…Unless You Have a Tool

by Dwayne Phillips

There are many tasks that are difficult and require fine motor control and dexterity. They are darn near impossible—unless you have a tool.

A few years ago, we were building a system that had a sensor. The sensor would sense the state of an other system and relay signals to a processor. The sensor was small—less than a half inch in size. The part of the sensor that attached to the other system was about a quarter inch in size.

Attaching the sensor was difficult. Persons in the lab fumbled with it and usually needed half an hour to attach it just right. This wasn’t going to work. We wanted the sensor to be small, but “small” meant that no one could handle it.

Then someone in the back of the room blurted out the answer, “Unless you have a tool!”

The world changed. Three engineers each drew sketches of a tool that would hold the sensor and allow a person to attach it to the system we wanted to monitor. The tools were the size of a regular wrench. Once prototypes of the tools were built, persons in the lab attached the sensor in a few seconds with ease.

Simple. Obvious. Unless it isn’t.

Struggling with something? Anything. Not just physical, but mental, emotional, financial, any “-al.” Stop struggling. Stop trying harder. Find a tool that removes the struggles. The tool is probably much easier to make than the original task is to accomplish.