HOW TO SMELL WELL

Early on you’ll want to smell the problem to develop a pattern of failure. Where possible, understanding where the problem does and doesn’t happen, when the problem started, and how often the problem occurs will generate critical insights for the problem-solving effort. For easy or fairly moderate problems, this pattern of failure can lead to the key insight that solves the problem or puts you just one step away.

A friend of mine was helping his mother understand why her car’s push-to-talk (PTT) feature was malfunctioning. When she pushed the button and asked it to play Lady Gaga, it would sometimes work great, and she could rock out. But intermittently, it would bring up the car’s navigation feature. It was driving her up the wall (blessedly, only figuratively so). The car dealer and its shop couldn’t figure it out, and had actually written it off as a software bug, a short circuit, or entirely nonexistent and all in mom’s head. They wasted lots of time, nearly lost a customer, and even offered to replace the car, because they didn’t smell the problem.

My friend, while visiting his mother one weekend, smelled the problem by repeatedly mashing the button and using all of his senses. A subtle pattern emerged: there were different numbers and tones of beeps just before navigation and just before music. He noted this, read the owner’s manual with this knowledge, and learned that you needed to hold the PTT button for more than two seconds to access music. He instructed his mom and solved the problem permanently. Now of course others had read the manual before him, but just the section on the onboard computer was dozens of pages, and they didn’t know what they were looking for.

There are literally dozens of problems like this that we encounter every year that waste our money, try our patience, and consume our time. Simply smelling the problem well can help you resolve them and lead a better life.