Squirrel Hunting

This is not related to hunting at all. Rather, it's about a rhetorical question and how it relates to my work.

"Would you use a shotgun to hunt squirrel?"

The answer is no. If you use a shotgun, you might kill the squirrel quite easily, but you'll ruin the meat with all the buckshot. It's so easy as to be unsportsmanlike conduct.

Rather, you shoot squirrel with a slammer calibre gun like a .22 rifle. In the hunting cluture I was raised in, if you can't shoot straight enough to do it with that bore, then you should not be hunting squirrel in the first place. Use a shotgun and wide buckshot only when you're trying to hit a flock of birds from 50 plus yards.

So, this applies to work or problem solving in general. When faced with a problem, people will often take whatever approach worked in the past for them, whether it is appropriate to the problem or not. They fail to start at the beginning. So when they try to solve the problem thay are using the wrong tools.

The place to start is first to ask what the problem is, and try to understand it within its own context. Understand exactly what it is that you are trying to solve, so that you have a firm goal in mind. Then you will know what tools are appropriate to use.

Often, folks will just start hacking at a problem with their old techniques, hoping that they'll fix it without having to think. The problem is that this often creates more problems, as the folks try to fit the problem into their old solutions.

This drives me nuts. I would much rather work with people who first ask what the problem is, and are willing to spend time thinking about the problem itself. Those who just take out the shotgun and start using, I just don't want to waste time with.

This is a test

This is a test of blogger.com