If you find yourself solving a problem with one band-aid after another, but each time what you get is not quite what you expected, odds are you need to step back and re-think your approach. There’s something fundamental that’s not quite lining up. It’s also all too easy to become tied to the strategy that you started out with and to focus on optimizing that when sometimes, what you really need is to approach the situation in a completely different way.

A friend of mine has a great story about luggage that he learned in a systems engineering class.

People hate waiting for luggage. You can spend a shit load of money figuring out how to move baggage faster in order to minimize wait time. Or, you can step back and observe that the real problem is the waiting, not the absolute amount of time the luggage takes. A lot of airports increase the walking distance between the gate and the baggage belt. People walk more, but wait less.

Re-defining the problem and focusing on the core of the issue often enables another approach to work.