One of the stupidest managerial truisms is “don’t bring me a problem without a solution”. The only thing this will lead to is problems being swept under the rug. If your organization has ten problems and your team can only come up with five solutions, would you prefer to hear about all ten problems or just the five that the team can solve?
I’d rather solve some problems and know there is work to do rather than live in blissful ignorance and suddenly get blindsided by an ‘unknown’ problem but, hey, some have called me crazy before so who knows, maybe I’m wrong about this one, too. (And this doesn't even get to the possibility that you might be able to solve one or two of those unsolvable issues yourself, hotshot manager...)
Of course, there are some areas where this idea should probably be the standard. I think my computer’s spelling and grammar check is one example. Sometimes, I write a word or phrase and that stupid squiggly line appears underneath it. I click on it and get…
Nothing!
No suggestions, no improvements, no help of any kind, just a big red or green mess underlining My Best Effort, a taunt, thumbing its nose at me, pointing out that it’s so incorrect, an example of such blatantly and hopelessly butchered English, that there is no way to fix it, no way this computer, this powerful machine, which has enough processing power to play the entire Joshua Tree album at 2x speed, over and over again, shuffling the order each time, until my neighbor knocks on my door at 3AM and tells me to shut up, he hates U2, no way this computer is able to come up with one suggestion for how to fix my spelling or grammar error, one little idea to add an ‘e’ or a silent ‘c’, to maybe reverse the fragment, possibly, did Moya go through this, did his entire work get underlined, as he went on and on, writing his life sentence, serving his life sentence, trying to cram his entire thought into one expression, without breaking the rules of grammar, the rules that must be known to identify a broken example, for how can spell check know it is wrong just because it isn’t right, what if it is a new idea, a new construction, to rise up in the next dictionary like the newest skyscraper, like the high-rise that blocks the sun, who does this computer think it is, to tell a creator that he is wrong, to draw a line on the horizon and say stop, there should be no line on the horizon, no lines, for there are so many lines under my words, under my letters, as if the natural condition of letters is not to be misspelled, that arranging letters into a word is the work of the writer, how dare this red line tell me I’m unfit for the task, the red tape of creativity, there should be a line under every correct word, so unnatural it is for words to be correct, unnatural like great wealth, like we explain poverty instead of wealth, like we have lines for poverty and poverty lines, why explain poverty, it requires no explanation, does food fall fully prepared from trees, does spell check point at the raw meat any say cook this, it is wealth that needs explaining, how can money grow on some trees, on some Joshua trees, these should have the red lines underneath, like the subways that takes us where we must go, oh Moya, how can so much function correctly when the natural state is chaos and misspellings and red line delays…
