If you were trying to get to the Statue of Liberty and didn’t know where it was located, would you just head out and hope you would find it?   If you don’t know where you are and where you need to go, will you ever get there?

Although many people can agree that in order to solve a problem well, one must take a top down approach to problem solving, it is my experience that people take the path of least resistance and solve problems bottom up.  For some reason most of the time I come across people who want to just dive in and “solve a problem.”  Some of these people see the situations in front of them as black and white.

Like many in the business world,  I too just want to get down and dirty.  I want to implement  solutions and move on to the next challenge.  The problem with this approach is that unless you step back and take a birds eye view of the situation prior to getting down in the weeds, not only will you manage to create a locally optimized solution, but you will likely find it more difficult to achieve your goals.  

Most people can step back and get a broader view, but they rarely go beyond the areas outside their immediate control.  Whereas the people who jump into a solution know the situation as the black and white squares above, the ones who take a broader view know there is more to the problem.

These people realize they are in a maze, but their Achilles heel is that they stop widening their view here because they see multiple paths to take.  Any one path may be the optimal path and so they do some analysis around the 3 possible solutions.  They show their analysis to management, select the path, and go on to implement the solution. 

In rare situations, you will have management who will help you see the entire maze.  These are the great managers who realize that locally optimizing a system may adversely affect someone else.  These managers realize that for the company to succeed, it need solutions that go beyond their immediate area of responsibility and which are aligned with the corporate goals.

If you don’t know where to start or what your goal is, any path will do.  So start at the top, understand where you’ve been and where you want to go, then find the solution to today’s challenge which will optimize the entire system.