There's a whole in my bucket...

In this episode, we explore how the effects of even a small change can ripple everywhere.

“There’s a hole in my bucket”: probably everyone from an English-speaking background would know that old song of stuckness - and no doubt every other culture would have its own equivalent. It starts off with a simple-seeming request from someone named Liza:

Fetch some water, dear Henry, dear Henry
Fetch some water, dear Henry, fetch it

Henry asks Liza how to do this; Liza replies - perhaps somewhat testily? - that he should use the bucket. At which point, up comes Henry’s immortal excuse:

“But there’s a hole in my bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza
There’s a hole in my bucket, dear Liza, a hole”

…and then they go through that long, circuitous stuckness where every solution suggested by Liza for the hole in the bucket is countered by Henry complaining that there’s yet another problem that needs to be fixed before that solution can work - eventually coming back to where they started, where he can’t get the water because there’s a hole in the bucket.

There’s a hole in my bucket. Stuck: no idea where to start. Round and round in circles: no way forward, no way out.

No doubt we all know that feeling all too well…

Yet there is a way out of that loop. And to start moving towards it, all it takes is one small change: add exactly one letter to that phrase, to change it from “There’s a hole in my bucket” to “There’s a whole in my bucket”.

And that one small change in turn changes everything.

Instead of being an empty bucket that can’t give us any help, it’s a whole bucketful of ideas.

Every point contains every other point; every point in turn points to another possibility, another possible way out.

And instead of being stopped at every step, we can start anywhere.

For example, look again at those options from TRIZ, as in that post ‘Small changes, different options’ a couple of weeks ago. Make the bucket larger, or smaller; make the bucket of a different material; make it harder, or softer; make it hotter, or colder. Hey, that’s a point: make the contents colder - fill the bucket with ice rather than water, then it won’t leak so much. Carry the bucket not in your hand, but on your head: your hair or your cap will seal up the hole in the bucket whilst you’re carrying it. Another option: wear the bucket on your feet, so that you can carry the water in your shoes instead. Or maybe invent a whole new form of anti-gravity, so that the water will hold itself together and you won’t need the broken bucket at all. And so on, and so on, and so on: always another option.

When there’s a hole in the bucket, it can seem that nothing is possible.

But when we make that one small change - there’s a whole in the bucket - then everything is possible.

(Or possibly possible, anyway…)