Remember the movie Groundhog Day, where Bill Murray keeps reliving the same day over and over again? Remember the movie Groundhog Day, where Bill Murray keeps reliving the same day over and over again? (See what I did there?)
Sometimes our work lives feel like the movie when we keep having the same conversations about the same problems, over and over again. Have you heard this one? “We never have time to do it right, but we have time to fix it over and over again.” Yet we continue to make the same short-sighted mistakes. The reason this happens is that we spend too little time truly understanding problems. As a result, we end up solving the wrong problems, or we only solve part of the problem. Worse yet, sometimes we don’t solve the problem at all and it comes bounding back to our doorstep bringing all of its friends and relatives!
So, what can we do? Two things. First, take a beat before spraying your machine gun of advice on how to solve a problem. Then ask a few questions, encouraging others to do the same. I had a mentor tell me early in my career, “Spend 85 percent of your time understanding the problem, 15 percent solving it.”