Problem or Choice?

Last week I spent a day with a client who was on the verge of breaking down. He runs a small machine building company. A year ago, he took up his biggest project. A year later he has accumulated loans and personal credits and has a disgruntled client who’s withheld more than half his payment. 

He has suppliers, creditors, employees, friends and family to pay and no income in sight for the next 8 weeks. 

When we analysed this situation together, he confessed that this lead design manager had sabotaged this project by taking shortcuts, favoured his suppliers and got sub-standard parts into the system. 

He has also learnt that the client has a long-standing history of giving unclear specifications and not paying their suppliers the last part of the due payments, which in his industry is the profitable part. 

After writing a few more reasons “why” this project had “failed” we started a backtracking exercise. It simply meant going back to the point where the “problem” had started. 

The first “problem” started when he accepted the order from this client with the specifications given by them at that point. “Was it a choice?”, I asked my client. He was a little unnerved by this question and didn’t answer it verbally, though his body language said it all. 

Coming to the decision of hiring the lead designer, was it a choice again? A feeble “yes” was an answer this time. How about trusting this person and not putting a process in place to validate his work? A choice again? Most definitely yes! 

By looking at each event as a choice rather than a problem, the client now was making a shift from blaming to taking accountability. Failure was now looking like a learning. And focus shifted from the bygone to the projects in the pipeline and application of the learnings in making them successful. 

Powerful shifts can occur internally simply by looking at our actions as choices in relation to our desired outcomes. 

When we ask questions like, “why me?” the answer often than not points out at a person, event or anything outside us. When we take charge, it gives us wisdom on how we made choices that didn’t support the outcome and make better ones in the present.

Change begins!