Being late really bugs me, especially when I could’ve prevented it.
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A few years ago, I took a long-term onsite client assignment during Chicago’s peak congestion season (a.k.a. everything but the dead of winter). While juddering down the interstate one morning, dodging potholes and fender benders, I thought:
I really should get this car into the mechanic for a once-over.
If I had to be late to the client site, I didn’t want it to be for something simple, that regular maintenance could have prevented. (Been there, done that: changed a flat tire and threw out my back while kneeling in the middle of a snowbank in rural Iowa, in the wee hours of a January morning. Not one of my finer moments.)
But delays are inevitable, and breakdowns happen. It’s how you react, get a grip and fix the problem that matters.
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A noisy, smelly lesson in getting a grip
To this day, my Dad — the original superhero* problem-solver — holds the record for Best Breakdown Solution I’ve ever seen.
We were in my mom’s quirky old mini-van: a front-wheel-driven, rear-engined mistake with an anemic four-pot diesel motor. This day in particular was a busy one: the family was shuttling my brother to an important and tricky-to-reschedule appointment (a pre-admission college visit, several hundred miles from home). I was too young to be left alone, and my sister had been dragooned to join us because that’s just what happens to middle kids. (Sorry, sis.)
Suddenly . . . Ping.
Then, some mild swearing from the driver’s seat.
Rattle-rattle-rattle.
More swearing, but less mild, now.
Matter-of-factly and with surprising calm, my father spoke. “The pedal’s on the floor, but we’ve got no power.”
The van slowed to a stationary idle as he steered us to the hard shoulder. Out came the toolbox (a fixture in that car), up went the sleeves, and Dad got to wrenching. With the engine at the back, this meant piling our cargo at the side of the road and removing a heavy, filthy hatch.
The “ping” had been the snapping of the throttle cable, Dad explained, and the sound it made as it turtled itself to some unreachable place under the car, between its usual home (nicely reachable at the top of the throttle spring in the engine bay) and the mechanical throttle pedal, up front. This left little chance of a conventional roadside fix with the tools he had on hand. Soon, though, inspiration struck.
“Hand me that rope.”
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Buckle up: Obscure visual detail incoming
Being a van, the driving position was fairly high. And the latch into which the seat belt clicked sat at one end of a long, metal bar, which was itself bolted into the frame below the seat.
And that long, metal bar could swing like a lever around that bolt, scribing an arc of almost 180 degrees, parallel to the driver’s seat and reachable with the driver’s right hand.
A-ha.
Dad tied one end of the rope to the throttle spring, and the other around that pivoting seat belt bar. We dropped the back seats to give him a more-or-less straight line from the driver’s seat to the engine bay, and … voila.
We were rolling again, in a road-going power boat.
The seatbelt bar was now a throttle lever, and that length of rope had become a makeshift throttle cable. More tension on the rope meant “more go” — he fed or starved the engine of fuel by pushing the lever forward or easing it back.
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Got some rope in your toolkit?
We got to the appointment on time, albeit smelling slightly of diesel and a little bit deaf. (We’d needed to keep the engine cover off while driving, of course.) But Dad had a pretty good story* to tell, about:
- Being resourceful
- Solving a weird and frustrating problem with limited tools
- Moving quickly from Oh, @#%! to Objective -> Approach -> Solution, in the face of the unexpected
- Taking a calculated risk to get back on schedule, without risking too much (e.g., your kids!)
As a business owner, you probably want to see exactly these characteristics in the communicators, creatives and project managers working on your most important stuff.
So … are you?
If it’s important to you that your:
- Copy is letter-perfect, engaging, and technically accurate;
- Project plans and strategies drive progress, not expense and anxiety;
- Audiences hear and act on your message because it matters to them; and
- ROI on your communication budget is clear and measurable…
… And if you feel that any of these ingredients are missing today …
… then I think a 30-minute conversation will be worth your time.
Let’s find creative solutions to weird problems, and have some fun together. The residual smell of diesel is totally optional.
Gotta dash, or I’ll be late …
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* Okay, if I’m honest, my siblings and I were the ones telling the story. Dad’s too humble to tell it himself.
