The Challenge of Being a Problem Solver
Over the past few months I have been working on a major challenge that I believe I have had my entire life. I’m sure many of you will relate. The problem that I have is that if I see a problem, there is this tremendous drive to solve it. The thought of sitting back and letting a problem solve itself is a very scary proposition to me.
I’m not sure when it all really started, but one thing I know is that it has actually gotten quite a bit worse over the last few years. I’ve always believed that I’d rather clean up a mess someone made than have them do nothing. That is generally a good rule of thumb, but I’m learning that it is much more nuanced than you might think. Absolutely there are a lot of situations where acting swiftly and decisively is much better than sitting around and waiting for the problem to escalate or get much worse. But there are also times where acting too swiftly can make things much worse. And I’m not talking about not having enough information. That’s a bit easier to wait on. I’m talking about times when you see the problem, can clearly see the resolution and know you can execute on it. Yep. Sometimes that is not the right course of action.
The Garage Door Opener
Recently my garage door opener failed. Not a major thing but it’s one of those small things that are just super annoying to me. I’ve replaced a garage door opener before and while it’s not my favorite thing to do, it’s not a huge deal. But we currently have a home warranty that covers this. So I opened up a service request.
Just like any insurance company, and maybe more so than other types of insurances, home warranty companies are notoriously difficult to deal with. I’ve had mixed experiences with our current company. So even though I opened the request, I was pricing replacement openers and plotting the path to resolving it myself if they gave me the runaround.
Within a day or so, I got an email saying that they had authorized me to find my own contractor. Not really what I wanted to hear. One reason I have a home warranty is because unless I know a contractor personally, I really don’t like the process of engaging one. So I called the warranty company to figure out what was going on. They basically said that they were continuing to look for a contractor but that currently none of their contractors could give them an estimate on when they could address it. Let’s just say that I was frustrated. It’s not that the garage door is as critical as my heater during the winter but it is a convenience.
At that point I’m running even more scenarios on how to get this solved myself through my head. That’s when I remembered I had a sticker from a company from the last time they had to fix my door. So I gave them a call assuming they would tell me they were months out and that’s why they hadn’t directly responded to take the request. But no, they asked for some information and started the process. The next day they were at my house diagnosing the issues. A half hour later they had approval to replace it and they actually came back that evening and took care of it. Problem solved.
What I Learned
This is absolutely a problem I could have solved myself. But the reality is that it was not something I HAD to solve myself. I had the network in place for someone with more expertise and resources to solve the problem. What I needed to do was put the resolution in motion, let someone else execute with just input from me where necessary. At the end of the process, the solution was much better and cheaper for me. Plus the time and mental energy I would have spent solving it myself was able to go elsewhere.
Lessons for Us All
There are several lessons for us to learn or be reminded of here. The first is that not all problems need to be solved by us immediately. That implies some sort of a triage motion when we encounter a problem. We need to get good at distinguishing between the following types of problems:
Problems I can and need to solve immediately.
Problems I can and need to solve but at a different time.
Problems others around me could solve with my support.
Problems others around me can solve and don’t need or want my support.
Problems I need to completely ignore because they aren’t really problems or don’t matter.
Problems that really need to be left to God to solve.
A second lesson is to realize that if you triage something correctly, it will probably end up better than forcing it into the “I need to solve immediately” group. Not only that, but if you solve all the problems you see, what does that do to everyone around you? It makes them dependent on you and their own problem solving skills will be less than they could have been.
The final lesson for this post (I’m sure there are others not mentioned here) is that if everything falls into that first bucket, you end up spending time solving problems (or maybe solving things that weren’t problems), instead of spending time on things of greater value. Even worse, you could end up spending time trying to solve problems that you personally will never solve.
Actions to Take
If you are a chronic problem solver, I’m sure you have run into issues like I have. My biggest suggestion and what I am working on is to try and slow down when you see a problem. Instead of increasing your speed and diving right into action, take a moment to figure out what type of problem you are really facing. Then you can build the right action plan (that doesn’t mean complicated) and then go from there. If that is something you can figure out, then you will avoid fruitless action, better develop those around you and hopefully let the things that really don’t need to be solved go.