In which Wolf reveals a simple question you should be in the habit of asking. Watch this episode on Youtube here: https://youtu.be/ny7U98T_kyg
I'm a night owl, so my wife usually gets up before me and starts her morning routine. This morning as I lay in sleepily in bed, I heard my wife get up and walk into our bathroom just off our bedroom. After a few minutes, I heard her get into the shower. I started to drift off again. Through another wall of the bedroom I vaguely noticed the sounds of my son getting up and going into the other bathroom. I heard him flush the toilet. I knew what was coming next.
I heard my wife curse, and a few seconds later she turned off the shower faucet. There was silence, then more cursing. A few minutes later she resumed her shower.
I live in a house built in the 1980s, where the plumbing has been rerouted multiple times. Even while I've been living here we once entirely lost our hot water pressure, and the plumber informed us that a pipe running through the concrete slab underneath our house had cracked and was leaking water directly into the ground. The solution was to reroute the pipe from the hot water heater in the garage through the attic instead of through the slab, which required the mess of opening up one of the walls in our living room.
So whether it's by bad design or the accumulated changes that led to the tangle of piping we have now, whenever anyone runs water, like flushing a toilet, anyone who happens to be taking a shower automatically get's an unexpected scalding.
So in our house the good habit of flushing the damn toilet sometimes has unfortunate consequences. Me, my wife, and my son have all done it to each other multiple times. Today, finally recognizing the pattern, I asked my wife what I call, "The Magical Question." Over the years I've brought up this question so many times that I've decided I'm pretty much the Prophet of the Question and the Question is my Gospel I'm preaching to you today.
The Question is: "What can we do so this doesn't happen again?"
I'm astonished that people don't ask this simple question more often. In a previous video I talked about how people have usually learned to retreat to the "blame frame," where there's always a perp and by God, they're gonna pay.
In this morning's situation, my son knew not to flush the toilet when someone's taking a shower. He and I share the same restroom, and we've set it up so someone can shower in private and someone else can also use the toilet in privacy. And, he's been in the WC and flushed the toilet while I've been taking a shower in the same room. He should know better.
But it's really not that simple. It's not just bad habits that die hard, it's also good ones, especially when we need to make our good habits more nuanced, like adding exceptions to the rule.
So when I asked the Magical Question this morning, the answer wasn't to give my son a talking-to. As I said, we've all accidentally done it to each other.
Have you ever been driving on highways and run into a sign that just says "CHECK HEADLIGHTS"? Obviously, it doesn't mean to look at your car and say, "Yep, it has headlights!" It's there to call your attention to something in case you need to do something about it. It's purpose is to call you to mindfulness.
It's been determined that on mountain roads like in California where I grew up, cars running in the daytime with their headlights on can reduce daytime crashes by almost 6%. So some highways are marked with signs that tell you to turn on your headlights even during the day.
When you get to the end of that stretch of road, you have a decision to make. Road signs have to get their message across quickly, and so a sign that said, "Turn off your headlights now, unless it's night, then keep them on," would be pretty awkward.
So instead there's just a sign that says, "CHECK HEADLIGHTS". All you need to do in that moment is think about your headlights for a moment, and you're much more likely to make the right decision.
And so many of our wrong decisions are due to not thinking: mindlessness. As I thought about our cause of unexpected scaldings, I realized that mindlessly doing something good is actually causing problems.
I'll tell you exactly what I decided to do in the moment. But I'm going to tell you how to use the Magical Question to solve problems big and small in your life.
First, recognize the pattern of symptoms
Things going wrong aren't usually one-offs they tend to fall into repeating patterns of failure. So be alert when things go wrong that these patterns are probably pointing at a deeper cause.
Next, map the contribution system
Step away from the blame frame and realize that things go wrong because of a whole series of causes and that deflecting blame away from oneself and onto someone else might help you feel better in the moment, but it probably won't do anything to really solve the deeper problem. So work with the other participants to learn from each other all the factors that contributed to that outcome.
Now you're ready to ask the Magical Question
"What can we do so this doesn't happen again?" You can also say, "What can we do so this is less likely to happen again?" because you're not living in a world that can be made perfect, you're only living in a world that can be incrementally improved.
Now, answer the question without blame
This is critical, because in the blame frame you'll just say, "Don't do that again," to the person you're blaming. If I'd just blamed my son for scalding my wife in the shower, telling him "You know better than that!" He'd probably react the way anyone reasonable would react: with resistance. So the plan I created was to make a set of small signs that say, "Is Someone in the SHOWER?" and put them near places in our house that can change the water pressure: like the WCs, the bathroom sinks, and the laundry room. This way we are all reminded to check for this. If the root cause is mindlessness as I suspect, then hopefully we'll all start to develop a more nuanced approach to the water pressure in our house.
Finally, measure your plan's success
As I said, this just happened today. Will my solution be successful? Honestly, I don't know yet. I have a theory and I've implemented it. I'm sure mistakes will still happen. People can also become desensitized to seeing the same thing over and over. So if and when this happens again, before giving up on the experiment I may try moving the signs so they again trigger mindfulness. I do know that as long as the problem persists, I'll keep asking the Magical Question until we have a real solution.
But what do you think? Let me know in the comments, and please share the video with someone you think would like it too.
See you tomorrow!