Are you too focused on the problem at hand?

I'm back home in America for a while, and it's starting to feel a lot like Christmas.  The malls are jammed, the outside world is white, the tree is up, and my mom is starting her annual Christmas-cleaning frenzy.

This year though, not all has gone smoothly. This year, our vacuum cleaner started wheezing badly as she attempted to clean the dining room.  Really badly.  Like it was struggling desperately to survive after swimming the English Channel with bricks tied to its waist.

 My father, my mother and I all tried to fix the problem.  We emptied the vacuum bag, we cleaned the inside of the vacuum, we even checked the electrical wiring.  There was absolutely nothing wrong - yet the vacuum was obviously on its last legs.

Of course, this wasn't unexpected.  Our vacuum is nearly as old as I am - which I remember because my mother enjoys telling about how when they purchased the vacuum and brought it home for the first time, my two-year old self proclaimed in wide-eyed astonishment, "I have NEVER in my WHOLE LIFE seen a GREEN vacuum cleaner!!!!

Luckily though, just as we had all concluded that it was hopeless and we'd have to brave the malls to buy another one, I happened to notice that the lights flickered every time we turned the vacuum cleaner on high.

Why was that?  Simple... my mother had plugged the vacuum cleaner into the only power outlet in the house where the power could be set lower to dim the lights.  And since the lights were only half-on... the vacuum was only getting half the power it needed to work.

Once we'd turned the power completely on, the vacuum roared away and performed its job like a champion.  Problem solved!

But it was a complete fluke that we figured out what was wrong.  We were all so focused on fixing the vacuum that we never thought that the problem might be something else.

Anyone else have that experience?  We're all feeling a little embarrassed that three well-educated, worldly adults spent 40 minutes trying to fix an appliance that wasn't broken in the first place!  So please share!  If we're stuck with egg on our face, at least it would be good to know that we're not the only ones!

Comments

[Conor Neill]

This post reminded me of a session I had with Verne Harnish, author of Mastering the Rockerfeller Habits. He asked "what is the most important capability of successful visionary leaders?"

Pattern Recognition.

Great visionary leaders give themselves access to data and then put themselves in an environment that they can see patterns in the data. Regularly taking a step back and asking "what have we learnt?", regularly getting out of the everyday environment, seeking out S.W.P.s (Tom Peters says we should all seek out Seriously Weird People in order to see the world in new ways that we are currently blind to).

There are many situations in life and business where we try to fix a tree while the forest is burning down.

[Joseph McCulloch]

I have had a similarly embarassing, but more costly experience with home appliances. When a "gas" dryer doesn't work the obvious place to check is the incoming gas line. After no trouble was found, replacement was the obvious choice. A new dryer was installed one day after the "broken" dryer was removed. New dryer, same problem. The less obvious issue in the haste of solving the problem is the electricity (tripped circuit breaker) used to start the "gas" dryer. This costly experience shows the importance of asking the 5-Why's when solving a problem.

[Alyjuma]

Ah, it happens all too often when you focus to hard that you can overlook the obvious, the details of a problem. I think it also ties into innovation, where you get some of your best ideas from things that aren't really related to what you're working on!