How Not to Solve a Problem
When I was younger I took ballet classes at a popular dance school in my hometown for many years. The school was located on the second floor of an old warehouse and consisted of two good-sized practice rooms, a small lobby/office space and a tiny changing room for the female dancers. In this 64-foot square space, we crammed our ballet backpacks and duffels against the walls to keep open valuable floor space. Inevitably, all manner of miscellaneous dancer items spilled from the bags and mingled around the fringe of the room. Although many dancers waited for their classes and parents in the lobby area, the changing room was always packed with girls sitting on the floor playing cards, changing, watching videos and generally hanging out.
All day, every Saturday from September through December, the school rehearsed its annual performance of “The Nutcracker,” which was open to dancers from other schools and so doubled the number of parents and dancers in the limited space. The floor space in the lobby and even in the hallway was taken up by dozens of dancers eating, stretching and playing cards while waiting to rehearse their parts. The changing room during this time of year became essential in providing space for the extra dancers and their stuff. Though crowded, steamy and messy, it was a really fun place to relax. One year, however, an unforeseen problem presented itself into this semi-organized, pleasant, chaotic little room.
Surely you wouldn’t punch someone in the face for having a different opinion. It might serve its purpose, it might make them think or change their opinion, but it will also get you arrested.
There are many ways to solve any given problem, and there can be many paths to obtain a right answer. I’m sure you’ve slaved through math questions and put your multi-stepped problem up on the board, only to have it solved in under three steps by that kid from Vancouver. Both methods do ultimately work, though one may work better than the other. That is why we sit at oval tables and tear each other’s math problems apart for errors, so we can find the best solution to a question.
But what about open-ended problems? Things like English and history, where the answer is hidden under layers and layers of literary technique and primary source analysis? The solutions to those problems may never become clear, or if they do, they may have more than one angle and be ambiguous about their outcomes. You could argue for days about what would have happened had America helped the French peasants overthrow the aristocrats, but the real consequences are still as unclear as they were back in 1805.
The problem popped up when a pair of underwear appeared in the middle of the changing room floor. It had been worn. It had unicorns all over it. But no one would claim it, and so it stayed on the changing room floor for two whole months. Yes, two whole months. People stopped using the dressing room to lounge about. It became an area of business only; people put their bags there and changed but that was it. They waited in the lobby, which, tight as it was, became only tighter with the addition of all the additional bodies. It was impossible to walk from the window at one end of the room to the dance studios at the other without stepping on someone’s fingers. It was quite a pickle.
Surely you wouldn’t punch someone in the face for having a different opinion. It might serve its purpose, it might make them think or change their opinion, but it will also get you arrested. But each solution, even wild ones, have a time and a place. Punching someone in the face because they are stealing your money is an excellent solution. It’s the same solution to the first problem, confronting someone with a different opinion. Even though they are the same solution, they are different problems and thus they require different thinking.
One day as the girls filed into the studio, they discovered that the underwear was gone. Immediately they began to put their bags down, pull out cards and reclaim their hang-out space. But one little girl, keener than the others, pointed to the lost-and-found box in horror. On the very top was the pair of underpants, in all its unicorn and rainbow glory. From that day on, nothing in the lost-and-found box was reclaimable. It overflowed, sweatshirts and water bottles spilling over its sides, but no one would go near it for the presence of the unicorn underoos. If your stuff went in the lost-and-found, it was as good as gone. And the box lost its usefulness as a last-minute source of hair pins, leos and toe tape. As it turned out, the secretary had been the one to sacrifice the lost-and-found box to the undies because, as she said to a crowd of angry bunheads, no one was using the changing room.
A solution may not be glaringly terrible. It may not cause the deaths of a dozen people, it may not cost you your job, but it can make your life more difficult. If you are facing a problem and you are worried about making a mistake, you shouldn’t fear if you think a little. Solutions should be deliberated and thought about very carefully before they are made. No fix to any conundrum ought to be offered with faulty or incomplete thinking. There is a time and a place for any possible answer, but you have to think for two seconds about whether it’s an appropriate one. Learning how not to solve a problem is just as important as learning how to solve problems in the first place.
I am still very upset about the underwear incident. I lost a really nice water bottle to the lost-and-found box.