Lesson on problem solving from my garden.

This is a photo of a tree in my garden invaded by ivy.  The triangle foliage is the ivy surrounding the tree (which you can only see the trunk). Do you find the shape peculiar? It is definitely not a work of art, nor was it my horticulture or gardening skills running wild. It was more of preserving the tree which was here long before people settled in the area. What I was trying to do was to kill the ivy and save the tree.

The problem I had was the ivy at the top was beyond my reach. I did not have a ladder high enough. Also it would be a bit dangerous for an unskilled tree lopper like me to attempt to clear the ivy from the tree.

I did not mention earlier that I had other trees invaded by ivy too. I once hired a tree lopper to get rid of the ivy. Instead he told me I can do it myself even without a ladder or tree lopping skills. He told me I don’t need to reach for the ivy at the top. I only have to clear the ivy at the bottom. As you know, this will stop the water supply to the ivy. In due time, the entire ivy will die.  Simple, cheap and efficient.

That is why you see at the lower part of the tree trunk, it was cleared of ivy.

A thought struck me after I cleared the ivy. There is a lesson here especially in problem solving and root cause analysis. We were trained to see big things and find solution using sophisticated methods that sometimes the obvious escaped us. I focus on the ivy that I cannot reach. The ivy was definitely the problem. The solution was not to clear all the ivy at once but rather to cut the water supply from the root. No price for guessing where the term “root cause analysis” came from.

The lesson from my garden is when you want to solve a problem, find out what fuel the problem Cut the supply of the fuel and eliminate the problem for good.

Now I just wait for ivy to die.