Posts Tagged ‘problem solving’

See it? Over there, floating in the air just … out … of … your … reach. In your mind’s eye, you stretch out your fingers … so close. Maybe if you get to your feet! Yes, that will do it! The simple act of standing will bridge the distance, allowing your brain to latch onto the elusive idea floating just outside its grasp.

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My niece is about to enter the second grade, but as Robert Fulghum famously noted, she learned everything she needs to know in kindergarten. She learned to share and to play fair. And she expects the universe to support her idea of fairness. So when she lost her plastic duck-topped coffee-stirrer—a souvenir from the previous day’s parade of ducks at the Peabody Hotel—she declared: “That’s not fair!” as though the universe would magically make it reappear.

“What’s not fair?” I asked.

“They took it!” she said of the restaurant staff that had thrown away her prize.

“You left it on the table, and they picked it up with the rest of the trash. Why isn’t that fair?”

Because!

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Lucien Loubiere had a problem. A big, angry, snorting problem. It was early 1961, and the actor commanded the spotlight before a live audience in Périgueux, France. As he stood center stage looking regal in a brilliant bullfighter’s costume, he suddenly found himself facing an unexpected and unwelcome challenge: an enraged young bull, set loose by practical jokers in the show’s company.

Audience members began screaming and scrambling from the front rows, but Loubiere remained calm. Reaching inside his costume, he quickly extracted a pistol and fired three shots, killing the bull as it charged. Then turning to the audience, he announced with a dismissive shrug, “It’s the modern way to do it.”

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Poor Virgil was a sweet young man saddled with total ineptitude. Whatever he touched, he broke. No matter how simple the job, he botched it. Finally, given the easy task of polishing a set of keys, he managed to wear away the grooves, rendering the keys useless and sealing the door they were supposed to unlock.

Faced with this latest example of his incompetence, his cousin Barney berated his stupidity, leaving Virgil hanging his head in shame and defeat.

Fans of The Andy Griffith Show recognize the plot from the episode “Cousin Virgil.” But most of us have witnessed similar interactions between managers and employees—or worse, between parents and children. People screw up and other people berate them. We may have been on the giving or receiving ends of similar experiences.

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Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about decision-making. Make good decisions, take small but persistent steps in the right direction, and you can achieve amazing things. Make poor decisions, and your mountains seem to grow taller and more insurmountable each day.

Since the start of the year, I’ve been making poor decisions. Actually it’s more accurate to say I’ve been postponing decisions. But making no decision is really making a decision to do nothing—and that’s usually a poor choice. So my mountains have begun to seem … immovable.

Fortunately, those mountains are uniquely mine, and the only person my idleness has hurt is me. Now that I’ve chosen to do something, I can simply move forward with no real harm done.

But what if other lives were in the balance? What if your failure to act could cause irreparable harm?

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You’ve probably heard the line from the movie Apollo 13: “Houston, we have a problem.” Tom Hanks, playing Commander Jim Lovell, was informing Mission Control about a catastrophic failure aboard the space craft. The film is based on actual events, and “the” catastrophic failure turned out to be a series of challenges that threatened to leave three astronauts stranded in space.

Faced with these challenges, the real-life astronauts and ground-control experts could have thrown up their hands at the unfairness of life, decided the problems were insurmountable, become overwhelmed and panicked, focused on their inadequacies, or gotten caught up in any of the dozens of excuses we all use for failing to work our problems. Instead, they maintained their focus and pulled off a miraculous save.

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Finished with your holiday shopping? How did it go? Did you spend a lot of time second-guessing yourself? Calling friends, your spouse, your parents and asking them to validate your choices or help you make a decision? Do you sometimes wish you were one of those people who seem easily able to decide for themselves?

Then why don’t you try to become one of those people?

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A helicopter. After being stranded thanks to other delayed flights with this carrier, I thought it only fair that this time the airline should comp me a helicopter to La Guardia. And I wanted transportation from customs to the helicopter pad at JFK and then from the helicopter pad to the gate at La Guardia. It took a lot of polite persistent persuasion, but the airline finally granted the requests. Not bad maneuvering for a nearly broke recent college grad. But, hey, I was just channeling Lucy Ricardo.

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