Jumping from hot water.

Have you been frustrated because someone wasn't addressing a problem or wasn't addressing it correctly? Often, it seems I've spent my whole career in that situation. I even felt, at times, that the people working for me weren't concentrating hard enough on the problems that I wanted them to fix.

That makes me sound like an old curmudgeon. While I may be one, listening to others' situations lets me know I'm not alone. I've heard the same complaints everywhere. Everyone knows what problems need to be fixed and are frustrated because they aren't.

Whenever I run across something that doesn't seem to make sense, I try to figure the logic behind it. Doing that now, I think I've come up with some ideas that might have reduced my frustrations through the years.

A common circumstance I discovered was that someone might really be working on the problem but not advertising it. No one likes to admit they are caught in a predicament. It goes without saying that if you tell everyone you're working on a problem, you're admitting you have a problem. Not only that, but sometimes it's better to remain silent. Management won't tell you they are building a case to fire the colleague everyone feels is disabling the entire operation. Just like you're not going tell them you're looking for a job at a different company because you're frustrated with management for not getting rid of the colleague.

That being said, I know this answer doesn't cover all the situations. We all know there are many times when the problem isn't being worked on. I've come up with only three possible causes for that happening.

The first is the most obvious and the one that I've spent much of my career addressing: A problem won't be worked on if no one knows it's a problem. If you think back to when many metalcasting facilities switched from cupolas to induction furnaces, employees thought they were making the "same iron" if they had the same carbon and silicon, but they fell into hot water with machinability issues. Many metalcasters didn't know at the time that all those other elements and nucleation had to be controlled if they expected to produce the "same iron." I've been in many facilities that really didn't know how bad their scrap was. Once it was shown to them, they sought to reduce it.

There still are those problems that are obvious and well-documented, but nothing is done about them. Thus, the second cause for not addressing a problem is the lack of knowledge to solve it. Let's face it, if you don't know what to do about something, there's a small chance you'll do anything. There was one facility I once tried to help with an inclusion dilemma. We made change after change, but we finally halted our activity because we ran out of things to change. Fortunately, later we obtained a clue of what was needed, and the situation improved. For a considerable period, however, we did nothing because we didn't know what to try.

This is an important lesson for all who are trying to have someone else cure their headaches. Don't tell the boss about a problem without suggesting what needs to be done to fix it. If you cannot come up with a way of solving the problem, don't be surprised if there isn't any action taken. Of course, telling the boss what to do does take a bit of finesse.

That brings us to the last reason problems aren't addressed--other problems are more important. There is only finite amount of resources that can be spent. We technical types are infamous for finding what we see as problems that no one else sees. We will even come up with ways of solving them. Unfortunately, at times we forget to check whether we are spending dollars to correct an obstacle that is only costing us pennies.

So, the next time you get frustrated with a problem that isn't being addressed, ask yourself these three questions:

1. Is it known that this is a problem?

2. Do you know what should be done to solve it?

3. Is the problem important enough to warrant the time and money for a solution?

If you've answered all of those questions and still can't determine why no one is working on the problem, there's one more question that you need to ask: Is there something that you can do to solve it?

Roy Lobenhofer, Lobenhofer Consulting Inc., Mount Prospect, Illinois