A kangaroo at the Sydney zoo kept getting out of his enclosure every night. Knowing that mature kangaroos could hop very high, the zoo officials replaced the eight-foot fence with a ten-foot fence.
He was out the next morning, just roaming around the zoo.
They tore down the ten-foot fence and put up a fifteen-foot fence.
He was out again the next morning.
A twenty-foot fence was put up.
Again he goes out.
When the fence was forty feet high, a camel in the next enclosure asked the kangaroo, "How high do you think they'll go?"
The kangaroo said, "About a thousand feet, unless somebody thinks to lock the gate at night!"
How often do we rush into the most obvious solution and find ourselves in a greater mess!! This is obviously not an example of the hyped 'out of box thinking' but a nice demonstration of the futility of rushing into solutions. I am sure you must have come across the old story of how Americans and Russians solved the problem of writing in zero gravity.OR the story of how the Japs managed to eliminate empty soap boxes getting packed into cartons. This is also a reminder that solutions to problems can be much simpler than you imagine.
There is probably another angle. I remember having an interesting conversation long time back about "whether a problem can be solved at the level it is created" Quite an abstract question but what we were discussing was probably the fact that as consultants we tend to keep ourselves quite above and aloof from the problem and tend to believe that it is the best way to provide a solution. On the contrary if you don't step into the shoes of that poor operations guy and just diagnose the symptoms as seen from COO dashboard you would most probably be doing what the zookeeper did. May be this is different discussion i would keep for another post..
If you have heard of Occam's razor, it would be a good approach to keep things simple.
PS: If you missed the meaning of KISS in the title of this post it's Keep It Simple Stupid
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