I was on holiday recently staying near Saint-Tropez in the South of France, a town I have visited many times before. We were watching the incredible display of old and new sailing yachts in Les Voiles de Saint-Tropez regatta from the hill behind the town when as we walked back into the port we discovered a completely new (to us) part of Saint-Tropez right on the sea front just outside the main town with its shops and harbour.
This is the benefit of returning somewhere a number of times – you find out new things you never suspected. It’s the same in professional work where drilling down more into a topic or document can reveal hidden depths of meaning which are easily missed at first glance and are vital to understanding and decision making.
This sort of careful and detailed analysis prior to taking any decision or action will enable a far more profound conclusion. As Albert Einstein said “If I were given one hour to save the planet, I would spend 59 minutes defining the problem and one minute resolving it.”
There even seems to be a Drill Down Technique in the context of management processes where When you are facing a large and complex problem with significant potential ramifications, one of the best things you can do is break that problem down into its various components until you have it solved.
This is also linked to other techniques like root cause analysis designed to get to the bottom of, for example, a complex IT failure or medical problem. This article on the subject and Tracing a Problem to its Origins comments But what do you do when you have a problem at work? Do you jump straight in and treat the symptoms, or do you stop to consider whether there's actually a deeper problem that needs your attention? If you only fix the symptoms – what you see on the surface – the problem will almost certainly return, and need fixing over, and over again.
However, these techniques or approaches are only any good if they are utilised in the first place. In the crazy modern work environment where we are flooded with information and expected to make snap judgements, taking time for a more thorough analysis is almost counter cultural. This Harvard Business School Article on What It Takes to Think Deeply About Complex Problems articulates this dilemma well suggesting that Simple answers make us feel safer, especially in disruptive and tumultuous times. But rather than certainty, modern leaders need to consciously cultivate the capacity to see more — to deepen, widen, and lengthen their perspectives.
And if that means finding a bit more time to understand the issues and reach a more robust conclusion – or in my case discover another part of an historic old town - then so be it. As Abraham Lincoln said “Nothing valuable can be lost by taking time.”
This is the benefit of returning somewhere a number of times – you find out new things you never suspected. It’s the same in professional work where drilling down more into a topic or document can reveal hidden depths of meaning which are easily missed at first glance and are vital to understanding and decision making.
This sort of careful and detailed analysis prior to taking any decision or action will enable a far more profound conclusion. As Albert Einstein said “If I were given one hour to save the planet, I would spend 59 minutes defining the problem and one minute resolving it.”
There even seems to be a Drill Down Technique in the context of management processes where When you are facing a large and complex problem with significant potential ramifications, one of the best things you can do is break that problem down into its various components until you have it solved.
This is also linked to other techniques like root cause analysis designed to get to the bottom of, for example, a complex IT failure or medical problem. This article on the subject and Tracing a Problem to its Origins comments But what do you do when you have a problem at work? Do you jump straight in and treat the symptoms, or do you stop to consider whether there's actually a deeper problem that needs your attention? If you only fix the symptoms – what you see on the surface – the problem will almost certainly return, and need fixing over, and over again.
However, these techniques or approaches are only any good if they are utilised in the first place. In the crazy modern work environment where we are flooded with information and expected to make snap judgements, taking time for a more thorough analysis is almost counter cultural. This Harvard Business School Article on What It Takes to Think Deeply About Complex Problems articulates this dilemma well suggesting that Simple answers make us feel safer, especially in disruptive and tumultuous times. But rather than certainty, modern leaders need to consciously cultivate the capacity to see more — to deepen, widen, and lengthen their perspectives.
And if that means finding a bit more time to understand the issues and reach a more robust conclusion – or in my case discover another part of an historic old town - then so be it. As Abraham Lincoln said “Nothing valuable can be lost by taking time.”
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