Moral: it's really important to know what the problem actually IS before you try to fix it.
Throughout history, some very important people have failed to do that about very important things, with catastrophically bad results.
You see, if you don't know that it's the fleas on rats that are spreading the bubonic plague, then in your medieval religious fervor you might blame the devil and start killing cats that are the only real control on the rat population. In which case, congratulations! You just mad a bad situation 1000X worse.
If you only have a 1929 understanding of the economy and are worried the stock market crash might set off runs on banks, you might try to boost consumer confidence by requiring banks to keep a much greater percentage of every deposited dollar instead of lending it out. In which case, congratulation! You just shrunk the money supply and turned a bad economic downturn into The Great Depression.
Look, there are some genuinely bad people out there serving their own self-aggrandizing agendas at the expense of the rest of us. There are a lot more perfectly nice people out there who mean well, who want to help, who would like to fix a bad situation - but good intentions don't make a bad decision into a good one.
You have to understand what the problem is before you fix it. Otherwise, you're just making coffee-tinted filter tea.
FWIW, conventional wisdom and most management textbooks say the person who identifies a problem is the one who understands it the best. I am wary of that
kind of Sith-like absolute, but I think that is true much of the time. It certainly can't hurt to call them in and talk to them, and above all, put the
ego on the back burner and listen.
