3 Attitudes to have in Problem Solving
Have you ever had a problem where you just wanted to tear your hair out? The kind of problem that causes you to say, “Mr. Problem, you &*$%%, I don’t have time for you today!” or, “You’re causing me to lose sleep, Mr. %&^#&# Problem!”?
From time to time we feature guest bloggers, authors, thought leaders and subject matter experts here on yoogozi.com. Today I want to introduce you to Dave Braun, who happens to be my partner at FLASHPOINTS; and who’s done the heavy lifting on building out the functionality, mechanics, and bells & whistles on this yoogozi site so that I can focus on collecting and creating content. It’s a partnership of complimentary strengths. (Yes, there’s a message for you in these last couple of sentences.) Dave has been a trooper on meeting some nutty timelines, and dealing with my hair-brained ideas, but his message today is at once thought provoking and instructional. Just the way I like it. ~Larry
First the Problem
From the early evening on Aug 19 until about noon on Aug 20, the display of this yoogozi.com site was, well…messed up. No pictures. No styling. Just some text scattered about the page. Taking a look at the detailed formatting and structure of the site now, you can imagine my frustration. Okay, I admit that during those eighteen hours, there was some mumbling and cursing under my breath!
Since the problem’s now resolved (and I can breath clearly again), I thought it would be helpful for me to share with you what happened, what lessons I learned, and what nuggets I was reminded of during the battle.
Now the solution
One of my recent goals with the yoogozi website work has been to improve page load speed times. As a result, we use a service that helps deliver our content to the page faster to improve your experience.
To explain it in terms most of us will understand, think about yourself standing in a park during a family picnic. You have a contest where the loser gets 10 water balloons thrown at them. Sorry, but you just lost the contest!
Now, you can choose one person to throw all of the balloons as fast as they can, or you can choose ten people to each throw one balloon.
If you choose one person to throw all ten balloons, once you say, “Go!”, it will take about sixty seconds for them to accomplish the task. If you choose ten people, each one throwing a single balloon, it will take about six seconds to use up all of the balloons. Of course, it’s much faster. And of course, you must say, “Go!” for it to start.
So, taking this analogy to the website, if the content displayed is the water balloons, we wanted all of them to be thrown at once so the content is displayed as quickly as possible. Therefore, we use a distributed network of servers, each of them providing different portions of the content. This is like using 10 people, each with a single balloon, simultaneously tossing them at you so the event is over as quickly as possible.
Unfortunately, one of the servers that’s supposed to say, “Go!” for this all to start said absolutely nothing. Nada. Zip. Zero. So, like the 10 people standing with their arms cocked and ready to throw, but not hearing you say, “Go!”, the server network was prepared to work, but the main server didn’t say “Go!”, and consequently, nothing happened.
Except the ramp up of my frustration factor!
Problem Solving Lessons
Happily, the issue finally got resolved through some good support help and some attitudes I had to remember, as well as steps that I had taken leading up to this. Here are the most important ones.
1. Pay for good help in anticipation of problems. Don’t go cheap; because when problems occur, you want to resolve them fast, and cheap doesn’t normally equal fast. We pay a little more for our hosting service (and other services) so that we’ve got help available 24/7…and it’s good, responsive help. Even if they don’t always cause the issues, they still help pinpoint the problem. (We use Site5.com for hosting and MaxCDN for our content delivery network – these are affiliate links, for full disclosure).
I am so glad now for making that decision early on.
Note that even if it’s your friends helping you, reward them with your help or reward them monetarily some how. Or if you use free or open source software, make a donation. I love Evernote (no affiliate link) and use it daily, so I pay for the premium version.
2. Realize that every problem is an opportunity to learn. And, wow, did I learn a lot about content delivery networks! But, what’s most important about this attitude is that it allowed me to stay pretty positive, asking questions, not settling for “over my head” answers, and trying new experiments to provide additional clues to all involved.
A side benefit was that I facilitated the exchange of knowledge between two companies, and helped other users avoid the same headaches. That’s a big win!
3. Be like a dog with a bone, and don’t let go until YOU’RE good and ready. I had a help ticket in, got on multiple chats with multiple people, and helped determine the problem was located to one geographical area. And it was one particular person I was chatting with that made the difference, as he was able to communicate to a senior admin person to make a change that was really non-intuitive.
I could have told myself, and Larry, “Forget using this methodology, we’ve gotta get the site going and move on.” But I had the long-term view and kept digging until I was convinced the problem was actually solved, not just in the short term, but in the long term as well.
Now, have I always done all three of these things when faced with a challenge? Absolutely, not! Sometimes I panic and throw my hands in the air. But, because I’m working with Larry and follow his advice, and am authentic with myself and him as much as I can be (plus having some training as a John Maxwell certified coach), I’m growing more and more self-aware of my strengths and weaknesses, and of my potential and limitations.
As one of our recent thought tiles says, “seek progress, not perfection.” (Click here to see it.).
