Questions and Answers again

Finding answers verses accepting answers was the subject of the last post.  It's going to be the subject of this post too.  There are a few more things that I am going to share.  The first one is born out of a situation I had at work a few years back.

I was working as an assistant manager of a grounds maintenance company.  I had joint responsibility for 17 mowing crews, which worked out to about 50 people.  We had a computer system that spit out the jobs for the day and track them.  We would  upload the jobs in the morning and fire them out to the crew leaders phone.  We wouldn't do it in the evening because there was a risk that the idiots who worked for us would complete them or delete them.

Early one morning (6am) I opened up the shop all on my own and went to upload the jobs.  The system wasn't working.  The crews started to filter in and stood around waiting to go.  Each person is being payed hourly.  Each crew starts early to get to all the sites in the schedule without running into too much traffic.  And I can't get the computer working to give them the jobs.  What am I to do?

What should I do?  That is one of the biggest questions that we face all the time.  And unlike the question we looked at yesterday (1+1=?) there are a whole lot more answers.  Usually when we ask this question we have to have an answer pretty quickly.  Truth be told, in situations like this, not answering the question (by doing nothing) is a form of answer in itself.

I didn't do nothing.  What I did was send all the crews out to start the work.  The crew leaders knew the site they had to go to first as we were on a regular weekly schedule.  I knew that this would create a bit of a headache for the administrative staff - made up of just one person.  And sure enough went she got in she was seriously mad with me.  The president of the company called me into the office and warned me never to do that again.  But he never answered my question "what should I have done?"

I still think that I did the right thing.  The whole point of the company was to cut the grass of our clients in a timely manner.  Keeping the crews waiting until the computer problem was sorted out would have cost money.  Administrative tasks are there to support, not control the people carrying out the job.  But I learnt an important lesson there.  People will always see the problems that you cause, not the problems you avoid.

So, how does this relate to answers?  Because the choice that I had was between two answers.  Both had things to recommend them, both had problems they would cause.  I had to deal with the problems caused by the answer that I accepted as the best to act on.  Unfortunately those around me didnt react with understanding of the problem I was facing, but frustration at the problems I caused.  I got no credit for the problems I avoided.

Many times we are going to be in similar situations where we only see the bad fallout from the answer someone else has accepted as the best.  They may be very aware of the damage they are causing but often they are trying to avoid a different answer which has a different set of problems following.  Life is very rarely a purely positive/negative choice, or able to be resolved to a simple mathematical equation to tell right from wrong.

I guess the whole point of this is to show the difficulty of finding the right answer.  No-one is able to find the answer that doesn't have negative effects somewhere.  We all need to make the effort to be a little more understanding of things people have done to us that left a negative impact.  They were probably trying to do the right thing as best they saw how.