When you gaze out your window — real or figurative — do you see the forest first, or the trees?

When I look at actual trees, it’s always the forest first and then individual trees. However the idiomatic expression that this is related to is quite different for me. When it comes to solving problems I tend to be more tree-than-forest based and it often times bites me when I miss the obvious answer if I could just step back and see things more simply and holistically. So far I haven’t been unduly defeated by this problem, but it’s something that occurs to me now when I see a problem that I have to solve crop up. It’s important I think, especially in IT, to stop in the very beginning of diagnosing a problem with technology to honor this idiom and pause in the beginning and ask “Are there any really simple explanations for why this is happening?” that one question sometimes is just what I need to find the real culprit and save myself the hours of pursuing shadows and gremlins through a system, completely ignoring the surface-only solution that I walked right past.

In a way this is an error of assumption. You assume that it couldn’t be anything really obvious so you don’t look, and when you don’t look, you don’t see and missing it right then and there is such an embarrassing mistake. Almost always I get the solution and the chagrin from missing the obvious makes me feel the fool each time.