This Little Piggy: Autonomy and Innovative Problem Solving

What’s 100 pounds, barely fits in a freezer locker, and tastes delicious when cooked? Expand your mind beyond Silence of the Lambs. Try the large swine I had the opportunity of roasting this weekend for a Stanford University event. For a professional, this is an undertaking, certainly, but not one that involves more thought than manpower. Our exercise answered the age old question: how many university students does it take to roast a pig when not one of them has done it before and they are equipped with only the most rudimentary of tools?

Each step was a process. Did we have a spit? No. Someone went to the shop in the middle of the night and welded one (I’m told this is typical of Stanford students). How will we rig the spit? Clamps attached to sideways picnic tables. The pig is too heavy to be spun on the spit…the pole is just turning inside the pig and now the back of the beast is completely charred without cooking the rest of its insides. Get the grate off the grill that’s sitting next to the pit, rest it on top of two wooden planters and another picnic table, and make sure to flip the thing every two hours. Oh, and to make sure the skin stays moist? Spray it with Sprite every ten minutes or so.

MacGyver would’ve either laughed or applauded. As the fire was dying down one girl rigged up a fan to the bottom of the grill pit to ventilate, and the rest of us went at the coals with lighter fluid and the used paper towels with which we had wiped the pig seasoning off our hands. We then made a makeshift oven with huge sheets of aluminum foil held down by broken brick pieces around the pit. No object was too small to contribute.

The final result? Delicious. The entire pig team, myself included, felt ridiculously accomplished. A professional may have gotten it done faster and more effectively given their experience and technology, but we accomplished the same results with a high level of innovation.

Autonomy breeds innovation and lateral problem solving skills. Throughout the roast, our instinct was to defer to someone who knew better, but no one had actually undertaken the task before. When faced with a task that is completely unfamiliar to us, the first thing we want to do is turn to someone who has experience with the task to tell us how to navigate. But when a task has to get done and the novelty is not unique to us, it’s our job to reach outside conventional methods of problem solving to get the task done. All because no one is standing over our shoulders telling us how to do things.

Learning often comes from doing. Being thrown into the thick of things is par for the consultant’s course. The key is to determine what you want the eventual outcome to be–what success looks like for your client–and from there begin to formulate strategies to get there. As easy as it would be to ask for a superior to give you a well-trodden path to get there, it is ten times more rewarding to try and discover your own way through. Remember, though, you don’t have to go it alone; your team acts as a valuable resource, even when the rest of them are just as new to the process as you are.

It takes four people to flip a 100 pound pig. It takes 50 dinner guests to even make a dent in the meal. But all it takes is one collective open mind to an unfamiliar task to get an unprecedented job well done.

To our readers: how did you tackle an unfamiliar task?