Today’s headlines; Paula Dean drops two pants sizes and, based on six years of research in the Pacific Northwest, graduate researchers at Chicago’s School of Anthropology have confirmed that in fact, consultants do eat their young.

Observation may be one of our best teachers, but we often ignore what can be learned from it.  Here is a real-life example that occurred to me from having watched a human interest story on the local news about neighbors banding together to try and rescue someone’s pet cat which they surmised was stuck in a tree.

Here is the observation; how many cat skeletons have you seen in trees?  What can be learned?  Maybe cats do not need rescuing.

Project management and business in general have many similarities with cats stuck in trees.  Somebody thinks there is a problem, and like good little workers, we throw resources at the problem trying to rescue it.  We establish committees, have meetings, and create reports.  We discuss the problem, we recall what happened the last time we had this type of problem, we bring in experts whose skills are particularly attuned to solving this problem, and then we attack it.

The one thing we fail to do is to validate whether the perceived problem is really a problem.  Chances are that the cat in the tree is doing just fine and does not require any help. If it does, there is always gravity.