It's late summer in the Gatineau Valley in Quebec. I'm with five friends, and we're on our way to the Cabonga Reservoir to fish. In the morning after an overnight stop in the forest of a provincial park, a light rain is falling. At this time of year in Quebec, any rain is cold and uncomfortable, so we're trying to fix flapjacks for breakfast. We're failing.
It has been a wet month, and we haven't found any dry wood. Despite many attempts, we can manage only a smoky little fire that's nowhere near hot enough for flapjacks.

"Father and son feast on pancakes, May 15, 1999." Photo by Paul Schnaittacher, for "World's Largest Pancake Breakfast," a Massachusetts Local Legacies project
We hear a vehicle crunching along the gravel road approaching our campsite, and soon a government pickup truck pulls up and stops in the empty campsite across from us. Three men hop out and one waves hello, calling to us in French. We wave back. Smiling, he comes over for a visit. He quickly figures out that we don't understand his French, and just as quickly, he figures out that we don't know what we're doing.
He points to our hatchet lying on a stone and says, "OK?" One of us replies, "Oui." He speaks about as much English as we do French.
With the hatchet, he begins splintering a large log lying beside our dysfunctional fire. He piles the splinters onto the fire, and they immediately explode into flame. He exclaims, "Bois sec! Bois sec!"
Making small adjustments
to what you're already
doing is often the answerOne of us remembers enough French to translate: "Dry wood! Dry wood!" We thank him and in mime we offer him breakfast, but he waves us off, and goes back across the road to rejoin his work mates.
Soon we're full of coffee and flapjacks.
When things aren't working, how do you find an approach that does work? Making small adjustments to what you're already doing is often the answer. But even when the adjustments do look small in retrospect, discovering them in the moment can require great imagination and insight. Here are some tips for finding small adjustments that have big impact.
- Assume that whatever you have to change will be small
- You're more likely to find an ingenious small adjustment if you're actually looking for one.
- Rewrite the problem description
- Write down a description of the problem. Then rewrite it so that it uses none of the same words, except prepositions, articles and the various forms of is.
- Get fresh eyes
- Find some people who haven't been working on the current approach. They're more likely to ask the right questions. Brief them and let them question everything.
- Explain it to some kids
- Children not only have fresh eyes, they have fresh brains. They can understand way more than you might think. To engage them, tell them you're stuck and ask for their help.
Next time your team is stuck, treat them to a breakfast of flapjacks. Tell them the story of bois sec and watch what happens. Top
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Related articles
More articles on Project Management:
Geese Don't Land on Twigs
- Since companies sometimes tackle projects that they have no hope of completing successfully, your project
might be completely wrong for your company. How can you tell whether your project is a fit for your company?
Teamwork Myths: Formation
- Much of the conventional wisdom about teams is in the form of over-generalized rules of thumb, or myths.
In this first part of our survey of teamwork myths, we examine two myths about forming teams.
Project Improvisation as Group Process
- When project plans contact reality, things tend to get, um, a bit confused. We can sometimes see the
trouble coming in time to replan thoughtfully — if we're nearly clairvoyant. Usually, we have
to improvise. How a group improvises tells us much about the group.
False Summits: I
- Mountaineers often experience "false summits," when just as they thought they were nearing
the summit, it turns out that there is much more climbing to do. So it is in project work.
Managing Wishful Thinking Risk
- When things go wrong, and we look back at how we got there, we must sometimes admit to wishful thinking.
Here's a framework for managing the risk of wishful thinking.
See also Project Management and Problem Solving and Creativity for more related articles.
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And on April 28: The Self-Explanation Effect
- In the learning context, self-explanation is the act of explaining to oneself what one is learning. Self-explanation has been shown to increase the rate of acquiring mastery. The mystery is why we don't structure knowledge work to exploit this phenomenon. Available here and by RSS on April 28.
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Decis
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- A recording of a program presented June 24, 2020, Monthly
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- A recording of a program presented June 24, 2020, Monthly
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Webinar Series. PMI members can earn 1.0 Category 'A' PDU by viewing this program. View this program now.
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