Rob Hendrickson

The right perspective is important when you’re trying to solve a problem. It’s difficult to create a good solution if you have no empathy for the one with the problem.

My wife and I were looking for a new place to live eight years ago. Because of our horses, goats and other menagerie of livestock, we required space.

We found a nice home within our price range some mile from the busy metro-plex. A nice view and lots of room, this was a nice place to camp while we began our family.

Two years after we settled in, an engineer working for a big oil and gas firm invented a way to extract gas from under the rocky ground in our county and all hell broke loose.

With the exploration and extraction came people. Lots of people that drill, haul, and service the pipelines and tanks scattered all around. These people like to drive and so our small farm to market road, became a congested travel way overnight.

Our road intersects with a larger highway not far from our house. This intersection has always posed danger. The highway traffic appears from over a hill and disappears much the same.

Taking a turn into this steel laden stream is usually a leap of courage or faith - maybe both.

With the added traffic to our small road, we needed a stoplight at that intersection. The county had placed several others at less needed intersections and so when we spied the construction crews setting up shop at ours, we naturally assumed they had come to the rescue with a good solution.

Within a weekend they had completed their task of adding a left hand turn lane for the highway traffic. This not only didn’t solve the initial problem, but made it worse. Now the highway traffic had no reason to slow down at the intersection. They could take the through lane and keep on zooming. Before, we had a chance to slip out when someone slowed to turn in and the cars behind had to wait to resume. Now the traffic backed up for a mile impatiently waiting to risk the deadly intersection.

I picture two or three civil engineers sitting in a room looking over the reports of the accidents at that intersection. With a birds-eye view of a technical drawing, they mapped out what they assumed to be a correct solution… from their perspective. All they had to do was give me a call. Me who drives that shit slew each day. Me who grits my teeth, closes my eyes and catapults my vehicle into a gauntlet of cars to get to work.

I would have shown them pictures of my daughter’s book, Go Dog. Go where the little bird is standing in the intersection and when the light turns red he yells… “Stop Dogs. Stop now!” and the donut pushing pups screech to a safe halt before they splatter green bird scat all over the road on their hurried way to the big ass tree.

The stoplight is a universal symbol for - “caution, caution, OK stop! or you’re going to kill someone.”

IF the engineers had written Go Dog Go, that little bird wouldn’t have made the party at the end.

If the engineers had the right perspective when they looked to solve our nasty intersection problem, they would have a good chance to get it right.

When you’re trying to solve the next problem, take a gander from the viewpoint of the people your trying to solve it for and you’ll have a better chance at a good solution.