Hiding in plain sight..?

Recently- don’t remember exactly where, maybe some TikTok video my daughters shared with me- I saw a video in which there was a little boy who surely had tried to squeeze, headfirst, between two bars in a wrought iron railing (as kids are sometimes inclined to do). He surely felt anxious after a strenuous effort and ended up caught between the bars.?

He yelped as two adults (his dad and uncle?) tried their best to pry the bars apart just enough to free his head, lodged about halfway up (or down) the height of the railing. They huffed and puffed mightily, trying to pry the bars apart, with their hands positioned near the top of the railing, veins and eyes bulging, sweat trickling down.?

After some fruitless attempts, everything seemed lost. They boy kept wailing, and the guys started more frantically trying to free him. Finally, they agreed to get a hacksaw to cut one of the bars. They were about to do this when the kid realized that by tilting his torso just so and moving forward, he could (and did) get the rest of the way through.?

The two men, apparently victims of sudden amnesia (remember they were about to go get a hacksaw?), looked at and chided each other, pointing fingers, each one asserting that he had been “just about” to point towards this “obvious” solution. It is also probably fair to say that neither realized that if they pulled at the bars closer to the middle of the length (where the kid managed to poke his head through), they probably would have been able to create the minute extra width he needed to pull free.?

Remember the space race anecdote (fable?) about the problem of writing in space? Ever notice how pens stop writing when upside down (sometimes when horizontal)? They work with gravity, right? Ink goes to the bottom of the cartridge, where the little bearing (or the felt tip) transfers it onto the writing surface. This problem vexed NASA for a while- astronauts needed to write but would find it challenging to do so without gravity… So NASA invented the “space pen”: a cartridge filled with pressurized gas to push the ink to the tip, regardless of position. Another triumph of space age technology! However, consider what the Russians allegedly did, faced with a smaller budget. They gave each cosmonaut a pencil. Solved.

More often than we want to admit, we end up spending more time and energy than needed looking for solutions far more elaborate and complicated than necessary. Before you know it, the day has ended, the meeting is starting, the deadline is upon you.?

If we could get to the solution more easily, through a more direct route, we could use the extra time wasted on “the long and winding road” on more value-adding endeavors. You live you learn, but we will never be rid of the fact that obvious solutions are sometimes the hardest to see, even when they might be right in front of us. Hiding in plain sight.

Is there a way out of this conundrum? Here are a few things to consider:

• Take stock. When you feel like you are in the hottest point of the effort is probably a good time to put your (physical or mental) tools down, take a step back, and get a wider angle, trying to get a fuller view of the larger picture.?
• Ask for feedback. Run a colleague through your thinking - are you falling victim to the sunk cost fallacy, unwittingly committed to a course of action you already invested lots of energy on, and digging the hole deeper? Are you prey to workshop blindness, so focused on the minutiae that you lose sight of a more direct way?
• Cut your losses. In the early days of my career, developing software for business applications, I learned (after much heartburn) that it was oftentimes easier and more expedient to just start from scratch vs. adding patch upon patch, creating a Frankenstein with rapidly multiplying failure opportunities, a nightmare to debug.?
• Just do it.?I know it is a commercial slogan, but sometimes action is the best cure to the problem- vs. trying to fit in legacy tools (a.k.a. “this is how we do it here”). Over time, many organizations develop powerful approaches and methods. In fact, most of the times re-inventing the wheel is more wasteful than using proven tools that might be at your disposal. So, while this is not an argument for frantically diving into solution mode, not following a disciplined approach, well rooted in data and analytics, it is also true that many problems are of the “just do” variety, where sinking time into running problem-solving processes and workshops, creating pareto and other such analytics will only confirm what you already know. Sometimes it just be more efficient and effective to just act on that low hanging fruit and secure 80%-90% of the benefit.

Reality happens. We will always find situations where we probably dabbled more than we needed to, and where the solution was staring at us in the face. However, taking that proverbial step back does allow for a realization that there is a simpler approach. Next time you are confronted with a situation where you suspect there is an easier way, think of that poor kid with the swollen ears from trying to yank his head out from between the bars.

There might be a solution that will not need a hacksaw or multiple people trying to pull the bars apart.?