(L)earning is a lifelong process of keeping abreast of change.
Peter Drucker
In this life, the only thing that anyone can really promise us is that things are going to change. For home inspectors, this fact means that our client’s HVAC system is eventually going to change from functional to non-functional. Good maintenance (and good luck) may be able to slow this process, but eventually, change happens. There’s nothing that can stop it. No matter how long it takes, eventually everything changes. Nothing ever stays the same.
This goes for our education as well. We’re either learning or we’re falling behind. The collective knowledge keeps increasing, and we’ve got to do our best to keep up. We should all be doing everything we can to make sure we keep learning. While in an ideal world, the things we learn would make us better business owners and inspectors, almost any new knowledge we acquire will help.
In this vein, I’ve been quietly working toward finishing my college degree; one I started working on in 1984. As there is (unfortunately) no bachelor’s degree in home inspection, I’ve had to choose a different field of study. I’m currently taking my very last class, and I’m on track to graduate from the University of New Orleans in Dec 2025!
I’ve been pleasantly surprised with the ways in which seemingly unrelated fields of study have overlapped with my inspection business. I’ve been able to take many of the ideas that I’ve learned in my various classes and put them to work bettering my current business situation.
In my current class, I’m studying a thing called a “wicked problem.” The wicked in this problem doesn’t refer to evil but rather describes a problem that lacks a single solution, where there is not a yes or no answer. It’s a problem that’s complex, interconnected, and often aiming at a moving target. To make things even better, sometimes an attempt to solve one aspect of this problem creates even more issues somewhere else.
As I read this description in my school book (actually, there’s no school book; it’s all on the internet now), along with the corresponding attributes of wicked problems, I couldn’t help but think: “Man, this sure sounds a lot like problems we run across as home inspectors.”
Like each individual home inspection, every wicked problem is essentially unique. No two houses, no two customers, no two agents, no two inspections, and no two problems are the same. No matter how much they resemble each other, every day is a new day, filled with its own distinct trials and tribulations. We’ve got to be ready for anything.
Solutions to wicked problems, like solutions to home inspection problems, are not graded by right or wrong, but by which one turns out to be better or worse. It’s quite rare that we’re faced with a decision that we’re 100% behind. It’s more likely that we’ll be making a choice we’re less than happy with, and that’s OK. If it’s the best we can do in this particular situation, we’re got to salvage what we can from a bad situation and live to fight another day. Learn what we can from this experience, and effect changes to help limit the possibility that we’ll make the same mistake again.
Life is an ongoing project, so our futures are always being created before our eyes. There really is no way for us to predict (with any kind of certainty) what’s going to happen next. For home inspection problems, like wicked problems, there is no immediate and ultimate solution. We may write that check or make that repair, but that’s never the end of it. There may be more calls from the client. The issue will certainly have an impact, for better or worse, on our relationship with that agent (and possibly others in her office). There may be implications for our reputation, and the whole thing might change the way we do inspections from here on out. There really is no end to the possible influence of a problem.
If you’re interested, I invite you to read through the Wikipedia entry for this idea. As I stated, I was amazed at how much overlap there was with our inspections. Learning this new information certainly has made an impact on the way in which I interact with other people in my business.
You never know where you might be when you suddenly learn something.
P.S. Never stop learning.
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Thanks, Joe
