More Buckets!
Thursday, August 30th, 2007
In life one encounters challenges, sometimes even full-on problems. My experience is that these challenges often face individuals inside of a large organization and organizations themselves. There are 6 distinct types of responses and characters that I’ve encountered in these situations and I like to express them in the metaphor of a sinking ship that has sprung a leak.
- Fix the leak: The most rarified group is those who believe that the solution is to patch the hole. This may not be the easiest solution, the quickest, or something that can done by an individual alone, but this never daunts those who want to fix the leak — more often they’re stymied by the following individuals.
- More buckets! Though misguided I have a soft spot for these types naiveté. These people are certain that the answer to keeping this ship with a leak from sinking is to bring on more people with more buckets! These people see water on the ship deck, won’t stand for it, and know exactly how it can be fixed: get more people with buckets!
- Technology Solution: These individuals assess the situation for you and recommend that what your ship needs is a brand new bilge pump that only they can provide one of the sophistication that your ship requires. These technologies can be leveraged to affect a new cutting edge solution – often a brand new nuclear powered super bilge-pump is recommended. It is worth noting that the pump often arrives late and in the form of a small, unreliable gasoline-powered sump-pump and our technologist isn’t sure where you can get gasoline but knows that he/she doesn’t have any. At this point the suggesting of a new boat tends to appear.
