Breaking Down Artificial Barriers

A few months ago I was volunteering at an elementary school "field day" in which the entire school participates in a variety of physical events and activities. Kindergartners to fifth graders had a wonderful day of races, obstacle courses and challenges. The entire day was a success, but one event stood out in particular: the tug-of-war.

The tug-of-war was a challenge between classes. The school has two classes in each grade, and so the tug-of-war was a battle to find the winning class for each grade level.

One teacher explained the rules. Each class was supposed to line up on each side of the rope. A flag was tied to the rope to indicate the center, and the goal was to get flag across a designated line on each side. The first one to bring the flag over the line wins.

The kindergarten class went first, with one class successfully dragging the rope, flag and other class over the line. Then went the first graders, with a similar result.

But when it came to the second graders, something interesting happened. At the front of the rope for one team was a small boy. As the whistle blew and the tug-of-war started, both teams struggled to drag the other to their side. The flag wavered back and forth across the center line, but resisted the pull to either side.

Then something unexpected happened. The young boy, a special education student, suddenly let go of the rope. He looked at the flag dangling from the rope, and walked over to it. To everyone’s surprise, he grabbed the flag and slid it along the rope to his own side and beamed with a huge smile on his face as the flag crossed over the line, signifying his team the winner.

Had he really won? It depends on who you ask, but the school chose to declare his team the winner. The rules, which were later amended, only stated that the flag had to cross the line without specifying anything. . This young child saw an element to the competition that no one else had seen, and he took the simplest approach to solving his team’s trouble: he just moved the flag.

There are many analogies that we can draw from this. Among the obvious: thinking outside of the box, relieving tension by finding the simplest solutions, and working smarter – not harder. The lesson I learned was that sometimes we give too much credence to convention and we create artificial barriers that hinder our success. His teacher also remarked at how amazing it was that despite some disabilities he was able to analyze the problem and find a solution that nobody else had discovered.

Sometimes it is helpful to look around and realize that the obstacles we thought existed don’t actually exist. We see this in many industries, but I’ve noticed it most recently in technology innovation. Most specifically, as technical specifications improve, it is easy to think in terms of last year’s or even last decade’s technical ability, and not realize the power of today’s or tomorrow’s technology.

This is most obvious with mobile application development, as a few years ago the BlackBerry® was the most powerful device because it could get email on-the-go. Now with today’s technologies, we are developing apps that would have been considered impossible (or prohibitively expensive) even a few years ago.

Working at Amadeus Consulting, we’re forced to rethink what’s possible as we see a lot of very creative people that come to us looking for help with custom software development projects and in strategic technology consulting. These clients range from big companies to startup companies and everything in between. Sometimes these ideas break into new territory and try things that have never been done before, and sometimes during the custom software development, we break down new walls and do things that have never been done before.

Part of our motto is "Everything is possible," which helps remind us that we can find a way to make things work, and that sometimes the things we thought were impossible are actually doable when viewed from a different angle.

In the end though, it is about making results happen the best and simplest way possible. Like in tug-of-war, sometimes that just requires really hard work and great teamwork, and sometimes it is looking at the problem from a new perspective and finding a new approach. And usually, it is a bit of both.