Do what you can, with what you've got, where you are

Thoughts on a (mis)quotation.

"There is a bit of homely philosophy, quoted by Squire Bill Widener, of Widener's Valley, Virginia, which sums up one's duty in life: 'Do what you can, with what you have, where you are'."
— Theodore Roosevelt

Often misquoted (as has happened here) and usually misattributed to Teddy Roosevelt, this is actually a quotation pulled from Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography, and is one of two pieces of classical advice I often give to people who are struggling with the concept of adulting, or who find a project or situation difficult. Because I often find myself in one of those conditions, I am frequently having a conversation with myself that includes these words.

When I first came to visit the US, one of the books Christine was reading to Tessie at bedtime was in the Little House on the Prairie series. Laura Ingalls Wilder told the story of her family as they moved into the American West to homestead and colonise. Now despite my personal views on manifest destiny, I had to admire the courage, fortitude and above all, ingenuity of these settlers as they moved west across the continent. After all, in most cases they had only what they could carry in a covered wagon, or buy from trading posts along the way.

Many were the tales I read of Pa building a house, or digging a well, or hunting game. The more I read, the more it seemed to me that the West was won with little more than families with an axe, a shovel, a musket, a ploughshare and some cooking pots and measuring cups. Need a house? Cut down trees, build a cabin. Chimney? There are rocks, we can build a wheelbarrow to shift them. Water? It's in the ground, so we dig a well! Of course it was a tough life, they didn't have much by modern standards, but they survived with a "can-do" spirit, some co-operation, muscle and a good deal of creativity.

One of the stories that particularly stuck in my head was of a Christmas when one of the girls was given her own tin mug. Previously she'd had to share with one of her sisters, and this was something that stuck out as being an especial kind of "make do" attitude, one that is so far away and foreign to our modern consumer society, when a quick visit to Amazon means that no-one has to share a mug. Or a laptop. Or an iPhone.

Have we lost this ability to get out off the tracks and hack out a new way? No, of course we haven't.

Imagine an IT trainer running an induction course for perhaps twenty people. He is training off site at a retail location, and has been given perhaps half a dozen desktop computers and monitors, and a printer. He has a week to deliver basic hardware and software technology and diagnosis for all these poor people destined to become phone technicians in a call centre. It's a Monday morning, he's unloaded all the gear into the goods lift for transport to the training room on the first floor (because this is in England, where the floors start at "ground" and the first floor is the next one up). Now imagine his dismay when he runs upstairs to find that the lift has stuck between floors. A query to the shop staff is fruitless, the lift does this from time to time, but they can call an engineer who should be able to come before noon. A call to his boss for reinforcements is a futile endeavour as he knows that there are another two course starting that day, and there are no more spare machines available.

With only an hour to prepare before his victims are due to arrive, he has to face a morning, and possible a whole day, without the machines he would normally rely on to provide the necessary training to these poor souls. What is he to do? His years of experience in training are surely futile without machines to train with. So, what does he do? He does what any decent Englishman would do; he makes himself a cup of tea. With the tea close by, he reviews the notes for the day. The first hour is easy as it's really just introducing the course and ice-breaking exercises. The second hour is an overview of the job and talking about the skills that the three-week course will develop. The third hour is where it gets tough, because that's when the delegates connect up and boot the machines and start some simple tasks to identify hardware components. Then a break for lunch.

Okay, so machine components and how they connect. How the operating system sees them and presents them to the user. Sure, the trainer could simply draw everything on a board and give out some summary handouts, but that is not as engaging as the stuff they'd be doing hands-on with the machines. So he hatches a plan. He'll divide the class into groups of four and have them build themselves to become a part of a "machine" using them as the components, everything from power supply through processor, motherboard to monitor. He'll have them pass information between groups on bits of paper. They will become a computer with notes as system busses. He has lots of bits of paper and any number of pens. He will explain that this is to encourage their creativity and ability to improvise; he's not even going to mention that fact that probably twenty feet away are the machines they'd ordinarily be able to get their sticky paws on.

Does it work? Yes, amazingly enough it does. The few notes he scratched out for his own benefit, and a few diagrams on a whiteboard are sufficient. By lunchtime, the group is having fun and the experiment seems to be a success. But the trainer knows that the post-lunch session is the tricky one, when the post-prandial lethargy kicks in. A group needs something that is either simple, or so engaging that it energises them. So he plans to take a unit from later in the week and introduce them to the concept of "managing customers". He devises an exercise that quizzes them for customer types, and then decides to lead that into a discussion on how to handle each type.

That too is a success. Within an hour they have identified all sorts of customer types from the angry and aggressive to those fearful of technology, from those whose first language is not English to the one who's terrified they've somehow broken their child's £1000 computer. Not only that, but they're coming up with ways of handling them better, developing their own scripts to manage not only customer expectations but also improve the outcome and create satisfaction.

The trainer is delighted. Not just with himself, but with them. They pulled out all the stops, they racked their brains and solved problems. And by the time the afternoon tea break comes around, and the shop manager sticks her head in to say the lift is fixed and he can have all his kit, he is a very happy man. The delegates, on hearing the story, consider him to be a god amongst trainers, and he considers them among the best group he's ever had.

The epilogue is even better. When he returns to base and reports to his boss, he suggests that this has a much better set of outcomes than he could possibly have imagined, and a couple of weeks later, he rewrites the first few days of the course to incorporate the jury-rigged first day into the formal training program.

Of course, that trainer was me. I've since used this tale as an example of how to overcome adversity and make creative decisions. Squire Bill would be proud of me.