Problem Solving Through the Lens of a Plumber: What 20 Years of Blocked Drains Taught Me About Business

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The smell hit me before I even opened the manhole cover. Twenty-three floors of human existence had conspired to create what I can only describe as an olfactory nightmare beneath a prestigious Sydney office building. But here's the thing that struck me as I descended into that corporate sewage system with my torch and snake auger – this blocked drain was going to teach me more about business problem-solving than any MBA ever could.

You see, most business consultants approach problem-solving like they're arranging flowers. Pretty theories, neat frameworks, everything colour-coded and laminated. But after two decades of literally getting my hands dirty fixing what people break, I reckon the best problem-solving lessons come from places where theory meets reality. Hard.

That particular Tuesday morning – and yes, it's always Tuesday when the really interesting stuff happens – I discovered something that's been bugging me about how we teach creative problem solving in corporate Australia. We're teaching people to think like engineers when most problems require you to think like a plumber.

The Difference Between Engineering and Plumbing Problems

Engineers design systems that work perfectly on paper. Plumbers fix systems that were designed by engineers but installed by the lowest bidder, used by people who don't read instructions, and maintained by blokes who retired three years ago without leaving notes.

Business problems are plumbing problems.

Your customer retention issue isn't happening because your process flowchart is wrong. It's happening because Sharon in accounts receivable has been manually entering data differently than everyone else for six months, and nobody noticed because the report that would show this discrepancy gets emailed to someone who left the company in March.

When I finally cleared that blockage – turned out to be a combination of wet wipes (despite the signs), several mobile phone cases, and what appeared to be someone's entire lunch from 1987 – I realised something profound about business problem solving. The real skill isn't identifying problems. It's understanding why people create them in the first place.

The Five Whys vs. The Plumber's Why

You've probably heard of the Five Whys technique. Toyota made it famous. Ask "why" five times and you'll get to the root cause. Brilliant in theory. Useless in practice.

Here's why the Five Whys doesn't work in real Australian businesses: because the fifth "why" usually involves admitting that someone made a decision six months ago that they don't want to explain to their boss. So they'll give you four perfectly reasonable whys and then wave their hands vaguely at "market conditions" or "legacy systems."

The Plumber's Why is different. There's only one why, and it's this: "Why is water going where it shouldn't?"

Everything else is just details.

I've seen companies spend months analysing customer churn with sophisticated models and heat maps and correlation matrices. Meanwhile, their phone system drops 23% of incoming calls during busy periods because nobody wants to pay for enough phone lines. That's not a customer experience problem. That's a "water going where it shouldn't" problem.

The best problem solvers I know – and I'm talking about people who actually fix things, not people who write reports about fixing things – they all think like plumbers. They follow the flow. They find the blockage. They clear it. They test it. They move on.

Why Business Schools Get It Wrong

Here's an unpopular opinion: business schools are terrible at teaching problem-solving because they're trying to eliminate all the variables that make problems interesting.

Case studies are sanitised. Data is clean. Stakeholders are rational. Deadlines are reasonable. Resources are available. Everyone speaks the same language and shares the same objectives.

Real business problems are nothing like this.

Real business problems involve competing priorities, incomplete information, office politics, budget constraints, personality conflicts, and time pressure. Plus, unlike case studies, you can't flip to the back of the book to see if you got it right.

I learned more about problem-solving from a blocked drain in Parramatta than I did from three years of business management courses. Because when you're standing waist-deep in other people's mistakes, you develop a very practical approach to finding solutions.

You don't have time for root cause analysis workshops. You don't have budget for consultants. You don't have stakeholder buy-in meetings. You have a problem that needs solving, and if you don't solve it quickly, everyone above you gets very unhappy very quickly.

The Tools That Actually Work

Forget your problem-solving frameworks. Here are the tools that actually work when things go sideways:

The Torch Test: Before you do anything else, make sure you can actually see the problem. Most business problems happen in dark corners where nobody's looking. Shine a light there first.

The Snake Auger: Sometimes you need to break through the obvious stuff to find what's really causing the blockage. Don't be afraid to dig deeper, even if it makes a mess.

The Pressure Test: Once you think you've fixed something, test it under normal operating conditions. Don't just check if it works – check if it works when Karen from HR is having a bad day and decides to process three months of expenses at once.

I've watched companies implement elaborate creative problem solving activities that wouldn't find water in an Olympic swimming pool. They're so focused on following the process that they forget to check if the process actually leads anywhere useful.

The Human Element

Here's what really separates plumbing problems from engineering problems: people.

When a drain blocks, it's usually because someone flushed something they shouldn't have. When a business process breaks, it's usually because someone took a shortcut, made an assumption, or tried to be helpful in a way that actually made things worse.

You can redesign the system, but unless you understand why people behave the way they do, you're just building a better mousetrap in a world full of mice who've learned to avoid mousetraps.

The most successful problem solvers I know spend more time understanding people than understanding processes. They ask questions like: "Why would someone think this was a good idea?" and "What would make this easier for the person who has to use it every day?"

Companies like Atlassian and Canva have built their entire business models around understanding that technology problems are usually people problems in disguise. They don't just build better software – they build software that works the way people actually think and behave.

When Everything Goes Wrong at Once

The biggest problem-solving challenge isn't solving one problem. It's solving multiple problems that are all connected to each other in ways you don't understand yet.

That Sydney office building? The blocked drain was just the beginning. Turns out the blockage had caused a backup that damaged the basement electrical systems, which knocked out the building's internet connection, which meant the trading floor couldn't operate, which meant several million dollars of transactions couldn't be processed.

One problem. Seven consequences. All happening simultaneously.

This is where most business problem-solving approaches fall apart. They're designed for sequential thinking: identify problem, analyse cause, implement solution, measure result. But real problems don't wait politely in line to be solved one at a time.

The plumber's approach is different. You prioritise based on what's causing the most immediate damage, you fix the things you can fix quickly, and you manage the rest as best you can while you work on the bigger issues.

Sometimes that means living with imperfect solutions for a while. Sometimes that means making temporary fixes that aren't elegant but stop the bleeding. Sometimes that means admitting you can't solve everything and focusing on what matters most.

The Measurement Problem

Business loves metrics. Problem-solving workshops love to talk about measuring success. But here's something nobody wants to admit: the most important problem-solving successes are often invisible.

When I fix a drain properly, nobody notices. The water flows where it's supposed to flow. People go about their business. Nothing dramatic happens.

The dramatic stuff only happens when I don't fix it properly.

Same with business problems. The best solutions are often the ones that make problems disappear so completely that people forget they ever existed in the first place.

I once spent six months helping a manufacturing company solve what they called their "quality control crisis." Turns out the crisis was caused by a change in their supplier's packaging that meant components were arriving slightly damp, which affected the adhesive they were using in assembly.

The solution cost $47 in silica gel packets and fifteen minutes of training. The problem never happened again. Nobody got promoted for solving it. No case study was written. No framework was developed.

But production efficiency improved by 12%, customer complaints dropped to near zero, and the assembly team stopped dreading Monday mornings.

What This Means for Your Business

If you're serious about improving problem-solving in your organisation, stop thinking like a business school and start thinking like a tradesperson.

Train people to follow the flow. Teach them to look for the obvious things first. Give them permission to make quick, imperfect fixes when the alternative is letting everything overflow.

Most importantly, remember that every problem was created by a person trying to do their job as best they could with the information and tools they had available. Your job isn't to find someone to blame. Your job is to understand why perfectly reasonable people made perfectly reasonable decisions that led to perfectly unreasonable outcomes.

And sometimes, your job is just to put on the rubber gloves and clear the blockage so everyone else can get on with their work.

Because at the end of the day, that's what problem-solving really is: making sure things flow the way they're supposed to flow. Everything else is just paperwork.

The smell from that Sydney basement eventually cleared. The building went back to normal. The traders made their millions. And I learned that sometimes the most valuable business lessons come from the places nobody wants to look.

Just remember to bring a torch.