All life is problem-solving, whether at work or home. We are continuously solving problems, large and small, systematically or haphazardly (mostly the latter). We often don’t even qualify these as problems, let alone consider the method of addressing them. Your approach to problem-solving can speak a lot about your disposition in life. Let’s delve deeper.
Concerning the level of thinking, we can identify three types of employees: pharmacists, doctors and surgeons.
A pharmacist is an expert in giving you the medicine prescribed by the doctor. Apart from reading funny handwriting, the pharmacist is adept at matching the names to medicines and, in certain cases, offering alternatives of similar salts. In rural settings, such pharmacists also double up as make-do doctors, offering drugs for common coughs and colds. But they never bother about the big picture. Your particular ailment doesn’t concern them. What happens after you ingest the medicine is the least of their concerns. They are experts at optimising transactions. Such employees demand, ‘Tell me what needs to be done, but don’t bother me with details.’ They remain right there, as expert troubleshooters.
Next come the doctors. You walk up to a doctor with your unique symptoms (unique in your head) and the doctor excels at mapping your unique symptoms to commonly known problems and then matching those to commonly available solutions. She will seldom create a new solution for you. Her skills are to diagnose, with the help of a battery of tests and offer you the best possible map. She cares about the big picture, as in your family history, previous encounters with similar problems, your diet, lifestyle, et al., but doesn’t get into your skin. Once you walk out of the door, her skin in the game is once again zero. She’s not as transactional as a pharmacist, and perhaps that’s why you visit her again. She’s like an employee who asks, ‘Why should I solve this problem? Tell me more.’ They can be annoying, but they often reveal the truth.
Finally, we have the surgeons. You walk up to a surgeon when not much has worked. After understanding your ailment, she devises a plan of action for you. Ask any surgeon if any two surgeries are similar and they will assure you that they are only as good as their last operation. A hundred things can go wrong in an OT. She has to not only understand you, your ailment, and your history but also keep a big-picture view of what can go wrong before, during and after the surgery. While she gets into your skin she maintains her skin in your life even after you are off the hook. Her knowledge asymmetry gives her the ability to handle your life, while you sign on the dotted line, taking full responsibility for what happens to you. She’s like the employee who asks, ‘Are we solving the right problem? What happens next? Let’s explore.’
There are instances when solving a problem seems pressing, but the real deal is what happens once the problem is solved. Are you creating a bigger one? In medicine, it’s quite natural to move from one ailing patient to the next, going about the motions, but a real surgeon maintains an elevated view, a humane disposition to fellow humans. His years of performing neurosurgery made Kalanithi reckon that ‘The physician’s duty is not to stave off death or return patients to their old lives, but to take into our arms a patient and family whose lives have disintegrated and work until they can stand back up and face, and make sense of, their existence.’
So, who are you—a pharmacist, doctor or surgeon? All three survive, but you know their relative value to the customer and in society. If you maintain a big-picture view, you get richly rewarded. But it takes discipline.
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