you know on which level your problem is, and come up with a solution that speaks the same language. Your chances to make an impact and be trusted (forever?) will increase dramatically.