032: Slow Down and Zoom In
Slow motion video seems to be more and more popular as time goes on.
It seems that everywhere you look, you can catch some phenomenal feat happening in frame-by-frame action.
Maybe it’s someone jumping from one building to another and impossibly landing right on a ledge before rolling to safety.
Or a perfectly placed volleyball floating up in space right before a player rises up behind it to crush it to the floor.
Or an arrow being shot through colored water balloons that seem to explode in a way that we never could have seen in real time.
When the action is slowed down, we not only have a greater appreciation for what is happening. We also are able to see things that we would have missed before.
That’s one of the reasons why slowing down is a great problem-solving tool.
This can really apply anywhere, but I’ve especially seen it play out in manufacturing. Over and over again.
For example, the problem as it looks to the naked eye might be that a machine is erratically acting up and not doing what it’s supposed to.
On the surface, watching in real time, this does indeed seem to be the case. There isn’t any apparent rhyme or reason to it. It just seems to happen in no particular pattern.
But when you slow it down, that’s when the magic can happen.
Especially when you couple slowing down with zooming in.
I use these two together often. And what happens is that what couldn’t see because it was too fast or to small suddenly makes sense.
With the machine we mentioned earlier, when we took video and slowed down and zoomed in we noticed that one of the pieces wasn’t able to fully drop into place every time. And it was because one of the guides was loose.
I never could have seen that otherwise and would have wasted valuable hours and manpower to try to fix something with a solution that wasn’t addressing the root cause.
And you can apply this too, no matter your situation. If one of your processes isn’t giving you the results you are looking for, especially if it’s erratic, try zooming in, slowing down, taking it frame-by-frame.
It could be an issue with some coding in a program. Or an automated sequence in your email system. Maybe it’s a communication or instructional issue.
Whatever it is for you, it’s worth the time to walk it through slowly and zoom in to the details. That’s when you can find that one thing that is wreaking all the havoc.
And when you’ve solved the problem, you have my permission to capture a slow motion victory dance to share with the world.
Thanks for listening to today’s episode. I’d love to know what you find out as you slow down and zoom in. You can shoot me an email at shawn@shawnwashburn.com.
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