One of the most frustrating situations to encounter is when you have a complex task to accomplish, and before you can figure out exactly WHAT it is that’s involved with the task, other people begin worrying about “Well HOW can we do that?”
A great illustration of this conundrum occurred in 2012, when our community band had outgrown the 800-seat auditorium where we had been performing and were looking for a larger venue. We were looking at a local Methodist church that would seat more than 2,000 people, and I was chatting with the music minister and the staff there.
Even during our initial talks, several of the people from the church started throwing up roadblocks, “But what about the traffic?” and “How can we handle the security?” and “I don’t think the seniors will go for it,” and several other “HOW can we” type objections.
I finally was able to pose them a question. I said “The first question to answer is ‘Do you want us to play here?‘ If the answer is NO, then we don’t need to chase any of these other questions. If the answer is YES, then there is no obstacle we cannot overcome.”
Sadly, several of the people there got their noses out of joint at that, because they WANTED to object, and they wanted to tell their opinions, and they didn’t want anyone to stop them from doing so. But eventually, things got all smoothed out, and we wound up playing our concerts at that church for six years.
Now comes LIDA.
The current LIDA project being worked on is the Event Management feature, and let me tell you, it’s one massively complex piece of coding. This feature is so robust, I think it could probably be its very own program, except for the fact that it needs to interact intimately with the LIDA library listings.As I first began thinking about putting all this together, I confess – I made the mistake of letting worry about the HOW get in the way – but only for a little bit.
Then I realized what I was doing and told myself to stop. “Self,” I said, “it’s time to start figuring out the WHAT. Just put together a list of all the WHATs, all the things we want this feature to do, and once I know WHAT I want it to do, figuring out the HOW will be easy.
And so that’s what I did, and that’s where I am right now.
I’m going to take another day to mull over and refine the LIDA Events Management Feature document I’ve built, then I’ll get working on the code itself.
But with the WHAT already laid out in that document, the HOW (building the code) should go very quickly.
What about you? Do you ever let the HOW get in the way of the WHAT?