Know the task – if you can
In my past as an IT specialist, I regularly wondered about the way people approached our service. I was responsible for the operations of document processing service. It was open to individuals and teams.
Naturally, we didn’t expect our customers to know the ins and outs of our service and hoped that they would inquire about the best ways to use our service. But what happened most of the time was, that after seeing one part of the automation they developed their idea of how to use it to then ask us to implement their idea.
It became our habit to engage in a conversation about their objective and inquire about the performance they were looking for. We worked to deconstruct their ideas, learn what they needed, and imagine how we could align ourselves with it. We wanted to provide them with the service we perceived to be the best for them without endangering the availability of the service to the community using it.
To this day, it remains a bit of a mystery that they users the necessity to have imagined a solution before connecting with us. It didn’t seem possible for them to simply connect with us and ask if our service was accessible to them and how. Instead of asking us to help with our expertise, they felt the need to describe the task they had in mind by telling us what to do.
At the same time, I can see how often, my own inability to imagine an objective has slowed me down in my effort to create something new. Instead of acknowledging the unknown and the process allowing for its exploration, I seemed to try to overcome the unknown before starting to explore it.
It is a somewhat strange idea to imagine being able to create something new without letting go of the idea of knowing what it is that will be created. The desire to stay connected with the known prevents us from creating something independent of it. As a result, the new will have to be something that relates to the existing, it will have to be different from it while keeping it as a reference.
It is transforming the creation process into one that can only change what is already known.
