Clients who love their problems — Transcript
[00:00:00.07] Jim: Okay, so we’re going to discuss what we call clients who love their problems, and the context for this is we both worked for decades, really, in a business where we were called on to be problem solvers. That might be the easiest description, and the twist is we were almost always called in to solve a problem that wasn’t described to us. The problem that we were called in to solve was almost always not the real problem at hand, and so that made the job interesting. and on and on, but what we’re going to talk about now is clients that we ran into who loved their problems so much they really didn’t want them solved, and these were usually problems that they had put up with, they were usually operational issues that they had put up with for a very long time, and it took me a while to catch on, but I realized, after going through it a few times, that the people that we were tasked with working directly with to understand the problem and then work with to solve the problem on the state side, sometimes had nurtured a problem. for so long and told each other that it was unsolvable, that they really weren’t interested in solving the problem, and that made our job that much tougher. What’s your take, Ken, on this?
[00:01:47.56] Ken: Yeah, so as you were talking about that. I found when I first saw this, they, I was always deflected to try and solve a different problem rather than the real one, and sometimes it worked on me until I got wise to the idea that some people love their problems. So they’d always, you know, sometimes kind of like the physician, sometimes the presenting symptoms aren’t always the. you know, the real, the root cause of things. I mentioned in the, in our Worst Client Ever podcast, I had a client who was so in love with methodology and process, he lost sight of the problem they were trying to solve, and that was, to me, was an example of this, clients who love their problems so much. they deflect what they’re trying to solve into something else. In his case, I mentioned he was trying to make my pseudocode compile for him and things like that, and that never worked, and sometimes the process of trying to solve the problem becomes more important than the problem, in my opinion. experience. You know, I likened it, as I was thinking about this topic, to clients almost developing a romantic relationship with their problem, and they don’t want to break up, you know? Yeah, yeah. They love it so much, and then I was trying to think about the reasons for this. In the case of that worst client ever that I mentioned, who was so in love with process that he lost sight of the problem he was trying to solve, I think having the real problem was big and very, very, very difficult to solve. On the other hand, the problems of of ensuring a methodology was correctly applied and assuming that would lead to a solution to the problem was much smaller and you’re able to get your hands around it, it’s more concrete. So I think sometimes they look at problems they can solve rather than you’d mentioned, you know, were they perceived the problems were insoluble, but I think sometimes they just deflect sometimes having challenges are exciting and they justify their existence. You know, we’ve seen whole organizations brought about to to solve a problem that’s really today could be solved with a simple automation or a simple tool, and maybe back in the day, the solution was to hire a bunch of people and work on it. But as most bureaucracies go, those things don’t go away. They just tend to multiply. So, you know, having a problem kind of justifies it. justifies your existence sometimes. As I said, you know, resolving the problem means the romance is over and it leaves a void. The other kind of tangential thing I related when I started thinking about this was that knowledge is power kind of trip you see sometimes, and I saw this a lot with programmers, where they wouldn’t document their code or tell anybody what they did, and it was so obscure and obtuse, it would take a lot of work to try and understand it, and they did that, consciously or subconsciously, to make themselves invaluable to the organization they’d choose some tools that nobody else knew or something like that. So they were the keepers of the secret knowledge, and I think that’s another example of, you know, people being in love with their problems or a reason for them to be in love with their problems. Did you ever find a, I mean, did you ever in your career come up with a… a way to resolve this or was it different for every client loving their problems? ‘Cause I’m not sure I did.
[00:06:06.05] Jim: - The only thing that I observed that would actually work was somebody higher up in the organization would have to come. in person and tell people this problem is going to go away, and it can go away in a number of different ways. I mean, the best I heard was a guy we worked with for years in Idaho, and then he moved to Washington State, and as you know, Washington State. State was both very sort of progressive in its health and welfare stuff and came up with lots of good ideas, but they also had some pretty entrenched things that were that were not best practices, let’s just say, and this guy was a deputy director level for the whole agency, and I will never forget I’m telling people, this problem’s going to go away, and we’re either going to work together to make it go away. Or, uh, he said, it’s causing me so much grief. Uh, if I have to, I’ll make the problem go away by making people go.
[00:07:23.90] Ken: Yeah, that’s what I was just going to say. You either make the problem go away or you go.
[00:07:30.14] Jim: A message heard and this came up because Rod, I can say Rod’s name, right?
[00:07:38.63] Ken: Yeah.
[00:07:39.63] Jim: I mean, we’ve used his name before. He was a great analyst. I mean, maybe one of the best I’d ever seen and he’d been called in to solve some pretty serious operational issues and he came up with several solutions, and when we presented them, the people at that agency, just one after another said, we’ve tried that. We’ve done that before. Yeah, good luck with that. Not gonna do that. This problem’s been here for 15 years. That’s not gonna fix it. when the other that’s when the person higher up stepped in and said, look, that’s not going to fly this time.
[00:08:22.61] Ken: And so yeah, did you did you ever have did can you speculate about what you think the causes of it were? I mentioned some and in this case, you know, maybe momentum is what you’re mentioning there where it’s it’s, you know, hard to get a rock moving.
[00:08:40.53] Jim: - I think it’s nurturing, you know, your dating part, you know, people have to love their problems. That explains it. People have so much invested in the fact that it’s an unsolvable problem, and I’m not, I’m not making judgment here. I’m just saying that they’ve got. so much invested over the years in explaining to people why the problem exists and explaining why it can’t be solved, in living with the problem, I mean almost all the things that you do and they’re almost like if you live with a bad dog or if you’re having challenging of problems with somebody you live with. I mean, they’re almost the same sort of nurturing things of working past it, working around it, addressing it over and over. I think that’s, I think that’s a big part of it, and I do have kind of a funny story of, engaging the guy at the top, this was actually a Medicaid director that I worked with, that gave me an intractable problem that they had had for years, and I had our usual good consultants working on it. This wasn’t something that I was working on. Necessarily, although I did do some of the interviews We had probably three or four people at the time from our consulting group working on this And he said you have access to everyone in the agency and he said I I need you back here within a month Telling me what? possible solutions are And uh This was the funniest thing I remember going back in there about a month later nice guy And when I walked in and I had an appointment with him I mean he was high enough and I I wasn’t just wandering into his office. He was a very busy guy And I walked in and he said I was wondering how long it would take for you to come back in and share the news with me, and he said let me guess, so you don’t have to beat around the bush, he said the problem is me, isn’t it?
[00:11:15.25] Ken: “You know what? Good for him!”
[00:11:17.53] Jim: And I thought, “This is going to be so much easier than I thought it was going to be,” because nobody actually pointed the finger, but what they described, he was the bottleneck, he was the problem, and he was self-aware enough to know it. Very pleasant conversation, and if I remember correctly, he found something else to do that he liked better. (laughs) But yeah, I’d never encountered that before where he just sort of said, “You know what, the problem’s me.” (laughs) But he did allow us to spend a month with- the staff of five consultants interviewing people, and that was the conclusion we had come to. It was a tough conclusion, but he made it a lot easier.
[00:12:11.11] Ken: - Yeah, there’s a lot of places this could go, the same conversation could go, but they’re probably different topics. I think we should end it on that. That’s a great, what a great ending for the story.