How Not to Dig a Hole

I would like to relate a story about how not to dig a hole. In the immortal words of humor columnist Dave Barry, I’m not making this up.

Some years ago, I was working as a carpenter for a contractor who was building a log cabin in the mountains of North Carolina. The footings had been poured and the cinderblock walls for the basement had been laid. Next up was the floor framing, but first we had to create a girder and support it from below with a column. Why the footing for this column had not been poured when the others were, I don’t know.

That day on the jobsite, there were myself, another carpenter, the contractor and two laborers. The contractor did some rough measurements in the basement, placed an X in the dirt with the toe of his boot, then called one of the laborers over and said, “Give me a hole right here.”

The response from the laborer was to place his shovel and jump on it to start the hole; the rest of us headed to the lumber pile to start constructing the girder.

We came back in an hour to find that the hole was about six feet square and three feet deep, with the dirt scattered all around.

Aside from the fact that the contractor intended to place the column on a couple of spare cinderblocks in the hole and let that stand as the support (just to be clear, this is not a good building practice), there’s another lesson here, which is: Garbage In, Garbage Out. I know we’ve all heard this expression, but here specifically it means that the scope of the work was not well defined. The location was specified, but nothing else.

The end result was that literally 96% of the excavated dirt had to be shoveled back into the hole. Although it is impressive that this laborer was able to move that much dirt in so short a time, he removed twenty-five times what was actually required.

It is of critical importance to define the scope of what needs to be done; this saves time, cost, labor and headaches. One of my mentors loves to say,  “A problem well stated is a problem half solved.” He is absolutely correct.

I have worked with a lot of engineers—including some brilliant ones—and we love to design things. I can’t tell you how many times I have seen an engineer receive a problem, then scamper off to design something to solve it only to come back with an innovative solution that is only a partial solution or one that is in appropriate because he didn’t stop to fully understand the scope.

My first task in any project is to first look at the problem from a high level, then work into the details. I define a clear statement of work, gain agreement on the scope (also a critical step, because there may be things I’ve missed or misunderstood), and only then start working to solve the problem.

This approach pays dividends every single time.

So when you have even a simple task like digging a hole, make sure you know what it needs to be. And save yourself 96% of the work.