Probably the best piece of advice I ever received is to take time to gain perspective. I received this advice from a sophomore, my cadre corporal at The Citadel, when I was a knob during that first week of military training. I was frustrated at myself. For whatever reason, most of what I remembered (or thought I remembered) from marching band was opposite what I was being taught. The Citadel had and still uses the US Army instructions on marching, and none of it matched what was in my brain. I kept making mistakes and kept getting angrier and angrier at myself.
My cadre corporal, Tim Harrenstein, pulled me aside after one bout where my frustration became clearly visible. He had me do something he knew I could do: recite the phonetic alphabet. Then he pointed out that others were struggling with that task which I found easy. He had me think about the fact that all of my classmates were getting corrected in one way or another. I wasn’t alone. I was just struggling a bit more with the marching than my platoon mates. My anger at myself was only going to make succeeding more difficult. What he was doing was helping me gain perspective.
I’ve applied that lesson throughout life, especially in technology operations. For instance, it’s easy to get focused on a symptom. I’ve seen situations where a team troubleshooting a problem zeroes in on a symptom and works to fix it. They apply a change but the result isn’t consistent. The symptom isn’t eliminated, but it doesn’t show up every time, either. They double-down and apply more and more changes, leading to more inconsistency. A system constantly failing is usually safer than a system inconsistently failing, so we could say the problem is worse with the growing inconsistency.
The key is to pause and gain perspective. What else is going on? What other symptoms are we seeing that we aren’t taking into account? Where, based on all of that, are the likely spots for the root cause to be occurring? How can we narrow things down / eliminate possible causes?
This doesn’t just work for work. It works for life, too. In the US military, this is an oft-taught concept. Former SEAL Jocko Willink would advise, “Relax. Look around. Make a call.” That “Relax. Look around,” is the instruction to take time and gain perspective.