SOLUTIONS

Who doesn’t enjoy having these? Even more so if they actually work. Which brings me to a personal observation on the subject of solutions. This is based on having heard plenty of them as Mayor and discovering in my little fish pond how they are different from answers.

It might seem to be a trivial form of semantics, but from what I have observed when a person tells me he or she has a solution to a problem, I normally is a theory. That is something they truly are convinced will work although it hasn’t been tried yet.

An answer on the other hand is something that is stated with more confidence because it is a solution that was tried in the past and actually worked. Believe me when you have some issue that you have to deal with the difference can be very important.

Now even those none of this is written down anywhere and not recorded in some book of rules about problem solving I still experience it quite often. That is why it is something I have had to learn to recognize. The one thing that happens when I don’t and I ignore or fail to listen when the person is talking solution instead of answer can be a disaster.

It is amazing too how so often I end up finding how the same people are far better at offering solutions instead of real answers. These are the “advice” people. Those who are rich in advice and poor in wisdom. Sometimes they get the title “expert” because they have an advanced degree that suggests they are smart.

Well there are probably plenty of people out there with a Masters or Doctorate who are smart. I won’t claim they are not. But let’s be honest, their knowledge is often more theoretical than practical. You have to take it and use it in some way before it becomes other than just theory.

To me that is a world of difference from my experience. I can be sitting there in my office and have a meeting with some “expert” on a given subject who is going to offer me a way to solve a problem. Well I’ll listen and then afterwards I spend a little time chatting with them.

It generally take to long to find out if they are right out of graduate school or have several years of experience. But even if they don’t tell me all the details, which is rare, the one thing I normally find that helps to tell the difference is costs. The theoretical people never have and exact price tag. How could they? You can only know what something costs if you actually spent money on it before.

Whereas the experienced people will often pull out a calculator and start crunching numbers. They can often give me a realistic cost so I know if their answer will be affordable.

However most of the time I encounter more solutions than answers from people. And then I have to sit down and take the “best” guess approach to whether or not I chose to trust their choice. It’s all fun when it works. When it doesn’t, it is speech time to lie my way through why another solution wasn’t an answer.