Unsolved Problems

Have you been frustrated because someone wasn't addressing a problem or wasn’t addressing it in the right way?  At times it seems I've spent my whole career in that situation.  Management didn't address the problems I felt needed to be fixed.  AFS didn’t address the significant problems of the industry that I saw.  The church I attended didn’t do the right things to increase attendance. At times, I even felt the people working for me weren’t concentrating hard enough on the problems that I wanted them to fix.

That makes me sound like an old curmudgeon. While I may be, listening to others, I know I’m not alone. I’ve heard the same complaints everywhere. Everyone knows what problems need to be fixed and are frustrated because they aren’t.

Whenever I run across something that doesn’t seem to make sense, I try to figure the logic behind it. Doing that now, I think I’ve come up with some ideas that might have reduced my frustrations through the years.

The most obvious idea I came up with was that someone might really be working on the problem but not advertising it. No one likes to admit they have problems. It goes without saying that if you tell everyone you’re working on a problem, you’re admitting you have a problem. Not only that, but sometimes it’s just better to keep your mouth shut. Management isn’t going to tell you they are building a case to fire the colleague everyone feels is screwing up the entire operation. Just like you’re not going tell them you’re looking for a job at a different company when you’re frustrated with management for not getting rid of him.

That being said, I know that answer doesn’t cover all the situations. We all know there are many times when the problem really isn’t being worked on. I’ve come up with only three possible causes for that happening.

The first is the most obvious and the one that I’ve spent much of career addressing: A problem won’t be worked on if no one knows it’s a problem. If you think back to when we were switching from cupolas to induction furnaces, we thought we were making the “same iron” if we had the same carbon and silicon, but ran into machinability problems. We didn’t know back then that all those other elements and nucleation had to be controlled if we were really going to produce the “same iron.” I’ve been in many foundries that really didn’t know how bad their scrap was. Once it was shown to them, they started trying to reduce it. 

Of course, there are those problems that are obvious and well documented and still nothing is done about them. The second cause for not doing something about a problem is not knowing what to do to fix it. Let’s face it; if you don’t know what to do about something, it’s not very likely you’re going to do anything. There was one foundry I was trying to help with an inclusion problem. We made change after change, but we finally stopped doing anything because we ran out of things to change. Fortunately, later we got a clue what was needed, and it was improved, but for a considerable period we did nothing because we didn’t know what to try.

This is an important lesson for everyone who is trying to get someone else to solve a problem. Don’t tell the boss about a problem without suggesting what needs to be done to fix it. If you can’t come up with a way of solving the problem, don’t be surprised if there isn’t any action taken. Of course, telling the boss what to do does take a bit of finesse.

That brings us to the last reason problems aren’t addressed. Other problems are more important than it. There is only finite amount of resources that can be spent. We technical types are infamous for finding what we see as problems that no one else sees. We will even come up with ways of solving them. Unfortunately, at times we forget to check whether we are spending dollars to solve a problem that is only costing us pennies.

So the next time you start to get frustrated with a problem that isn’t being addressed ask yourself these three questions.

1.                 Is it known that this is a problem?

2.                 Do you know what should be done to solve it?

3.                 Is the problem important enough to warrant the time and money for a solution?

If you’ve answered all of those questions and still can’t figure out why no one is working on the problem, there’s one more question that you need to ask: Is there something that you could be doing to solve it?

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