“Hey Ant, how are you doing?” Rosie, our once-a-week nanny, said.
“Good. What’s up?” I asked, assuming it was something unpleasant. Rosie is very self-sufficient and almost never calls me during the day.
“Well, it’s kind of cold in here,” she said, reluctant to complain. “Can we turn the heat up?”
“I wish we could, Rosie,” I said. “It’s so cold out that the furnace doesn’t seem able to get the place warm. It’s set at 68 but the temperature in the house can’t get there.”
“Maybe I’ll take Parker to the bookstore or something,” she offered.
Now, if your family cannot stay in the house because it is no longer fit for human habitation, then you don’t have much of a house. And, as the man of the house, the responsibility for making sure we can dwell there falls on me (at least in my house). I was failing that test, as there were days during the winter when the temperature greeting us downstairs was in the mid 50s. Now that’s COLD.
Assuming that our 20+ year old furnace was dying a slow death, and not having the least interest in the financial or technical realities of replacing it, I applied a Band-Aid — I took our electric space heater out of storage and set it up in the living room. Having solved the problem, I sat back on the couch and turned on Nat Geo Wild.
Of course, this was not much of a solution, even a temporary one, as Parker — speeding towards 3 years of age — would occasionally look at the heater with thoughts of what he could stick between its metal grids dancing in his head. I really could see them, I swear.
Fast forward a few weeks and I’m at Home Depot, picking up some windows to replace the horror movie look-a-likes that had come with the house. As I waited for the windows to be brought from the back, I chatted up the two older ladies working the counter, who I’m certain have fixed a thing or two in their day. I decided to run my furnace problem by them.
“Have you ever heard of something like that?” I asked.
“Not really,” said one of the ladies.
“Have you checked the air filter?” asked the other lady.
“Huh?” I asked.
“The air filter,” she repeated, as if Forest Gump himself were at her counter.
“The air filter,” I both said and asked, as my brain lurched forward like a locomotive getting up steam.
“Yeah, you gotta change that thing,” she said.
“Where is it?” I asked.
“I dunno,” said. “Probably different on all of them. Poke around.”
“Yes. I think I’ll do that,” I said, beaming. “I think I’ll poke around.”
As soon as I got home, I battled my way through the children and ducked into the furnace room. As instructed, I began to poke around, and it wasn’t long before I found it.
Yes folks, I had no heat for months because the equivalent of a thickly woven carpet was almost completely blocking the air flow. I slid in a new filter and turned the furnace back on. What had before sounded like a hair dryer now roared like a hurricane. I went to vents on the far end of the house and felt a rush of air I had not felt since we moved in three years ago. Since I changed the filter, the temperature in the house has not fallen one degree below the desired setting for one minute.
I started to think about why I had not made this simple fix sooner. Why had I frozen the family and grappled with space heaters when all could have been made right in an instant? Then I realized that this was typical Anthony. I had heard long ago that furnaces made use of air filters, and I even vaguely remember that when we bought the house our inspector told me to be sure to change it. But for some reason, I found the idea of both finding the filter and figuring out the replacement size very annoying, and so I pushed it into the dark recesses of my mind. I assumed this could not be the problem and buried the issue, (almost) never to resurrect it again.
Sounds crazy, right? Well, I’m sure I’m not the only one.
Today, right now, you are grappling with problems — things that don’t work, things you are responsible for making work — and you are trying to fix these problems by doing certain things, but those things rest on top of assumptions.
“We know that X and Y are true, and so we are moving in this direction,” you say.
But my point, my advice, is that if the next step you are contemplating is significant and/or if you’ve been grappling with the problem for a long while, it is worth your while to go back and verify or retest all the assumptions on which your current planning is based.
And as Dave Miller, vice chancellor for IT & CIO, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, writes, today’s CIOs had better be doing a lot of revisiting, questioning and reassessing if they are to respond to the changing environment.
“In order to move to a leaner, more strategically focused IT organization, it may be time to revisit the services that we provide and the way that we provide them.”
He continues, “I think we would have to take a new look at outsourcing supporting infrastructure capabilities that may be better performed by external service providers. This concept and practice, which has been somewhat cyclical in healthcare, is once again in play, and we can no longer afford to assume our unsuccessful experience in the past with outsourcing will be the same in today’s marketplace.”
Do you want to survive in a dynamically changing environment? Question everything, assume nothing, and revisit the foundations upon which your major challenges are being addressed. Shake the cobwebs from your mind and look at everything afresh, or there’s a good chance you’ll be left in the cold.
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