On the blog, Improve Something Today, Brian Kerr wrote a fascinating post titled Three ways people respond to a problem (other than solving it). Drawing on his experience as a consultant, he surmised ways problems are addressed: Push, Preserve, or Promote them.
I appreciated the author's definitions and noticed that each section was titled with zero-padded numbering. Surely there are at least a thousand behaviors? So, as an invitation to extend the author's document, here is one more.
No. 0004. Pretermit new problems
From my experience with software, when a new problem arises on a team, the most common reaction is to ignore it. "It's not my problem." However, there is always a small group within the team who will go for it; those devs illustrate Price's law — the square root of the total number of contributors produces 50% of the work in any given domain.
Deeper still, ignoring problems, especially when they are not an immediate threat, is a default human response. And in software, consulting, or business, it's about managing priorities and protecting egos.
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