It's a bit of a story, but it's got a point that relates to this.
Back in vanilla WoW, when Naxxramas was new and wonderful, my guild hit Thaddius. He was the big Frankenstein looking guy with lightning shooting everywhere. His big gimmick was polarity. If two people were near each other and had opposite polarity, we'd shock one another to death pretty quickly. However, if you had the same polarity, you'd increase the amount of damage you could do. This meant you wanted to stand next to people with the same polarity while keeping away from people with different polarity. Of course, this changed every 30 seconds, and ~10 people had their polarities changed. If you didn't move fast enough, you'd shock people. And with 40 people in the raid, all it took was one person to be slow on their feet and they'd shock the entire raid. Of course, this is going on while everyone is trying to maximize DPS and keep the raid healed up.
Anyways, the strategy was simple: positive on the left, and negative on the right. The debuff icons we had were blue for postive and red for negative, and the original idea was people would equate red with right. Association. This work well when people had to get into their initial positions. However, once we were engaged and everyone got to their initial spot, polarity changes were troublesome. People would move as soon as they knew they had to move. However, they had to think about it. The thought process worked like this.
1. Polarity changed happened.
2. Did my polarity change?
3. Yes. What color?
4. Red. What side am I on?
5. Left. I need to move to the right.
6. Move to the right.
That's a lot of work. A second delay, and considering you only had 3-4 seconds to react, coupled with a second of lag, and you'd burn people.
The problem wasn't people reacting. The problem was the thought process. How to get people to react quickly.
I finally caught on to the solution. The problem was thinking too much. What I told people to do was to initially setup on the left or right like normal. However, after that, ignore sides. Instead, follow one simple rule:
Change sides when your polarity changes.
Change when the icon changes.
Simple enough. You don't need to worry if the polarity doesn't change. You don't need to worry about going to the left or the right. You simple move to the opposite side.
The difference was dramatic. The very next attempt, we got him so low we thought we were going to kill him, but someone lagged out and caused a wipe. Regardless, the effect was clear.
Understanding now only the problem, but how to approach that problem and make it easy to learn is important. It's hard to understand where the problem lies with people. I was proud of this. Oh, it was just a game, but it was a clear example of being able to understanding a problem with how other people thought, and being able to come up with a solution.
Back in vanilla WoW, when Naxxramas was new and wonderful, my guild hit Thaddius. He was the big Frankenstein looking guy with lightning shooting everywhere. His big gimmick was polarity. If two people were near each other and had opposite polarity, we'd shock one another to death pretty quickly. However, if you had the same polarity, you'd increase the amount of damage you could do. This meant you wanted to stand next to people with the same polarity while keeping away from people with different polarity. Of course, this changed every 30 seconds, and ~10 people had their polarities changed. If you didn't move fast enough, you'd shock people. And with 40 people in the raid, all it took was one person to be slow on their feet and they'd shock the entire raid. Of course, this is going on while everyone is trying to maximize DPS and keep the raid healed up.
Anyways, the strategy was simple: positive on the left, and negative on the right. The debuff icons we had were blue for postive and red for negative, and the original idea was people would equate red with right. Association. This work well when people had to get into their initial positions. However, once we were engaged and everyone got to their initial spot, polarity changes were troublesome. People would move as soon as they knew they had to move. However, they had to think about it. The thought process worked like this.
1. Polarity changed happened.
2. Did my polarity change?
3. Yes. What color?
4. Red. What side am I on?
5. Left. I need to move to the right.
6. Move to the right.
That's a lot of work. A second delay, and considering you only had 3-4 seconds to react, coupled with a second of lag, and you'd burn people.
The problem wasn't people reacting. The problem was the thought process. How to get people to react quickly.
I finally caught on to the solution. The problem was thinking too much. What I told people to do was to initially setup on the left or right like normal. However, after that, ignore sides. Instead, follow one simple rule:
Change sides when your polarity changes.
Change when the icon changes.
Simple enough. You don't need to worry if the polarity doesn't change. You don't need to worry about going to the left or the right. You simple move to the opposite side.
The difference was dramatic. The very next attempt, we got him so low we thought we were going to kill him, but someone lagged out and caused a wipe. Regardless, the effect was clear.
Understanding now only the problem, but how to approach that problem and make it easy to learn is important. It's hard to understand where the problem lies with people. I was proud of this. Oh, it was just a game, but it was a clear example of being able to understanding a problem with how other people thought, and being able to come up with a solution.