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Being out of the box

Often being in a box is a matter of point of view. Oftentimes when I'm trying to think of ideas and solutions, and I feel stuck, I remember ask myself the "who, what, where, why, when, and how" types of questions . But when I don't remember that tool for thought, I'm  lucky enough to be working with a group of people who regularly show me other ways to think "out-of-the-box" as it were.

Today I was asked a question that I tried to answer for a co-worker. They were using R studio and editing an HTML table, and they needed to get some space between some columns. It was a technical issue, and my first idea, adding a non-breaking space to a collapsed column in-between the columns, didn't work. I didn't understand why it didn't work, because in other circumstances it would have worked fine. In fact, the behavior I got seemed entirely wrong and I didn't know why. I knew at worst my solution should have no effect, but that fact that it simply inserted the exact "&nbsp" text mystified me. So, my reaction was to dig in deeper and figure out why my solution wasn't working, before long my co-worker was trying to wrest control of his computer back from me as I got completely absorbed in trying to help him. 

I ran out of time and thus I mentioned the problem to another colleague, who is one of these "out of the box" people. As she so often does, she came up with an entirely different approach which easily solved the problem. Her answer was to simply set the column widths - and get the white-space that way. She was thinking about the original problem, which was great, but I had asked about why am I seeing thing "&nbsp" string? She probed a little, to get the original question and then had a better solution for it. 

Thinking about the solution she did come up with, I realized I was focusing on the question of "why doesn't this work" while she looked at the larger problem of "how can you solve the original problem". These are obviously two different frames of reference. "Why" doesn't x or y work versus, "what" is the problem that needs to be solved and how can we look at it differently. It's often a matter of having too narrow of a focus. "I have a hammer, how can I use that to put these two boards together?" against "Instead of using two pieces of wood together, what if I simply cut the piece I need out of that other piece of wood over there?"

I try to shake my frame of reference up when I ask myself "who, what, where, why, when, and how" and it just seemed to me that this was a good example of how I should be ever watchful for those sorts of moments.

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