Author: Peter Round
The bike path and the “solution”
This morning, while walking my dog, I watched four older cyclists ride through a gravel section of a bike path.
The first two hit a pothole, stopped, and warned the two behind them: “Watch out for the pothole!” – who then also rode straight into it.
As they regrouped and rode off, one of them said, “They should put up a sign to warn us about the pothole.”
That comment made me laugh and think. In a single sentence, they had:
- Accepted the pothole as a permanent fact of life.
- Jumped straight to a solution (a sign).
- Chosen an option that still leaves people hitting the hole, just slightly better informed.
No one questioned the obvious alternative: “Why don’t they fix the pothole?”
The request was about warning people, not removing the underlying hazard.
How this shows up in Data and Analytics
The same thing happens every day in data engineering and business intelligence.
Stakeholders rarely come to you saying, “We have a decision problem” or “Our process has a blind spot.”
They say things like
- “We need a new dashboard for this.”
- “Can you add three more fields to the report?”
- “We need an alert when X happens.
These are all “put up a sign” requests. They describe a preferred solution, not the real problem. If you implement them as-is, you may deliver:
- A beautiful report that almost nobody uses.
- A dashboard that looks impressive but does not change decisions.
- An alert that screams constantly until everyone ignores it.
Just like a sign next to a pothole, the artefact exists, but the pain continues.
From “build this report” to “fix this problem”
The job of a good data or BI professional is not to take orders.
It is to help people reframe their request from solution to outcome.
When someone asks for a report, start exploring:
- What decision are you trying to make faster, safer or more confidently?
- What goes wrong today without this information?
- Imagine this report exists and is perfect. What changes in your behaviour or process?
Often you discover that:
- The real issue is data quality, not data visibility.
- A simple metric, embedded in an existing workflow, beats a whole new dashboard.
- The best “solution” is changing a process, not adding another chart.
In other words, the right move is to “fix the pothole”, not build more signs pointing at it.
Slowing down to go faster
There is a temptation, especially in busy teams, to say yes quickly: capture the requirement, build the thing, move on.
It feels faster, but over time, you accumulate a landscape of potholes with very expensive signage.
Slowing down up front to question and explore:
- Protects you from maintaining unused or low-value reports
- Builds trust, because stakeholders start to see better outcomes, not just more artefacts.
- Creates a culture where people expect to talk about problems and decisions, not just solutions and tools.
A question for you and your team:
Next time someone comes to you with, “We need a dashboard/report/alert,” treat it like that cyclist asking for a pothole sign.
Ask yourself and them:
Are we about to put up a sign, or are we fixing the path?
Curious to hear: when have you realised that what someone asked you to build in BI or data was just a sign, and what happened when you went looking for the pothole instead?
If you are looking for assistance with your Data & AI to avoid your latest pothole, we are always here to help with a no-obligation discussion, contact our friendly team HERE