There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.
Peter Drucker
1909 – 2005

In the excellent book Fierce Conversations, Susan Scott tells a story about her brother Sam. When he was a teen, Sam had a permanent chore: taking care of their lawn’s mole problem. So Sam would spend his Saturday mornings using a variety of methods to rid the lawn of moles.

He tried smoke bombs and traps, and on occasion he even tried to drown them by sticking a garden hose into their underground tunnels. None of his attempts really worked.

Years later, Sam was at the counter of a hardware store and the man next to him had a bag of pesticide with a skull and crossbones on it. Wanting to make conversation, Sam asked the man why he was buying poison.

The man replied, “To get rid of moles.”

Sam’s interest was immediately piqued. “How do you get the poison down where the moles will get it?”

“Oh, you don’t worry about getting it underground,” the man said. “Just sprinkle it on the lawn. It kills grubs, which is what moles eat. No grubs, no moles.”

Unfortunately, Sam had spent far too many Saturday mornings focusing on the wrong problem. He had been battling moles when he should have been eliminating their food source.

Recently, I was hired to consult with a company that had spent a few years and several hundred thousand dollars trying to accomplish a goal. I almost made the same mistake as Sam. I could have recommended some slight variations to their plans, including hiring more qualified people or increasing their marketing budget. But on reflection, I realized they were fighting moles: they were trying to solve the wrong problem.

I believe we all engage in this behavior in our personal relationships, our business relationships and our work goals. We’re often guilty of fighting moles when we could easily solve our problems by taking a different approach. We can and do get attached to a particular solution and will keep trying to make it work. Understand that what you want is results; the specific way you achieve them isn’t important.

Governments at all levels waste millions of dollars focusing on solutions that have no chance of working. They spend lots of effort fighting moles rather than looking for alternate solutions.

If you have a long standing problem at home or at work that hasn’t responded to continual efforts, step back and engage in some reflective thinking. Ask yourself if you’re working on an issue that can’t be solved with your current approach. Too often, we get stuck trying to kill the moles when it would be much simpler to get them to go elsewhere.

Focus your efforts on the results you want — not on how you get them.

Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.
Arthur Schopenhauer
1788 – 1860

Copyright © 2014 John Chancellor