When to Pivot on the Problem

Since February, I’ve had a working relationship with an extremely gifted fashion designer. Together, we created a men’s shirt design that flattens the abdominal region when the dresser buttons the shirt up. This designer and I have a note of professional symbiosis. We joke at the same time, become analytical and serious the next, then break on cue to share a personal story that offers both insight into our respective character quirks and comedic relief to lighten the hour. We are here now; but just a few months ago, we were about as far away from mental harmony as a camel likely is from a Sea toad.?

Perhaps the hardest part of leading is understanding how vastly different humans’ are with problem-solving. When humans solve complex problems, their brains sort through thousands of prior solutions to try and identify what might work to remedy the current complication. As the best of us know, in the twentieth hour of a whiteboard brainstorm, tensions run high, frustrations ooze, and the room begins to smells like the inside of a fuselage on a cross country flight. If you’re lucky enough to belong to a powerful team, the gritty, tough problem becomes a pearl in the nick of time. If you’re not, then maybe you should keep reading (and maybe I should get to the point, and my dentist appointment).?

After working with a number of high performing teams over the course of a year, my stint as a subcontracted ghost writer taught me that successful teams know exactly when to bail on a good idea with too many thorns. Successful companies have all solved problems for the public. More specifically, pain points. The teams behind these companies have labored until their eyeballs pinch and their toes swell. But as the readings show, at one point or another, one idea was tossed, and a new one formed in its place. Youtube was a dating service; Shopify was a snowboard equipment store; Corn Flakes cereal was the result of a failed attempt to make coffee from a granola recipe. Humans are imperfect to the core, but some of our mistakes along the way to success are more right than they are wrong, and sometimes the solutions we’re searching for simply aren’t worth our time.?

Understanding this idea is a crucial component of progression on a challenging front. Moving past an existing roadblock requires multiple approaches, and each approach should be tried for a finite amount of time. If you spend too little time on one approach, it’s not fleshed out fully. If you spend too much time on an unfruitful approach, now you’re wasting valuable resources that could have been spent championing the winning route. So? How do you know? How do you know when to jump ship on one approach and try another??

Well, the exact duration of time will vary with the situation of course, but the methodology doesn’t. What I told my colleague a few months ago would likely prove true for any problem-solving marathon, really. At the time, we were trying to figure out how to keep the front of our men’s slimming button down shirt design from puckering in the middle, due to two very different materials pulling each other in opposite ways. I had come up with a few different stitch/fabric combinations that I thought would fix the problem and keep the buttons from behaving so poorly. The designer had her own ideas, and had gone out and bought some new buttons to work with. After about a week, we had a phone call about what would work best. She offered up a number of complicated stitching options to connect to the buttons, but the shirt still puckered. I said, almost astonished—What about snaps, Velcro, duct tape, and glue? Why are you still bothering with buttons?

It was a joke of course, but my message wasn’t. I understood that I had mentally exhausted the idea of using buttons to produce our desired result days ago, and had moved onto researching new closure forms. On the other hand, the designer had dug deep into her stores of stitching knowledge and had tried attaching the buttons in a number of creative ways for the duration of the week, but she hadn’t jumped ship on using the buttons altogether. I asked her, Of all the hours you spent working on the different stitches with the stubborn buttons— which of them led you to believe that another few hours would fix the problem??

She and I have a very clear understanding now. If a solution has legs and these legs extend somewhere, the solution might stand. If the legs can’t possibly extend beyond a certain point and all the ways that they might have grown have been drawn out, scratched at, white-boarded ad nauseam; then not a minute more should be spent on that particular path.?

Pivot time.