Staying Flexible

There's a guy at work that I've worked with for years. He's brilliant, and for the most part, I enjoy working with him. But he does this thing that's always driven me crazy. I've just very recently come to understand and appreciate why he does it.

Here's the situation: It's the eleventh hour of a big, complex project. Everything is going as smoothly as can be expected, and we putting some finishing touches on. Then suddenly, he goes into brainstorming mode. It's like we've spent a year building a sports car, and I say something like, "What color do you think we should paint it so that it looks its best?" And he'll reply, "What if we didn't build a car -- what if we built ... an airplane?"

As I've gotten older, I've become increasingly concrete sequential, so my historical response has been along the lines of: "No, we're not building an airplane; we've already built a car! Are you @%&*ing crazy? Focus! Focus!" If we had wanted an airplane, there was a time when we could have built one. When we're shipping tomorrow, it's not that time. Brainstorming impossible things with people under a deadline increases everyone's stress levels for no reason, and furthermore it disregards and disrespects all of the work that's gone into the project thus far.

But what I've come to understand is this: he doesn't really want an airplane. Brainstorming is just his way of stepping back from the solution to make sure it's really solving the problem. He's thinking to himself, "We wanted to build something that can go really far and really fast. Does this thing we've built do that?" He's walking around it, looking at it from all angles, and trying to put himself in the shoes of someone who's just asked for a go-far-fast thing and been handed a car thing. Would she like it? If she were to say to us, "Gee, I was sort of hoping for an airplane..." would we understand why a car was a better choice for her so that we could explain it convincingly?

To the question "What if we built an airplane?", the correct answer is "Then it would cost 10x more, and all of our customers would have to have pilot's licenses, and consequently no one would buy it." My instinctive answer, "Because we planned all along to build a car, dummy" is actually the worst possible answer, because it implies that I don't understand the problem I'm trying to solve, and furthermore that I'm less interested in finding out than in following a checklist.

So the next time it happens, I will pause, take a deep breath, take my blood-pressure medicine, and play my part in the dialectic. I wish I had understood how to do this five years ago.