thinking outside the box is fun .... when inside the box is sorted

A guy contacted me a few years ago.  We talked on the phone.  He even came by for a bit.  He's a permie living in idaho and was hired by a western montana sawmill company.  The sawmill had dozens of giant mountains of woodchips that were spontaneously combusting!  And they were out of space for wood chip storage.  So they hired this guy to "think outside the box" to solve this problem.  He contacted me to see if I had any ideas.

I told him it was kinda funny because we called that mill about a dozen times during business hours.  They never answer the phone and they never return calls.  We drove over there with our dump trailer four times.  Twice we were sent away because they require that we call first.  And the other two times we found the price was so insanely high that they clearly wanted to keep their precious wood chips.  (we went back and tried again because we talked to somebody that got a load of woodchips for one tenth the price)

My response to this guy:  what's the point of thinking outside the box when you cannot do the simplest things inside the box?

Sometimes a lot of small imperfect processes build up to catastrophic end results. I like to take a step back and trace processes when things aren't working properly. It can be quite illuminating.

Your story resonates with me.

Back in October 1987 a small social service agency was approaching bankruptcy. They had a budget of $350,000.00.  I wrote them a grant for $93,000.00.  All they had to do was to sign their name and mail it in.  Their plight was so pathetic that I didn’t charge them.  Their chance of getting the grant was about 100% …. They did not have to change their operation in any manner.  They had overlooked a funding stream.  I had the path well oiled. Anyway, I was in the area in Jan of 88, so I stopped by.  They  had never mailed in the grant. They were still researching it.

You can lead a horse to water ….  One of the core tenants of counseling is to never want your Client to succeed more than your client wants success.

I'll tell you what resonates with me, mills wanting to sell off cuts and sawdust all of the sudden! I used to get offcuts/slabs for free by the truckload and now they want $10 per. At worst they used to charge a loading fee for sawdust if you didn't want to shovel it. Must be pretty proud of that waste they have stacking up in the yard...

Every job I've ever had has had issues like this, which is why I've decided to be self employed. I work 10x harder for a quarter of the pay. I've found it worth it, just to avoid these headaches.

Another example: Today I emailed a department of NJ because I got an email from them with a link to a specific part of their site, basically saying "you need to read this notice waiting for you". When I clicked the link, my browser warned me that proceeding would possibly allow hackers to get my information, and it suggested going back. Something is wrong with their certificate or whatever.
So... what are other people doing who get this message? Some might go on anyway, but I bet MANY are not proceeding, and some might even be marking that email as spam, or blocking it! So if the state of NJ wonders why people ignore their messages, this could be one reason. I bet they get awful upset at the number of people who are irresponsible, or lazy, or shirkers, or whatever they are, when in fact it's a problem within their own system.

I emailed them to point out the problem. In fact, it was from a "donotreply" email, so I took the time to find a place to contact them with this type of issue. That's all I can do, and now I move on with my life.

Point is that they would probably wonder how to get people to respond better to those emails, when they never even clicked on one themselves to see if it works.