The Evasive Obvious

It’s kind of strange how, many a time, in to the process of solving an issue, we put in a lot of effort, to find later that the best solution was the most obvious......and for whatever reason, we’d missed it. So what is it that prevents our seeing it in the first place?

                                   

Let me do this through an example:

A couple of days back, the day I’d put up the post on Integrated Energy Centers, a friend called to say that the pictures weren’t showing up. My immediate reaction was, ‘oh… you should clear your cache and cookies and restart your computer and try’. I didn’t pause to think that the issue might have been at my end. First pitfall there….. :)

Later in the day I happened to see the blog on another laptop, and realized the issue was indeed at my end, the pictures weren't showing up there either. I tried reloading all the pictures, and unfortunately for me, this was one post which had a lot of pictures, so lots of effort. Still didn’t work. I checked the blogger help center, and went up the wrong tree there, thinking it was a storage space issue. Another hour gone. I then used other apps to work on the pictures, paint, adobe, picture manager, drive, so many. Nothing worked. By this time I’d worked myself into a real obsessed mood. I was three hours into trying and nothing was working. I got in touch with friends at Google to see if there was a bug on blogger. There wasn’t. I got on the blogger forum, and there was one really helpful guy, Kobus, who tried telling me what I was doing wrong. Initially I found myself resisting even his solutions, saying that’s not what I was doing. I went to bed with the problem unsolved. Got up in the morning with the realization that I had all along missed the obvious. 

I was searching for solutions in the wrong space, and it took me to step back from the entire problem to see what I’d missed. I was searching among shortcuts and in the process, I’d lost sight of the direct path. It sure was a lesson. 

Sometimes, in our anxiety to find the solution, we find ourselves in the middle of complex and convoluted paths, and get so caught up in there, that we don’t see the straight path to the solution.

How can we watch for this? When stuck in a situation that needs resolving, keep in mind:

1. What is my objective? Never lose sight of that

2. What’s the best way to get there? Find that right path. If needed have a Plan B

3. Chalk out the process for Plan A, and work on that per process. Only if needed get to Plan B

Seems obvious enough, right?  But it's obviously not ;)