The Unreliable Narrator

Lessons from "The White Dove"

Years ago, I flew to Puebla, Mexico because of twelve missing seconds.

Of course, I didn't know that at the time.

At the time, I thought I was flying to Puebla because of a rivet nut tool that wouldn't stop jamming.

The calls had been coming for days. The distributor was frustrated. The customer was frustrated. I was frustrated. This was around 2008, when sending videos from your phone still felt a little bit magical. But I got the customer to send me a video of the process.

Eight seconds.

I watched it. Then I watched it again. Then again. Probably hundreds of times.

I knew the tool. I knew the people involved. I'd trained them myself not even two years earlier. I knew the exact application in the plant. I could see it in my mind and on the screen.

Still nothing.

So, I got on a plane. Actually, two planes and a long drive through central Mexico with my boss in tow. Have you ever driven 160 kph in a Dodge Neon? I have. I don't recommend it.

By the time we arrived at the plant, I was nervous. I'd brought "the big guns" because I wasn't entirely convinced I could solve it.

I walked up to the work cell, deafening plant noise softened by my hearing protection, my eyes immediately finding the operator's hands. Twenty seconds later I was laughing.

Not because I was clever.

Because I was embarrassed.

The operator was threading the rivet nut onto the mandrel by pulling the trigger instead of spinning it on with his fingers. That particular model of tool didn't tolerate that very well. The moment I saw it, I knew exactly why the tool was jamming.

My boss didn't believe me.

The distributor didn't believe me.

Honestly, after all the conversations, all the theories, all the travel, and all the effort, I didn't blame them.

It felt insulting that the answer could be that simple.

So, I asked the operator to do it the old way.

The tool jammed.

Then I asked him to do it correctly.

The tool worked.

Problem solved.

Looking back, I was missing twelve seconds.

If I had simply asked for a longer video, I probably would have solved the problem without all the extra airmiles.

That realization stayed with me for years.

Not because of the tool.

Not because of the trip.

And definitely not because I enjoy explaining to people that I flew halfway across Mexico because nobody thought to film another twelve seconds.

What stayed with me was something much simpler.

I thought I had enough information. I didn't.

The older I get, the more I think that's responsible for an awful lot of frustration inside manufacturing plants.

Not bad intentions.

Not incompetence.

Not laziness.

Information.

Or more accurately, the illusion that we have enough of it.

Somebody says the tool doesn't have enough power.

Somebody says maintenance already checked it.

Somebody says the operator is causing the problem.

Somebody says the rivets are bad.

Maybe.

But how do we know?

What is telling us that?

Someone?

Something?

What's the evidence?

After twenty-four years in this industry, I've become less interested in answers and more interested in where answers come from.

That's one of the reasons I created an exercise called The White Dove.

People sometimes think it's a gotcha exercise.

It isn't.

The Bird is White

The White Dove exists because I wanted people to experience something that happens every day in troubleshooting but rarely gets discussed:

The moment you realize you've been defending a conclusion.

One of the questions asks about the color of a bird.

Most people answer it without ever going back to the story.

They already know.

Or at least they think they do.

One of the first people I asked to do the exercise is someone I respect tremendously. Smart. Curious. Thoughtful. The kind of person who reasons his way through almost everything.

We argued for nearly an hour.

Not because he got the answer wrong.

Because he was convinced he got it right.

The bird was white.

How did he know?

The title.

The story is called The White Dove, after all.

The bird must be white.

The interesting part wasn't that he got the answer wrong. The interesting part was watching how hard he fought to defend his certainty.

The answer had become less important than the belief that he'd seen it.

And that's when I realized The White Dove wasn't really teaching people about just language.

It wasn't even teaching them about assumptions.

It was teaching them about the stories we build from incomplete information.

For years, I thought The White Dove was an exercise about an unreliable narrator.

Now I'm not so sure.

I think it might be an exercise about an unreliable observer.

The narrator isn't really the problem.

The observer is.

The reader is.

The participant is.

Me.

You.

All of us.

We hear something. We see something. We trust something. Then we start filling in the blanks. Most of the time we don't even realize we're doing it.

That's why one of the most powerful phrases in troubleshooting is also one of the hardest for people to say.

"I don't know yet."

Yet Matters

The word yet matters.

"I don't know" sounds like surrender.

"I don't know yet" sounds like curiosity.

It implies movement.

It implies investigation.

It implies that we're going to keep looking until we understand.

Folks talk a lot about losing tribal knowledge. The people who know the settings. The procedures. The part numbers. The shortcuts.

That's important.

But I sometimes wonder about tribal wisdom.

The people who know how to ask one more question.

The people who know how to separate what they know from what they believe.

The people who are comfortable saying, "I don't know yet."

The people who know where to go find the answer.

I Knew It!

When I teach, the thing I enjoy most isn't when somebody memorizes a chart or learns a technical term.

It's when relief arrives.

I've seen operators get it.

Maintenance technicians get it.

Engineers get it.

Sometimes it's a smile.

Sometimes it's a guy taking off his baseball cap and smacking himself on the leg while saying, "I knew it. I knew it had to be something like that."

Not because he knew the answer.

Because he knew something wasn't fitting.

Because he knew there was another piece of the story he hadn't been given.

Because finally, it makes sense.

And that's really what I hope people take away from The White Dove.

Not that they should trust themselves less.

Not that people are wrong.

Not that assumptions are bad.

Quite the opposite.

I hope they walk past that process that's been irritating them for months and think: I need to go look at that again.

Not the report.

Not the meeting notes.

Not what somebody told me.

The process itself.

I need to see it.

Hear it.

Experience it.

And if what you find still doesn't make sense, be brave enough to say:

"I don't know yet."

Then go get the answer.

And if you need help understanding what you're looking at, that's when you call me.

Until next time... M