This has been one of my most used and most effective tools, especially in my maintenance positions. Working in manufacturing for most of my adult life, I spent a lot of time around equipment. And for most of that time, I was at least partially if not completely responsible for keeping that equipment operating. I had to learn the art of troubleshooting to become better at fixing things. Many times, when a machine broke, it was pretty obvious what had happened and there were usually pieces of something all over the floor. But sometimes, things would just start mysteriously acting crazy. That’s when the fun of troubleshooting would begin.
I learned this law and the application of it working with an electrical engineer that was responsible for writing programs for the manufacturing equipment in our factory. Now, if you are a programmer or are computer savvy in any way, this may insult your intelligence and for that I apologize. For the rest of you, just understand this, we had machinery that worked automatically. People would load parts into the machine and the machine would spin, turn, rotate, press, test and eject product. In order to do that, there was a computer that told the machine how and what to do. Our engineers wrote the programs that gave the machine it’s instructions.
Two things about programmers; good ones have never known a program that they couldn’t make better, and they almost all like to work with sub-routines. A sub-routine is where they take a small operation and write the program, or code, for that piece. Then they write the code for the other pieces. Then they put them together in a bigger program that asks each piece to do its thing at the correct time.
Subroutines work sorta like a family getting ready to go on a trip. There’re many things to be done and mom and dad have a master list, or program. They then give each child instructions or tasks to do. These are like the subroutines. Each person does their little piece, brings it to mom and dad who put it all together, so the trip can happen. Only with a production machine, the pattern gets repeated over and over, sometimes multiple times each minute.
Back to my engineer. We had a pretty sophisticated piece of equipment that had run continuously for months if not years. And one day, it just went nuts. Pieces were crashing, and parts were getting crushed and nothing made sense. I was working with my maintenance crew and started asking some questions. Had anyone been working on the machine? Did anyone replace any parts? Nothing had happened except the engineer had “tweaked” the program. I asked what changes had been made and he had only changed one of the subroutines to make the program run a little faster and the section he changed was in no way related to what was going on. Well, I bought that for quite a while…until we couldn’t seem to get anywhere with getting it to run correctly.
So, then I asked my engineer if he happened to keep the previous version of the program (something else about programmers, the good ones always keep the older version when then make updates) and he had. Desperate for answers, and against his protest, I asked him to reinstall the old version. Magically, everything went right back to normal! Once we realized the new changes were the problem, we were able to find a piece of the new code that had worked okay for some of the set ups on the machine but when we changed to a different part, the new code he installed had a couple of lines out of place and created chaos with the machine.
From that day forward, any time we had a situation where something just stopped working the way it should, we would think of law number 2 and stop and ask if any changes had been made. Most of the time, undoing the change, even though it seemed unrelated, corrected the issue.
The fun thing is that I’ve found this works with relationships. A lot of us take our relationships for granted and don’t invest the effort to keep them healthy and growing like we should. Some days things are going great and other days, those closest to us seem to want nothing to do with us. I think for most of us, especially guys, we just assume our boss, employee, friend, spouse, is having a bad day and things will blow over so we stick our head in the sand and move on. If we put in a little effort, we may be able to determine what changed and even if we can’t “fix” the issue, we can at least have some healthy dialog that grows the relationship.
One example I can give is from early in my marriage. We had been married almost 3 years and my wife was pregnant with our first child. In fact, she was due any time and ready for the delivery! I came home from work and realized there were no dinner plans. Not a big deal, it was a little unusual but, hey, she was nearly 9 months pregnant and I was never one that expected dinner to be ready at a certain time. But this was different, something was wrong. She was emotional, and while hormones can do strange things, this didn’t seem to be hormonal emotions. Being the gallant young husband, and oblivious at the time to the need to do some troubleshooting, I offered to simply run to the grocery store and pick up some things for dinner and come back and fix supper.
Off to the store I went. In those days (the stone age!), we used checks to pay for just about everything. Not credit/debit cards, no smart phone apps, and we didn’t use much cash. I grabbed a few things, went to the register and began writing out the check, starting with the date…THE DATE…oh my! It was our anniversary! Three years in, with a pregnant wife, I had forgot our anniversary. Definitely something had changed! She had no plans for dinner because the assumption was that we would most certainly be going out or have some plans…but no, I missed it.
Thinking about what had changed from the loving wife I left in the morning to the distraught one in the evening may have saved me a lot of grief that night. I may have been able to remember what day it was before I had to crawl back home with grocery store flowers and apologize for forgetting our anniversary. I will tell you that over the next 30 plus years I have never forgot our anniversary again.
I know it’s a simple story, but it illustrates that a lot of times our relationships hit turbulence because something has changed. Something was done or not done, said or not said. Someone hurt us, we don’t feel good, work was awful…you name it, something changed, and we’re hurt, angry, frustrated or just plain mad. When we’re in relationships, we can’t always fix what goes wrong. But sometimes just thinking a little about what may have changed in someone’s life, and especially if we did something that caused that change, we can find a talking point that opens some communication. And if we can communicate, we can work through a lot of things.
Whether you’re managing machines, employees or relationships, when things are going rough, it just might be that something has changed. You may not know what it is or be able to figure it out, and that’s fine. Just recognizing it and giving a little grace may be just what’s needed.
Oh, and my engineer, he and the rest of the staff began using the “What Changed” law every time something broke, even if it was his program change. Saved us many hours over the years. Something we just knew had nothing to do with the problem often was the problem. A little humility and asking “What Changed” was one of our best tools!