Problems vs. Solutions

"The heart of the matter, as I see it, is the stark fact that world poverty is primarily a problem of two million villages, and thus a problem of two thousand million villagers. The solution cannot be found in the cities of the poor countries. Unless the hinterland can be made tolerable, the problem of world poverty is intolerable, and inevitably will get worse."

-- E.F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful

If there's one thing I learned during my years of consulting, it's that too much knowledge is a terrible thing. I couldn't possibly begin to count the number of projects I was on that had worked themselves into a state of "analysis paralysis". That is, they'd spent so much time thinking about the question that their brains froze up whenever they tried to think of an answer.

Sometimes you have to jump in with both feet and just start slogging away. Granted, you fuck up left and right, but as long as you don't keep screwing up the same thing in the same way you inevitably work your way towards a solution. It's not always the most elegant one, and it's usually not the one that will win you any industry awards, but it gets the job done. In my experience, I've generally found that the best time to solve these problems is while the talkers are talking.

Of course, as I soon as I solved a problem for a client they would immediately switch from talking about how complicated the issue was to talking about how smart they were for having fixed it. Not that it made any difference to me - as a consultant I was already out the door. But it just goes to show that you don't need to know much about a problem to solve it. You just have to be willing to bang your head against a wall for a while and hope your brain is big enough to knock it down.

"There are two kinds of people, those who do the work and those who take the credit. Try to be in the first group; there is less competition there."

-- Indira Gandhi

Posted by flow Frazao on January 12, 2006 at 11:39 PM in Little Stories, Me, Microfinancing | Permalink