Experts At Solving The Wrong Problem
In the early 1990s, the marble surfaces of the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials were deteriorating at an alarming rate. A month after a report warned about the condition of the monuments, a 50-pound piece of marble fell from the top of a column at the Jefferson Memorial. Officials assumed the problem was all the bird poop, which had workers scrubbing the statues constantly, using large amounts of water and cleaning solutions that seeped into the stone, creating new cracks and worsening old ones. The proposed solution was to install metal spikes to keep birds from congregating there. But then the biologist Donald Messersmith, who specialized in the study of insects, was brought in to investigate. As he studied what was happening around the Lincoln Memorial one evening, he discovered that the birds were actually several steps downstream from the real cause. They were there because there were so many spiders to eat. The spiders were there because there were so many midges (tiny, mosquito-like flying insects) to eat. And the midges were there, irresistibly drawn to the bright floodlights that lit up the monuments every night. Midges emerge and swarm around dusk, right when the monuments’ floodlights normally switched on. Messersmith’s solution was simply to delay the lights by an hour, which would cause the midges to gather around some other available light instead. And it worked—within six weeks of switching the lights on an hour later, the number of midges fell by 85 percent, which meant fewer spiders feeding on them and fewer birds feeding on the spiders and fewer birds pooping on the monuments. I came across this story in Ben Meer’s new book, How to Be Good at Life: Simple Systems to Achieve More and Stress Less, all about looking beneath the surface of what is and isn’t working in our lives to the systems producing those outcomes. Throughout the book, Ben shows how often we do something analogous to what those officials initially did, attacking the most obvious symptoms of a problem without tracing them back to the root cause. “Every day, we put out fires without asking where the sparks are coming from,” he writes. “We become experts at solving the wrong problem.”
Looking beyond the most obvious symptoms of or solutions to a problem—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
Don’t Necessarily Operate On The Elbow
The film editor Walter Murch (Apocalypse Now, The Godfather I, II, and III, American Graffiti, etc.) writes in In the Blink of an Eye that every time he test screens a movie, “there’s a lot of what is medically called ‘referred pain’ in the process.” Referred pain is when you experience pain in a part of the body different from the actual source or cause of the pain. Pain in your elbow, for instance, is often caused by a pinch nerved up in your shoulder—you just happen to feel the pain in your elbow. The pain in the shoulder is “referred” to the elbow. Audience feedback is often like that, Murch continues. If a percentage of the audience agree that they don’t like a specific scene, “the chances are that that scene is fine. Instead, the problem may be that the audience simply didn’t understand something that they needed to know for the scene to work.” So, instead of fixing the scene itself, “you might clarify some exposition that happens five minutes earlier. Don’t necessarily operate on the elbow: instead, discover if nerves are being pinched somewhere else.”
Why Did Those Air Balls Happen?
In the elimination game of the 1997 NBA Semifinals, Kobe Bryant shot 4 airballs late in the game. His team lost 98-93. After the humiliating season-ending performance, Kobe said he asked himself, “Why did those air balls happen?” The obvious answer was that he needed to work on his shooting. But the airballs, it turned out, were only the visible symptom of a deeper problem. Kobe was then a rookie, drafted straight out of high school—the year before, he played thirty-five games with plenty of rest time in between games. In the NBA, there’s 82 games just in the regular season. So by the playoffs, he said, “I didn’t have the legs. If you look at those shots—every shot was on line, but every shot was short.” It was clear what he needed to do: “I gotta train differently,” he said. “I gotta get stronger. The weight training program that I’m doing—I gotta tailor it for an 82-game season, so that when the playoffs come around, my legs are stronger and that ball gets there.” Once he saw the improvements that came from training differently, Kobe started looking for other ways to make sure his body could hold up over the full 82-game season. He started analyzing the core movements of the game—jumping, changing direction, cutting, sliding side to side, pivoting, decelerating to pull up for a jump shot—and realized how much depended on ankle strength and foot speed. It struck him that no one really trained their ankles. It wasn’t a focus in practice. It wasn’t part of a typical weight training regimen. No one stayed after practice to work on their ankles. “I realized,” Kobe wrote, “that I needed to be proactive about strengthening my ankles. After researching the matter, it became apparent that tap dancing was going to be the best way to build up my ankle strength while simultaneously improving my foot speed and rhythm.” So he hired an instructor and started going regularly to a tap dancing studio, “and I benefited from it my entire career.”
It All Came From The Kid
In the June ’93 screen tests for Forrest Gump, Tom Hanks doesn’t sound or act like he does in the movie. Filming began on August 8, and on the 27th, the childhood flashbacks were shot. Hanks wasn’t on set, so director Bob Zemeckis called him to say, “We got a problem here.” The kid cast to play the young Forrest had a thick accent he couldn’t modify to match how Tom Hanks was portraying adult Forrest. “You have to teach this kid how to talk the way you talk,” Zemeckis told Hanks. In psychology, there’s various fallacies and biases related to a similar tendency. The Streetlight Effect, for instance, gets its name from a parable about a man who loses his keys somewhere outside one night, but searches only under a nearby streetlight—not where the keys are most likely to be, but where they are easiest to look for. The effect refers to our tendency—when problem-solving, decision-making, conversing, writing, and so on—to go with the first, most convenient, or most obvious solution, option, thought, or idea. Shortly after he identified the problem, Zemeckis stopped at the first, most obvious solution. Hanks went past the first obvious fix and found something better. Despite being one of the hottest actors in Hollywood—in a position to simply demand that they find a different kid or that they get someone else to teach the kid to sound like him—Hanks asked to meet the kid. The kid, Michael Humphreys, was raised in a small town in Mississippi, where he developed a Southern drawl with a distinct quality: the enunciation of words with an extra syllable (e.g. “grease” as “guh-ree-ce”) or an elongated ending (“running” as “run-ning-gah”). After some chitchat with Humphreys, Hanks said, “I thought, ‘Why don’t I just talk the way HE talks?’” The distinct Forrest Gump accent and mannerisms that would define the iconic character: “It all came from the kid,” Hanks said. “Everything that came out of Forrest—the way he spoke, the way he held his hands, moved his head—was based on little Michael Humphreys.”
So Much For “Cut It In Half”
In 1977, the science fiction writer Orson Scott Card sent a draft of his later-to-be award-winning and film-adapted Ender’s Game to the science fiction magazine Analog Science Fiction and Fact. The magazine’s editor Ben Bova wrote back to Card. In the letter, Bova said that, though he liked Ender’s Game, it needed to be cut in half. Before he sent the draft out, Card had read and reread Ender’s Game over and over and over. “If something could be cut out,” he said, “I didn’t put it in.” As Card thought about Bova’s note, he eventually realized this: when Bova says the story needs to be cut in half, what he’s also implicitly saying is, ‘to me, it feels way too long.’ So Card asked himself, why did it feel too long? What did I do that made it feel too long? “I realized I probably had too many battles in it,” he said. “I went in and cut out one battle entirely. I cut another one in half. Then I realized a few places where I wanted to elaborate on things. So the manuscript I sent back to Ben was a page or two longer than the one he had told me I should cut in half. But I didn’t remind him that he told me to cut it in half. What I said was, ‘I addressed the problems you mentioned. Let me know what you think of it.’” The feeling that the story was too long was apparently gone, because Bova said nothing about the fact that the manuscript was now even longer, replying instead with a contract and a check to publish it. “So much for ‘cut it in half,’” Card said.
When People Say That Something Is Wrong…
Ryan Holiday has written about the line that proves true again and again: “When people say that something is wrong, they are almost always right. When they tell you how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.” So don’t necessarily operate on the elbow, the bird droppings, the airballs, the kid’s accent, or the length of the manuscript. Instead, discover if nerves are being pinched somewhere else.