There is a Dilbert cartoon where Dogbert and PHB talks about two kinds of management problem. Dogbert says “There’s the kind you can solve by yelling and the kind you can solve by buying some sort of software”. (You can see the actual cartoon by following the link above. I wanted to buy the license to post it here, but this blog is still not popular enough for a $35 spend)
Also, a favorite quote of Charlie Chaplin that I use often: “Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.“.
Why am I saying this? The tragedy is that, Dogbert/ Scott Adams hit too close to home. Far too many people seem to think that way, at least in abstract. Maybe it is fine politics? I don’t know. I have seen this happen from board rooms to judiciary. Policies and diktats fly out for execution, without any in depth understanding of feasibility and fallout.
I have been personally handed such diktats for which in some cases I had gone to extreme measures such as causing on-shore companies to be setup, or have suffered extreme feedback because no one wanted the change; including the customer. Also, too many seem to think that any problem can be solved with an app or of course by sternly speaking.
What it needs is not an app or stern speech, but holistic and systematic thinking. Our education and therefore our mental models are analytical. That is knows how to split a problem in to smaller problems. What we need is a new kind of thinking- Synthetical thinking, where we assemble facts in to larger whole; a solution. In other words, we need to learn to listen more.
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