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DEFINING THE SOLUTION, DEFINING THE PROBLEM
Saturday Oct. 8, 2016
When we are not faced with a problem we more likely tend to say ‘sorry, not interested’, or ‘we don’t have a plan for that’, or ‘we have no budget for that’.
It’s the end of forest fire season, soon ‘snow-removal season’ and hurricane path citizens are fleeing – destructive nature, predictable and always costly. Nobody ever has ‘a budget that big’ but yet we manage.
Yet we so easily find budget for luxuries, disposables, fads – new technologies, vacations, investments and ‘the new car’. It seems credit cards and periodic bumps in our limit are offering solutions when we don’t have a problem yet. But like good well-conditioned lemmings Dr. Pavlov would admire, we put those solutions to work.
And we wonder why consumer debt is so high, trust in government spending is so low – and there is never enough money to do everything that needs to be done – only what we want to get done, and if we don’t have enough for the ice-cream cone then maybe it’s time to take out a second mortgage.
Sometimes solutions show up – often before we’ve fully identified or defined our problem; bringing a sense of immediate relief akin to finding that $20 bill between couch cushions when you’re short of cash to pay the pizza delivery driver. Or, minutes away from admitting your homework isn’t done, that you heard, “class cancelled”!
Solutions, I would contend, show up all the time – and we don’t notice because we aren’t having a problem then, or yet. When we have the problem, we embrace solutions (often half-baked ones) because we are feeling a sense of urgency, desperation or panic.
Reader feedback:
NEVER OUT AFTER ONLY ONE STRIKE
Mark, It’s the phone calls out of whatever field that keep us on our toes and in the game!!, PW, Calgary, AB
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