Right, let’s talk about this Joe O’Toole thing. It’s not some fancy framework or anything, at least not how I ran into it. For me, it goes back to a project, maybe three, four years ago? We were totally stuck.
We had this piece of work, supposed to integrate two old systems. Sounds simple, but it was a mess. Spaghetti code, no documentation, the usual horror show. The team was burning out, meetings were just going in circles. Everyone had ideas, complex ones, trying to engineer the perfect solution from the start.
Hitting the Wall
I remember sitting there one evening, feeling like we were getting nowhere. Just spinning our wheels. Then I recalled this old guy, Joe O’Toole. He wasn’t even in our department, worked over in logistics or something. Kinda quiet, kept to himself. But once, during a coffee break, he’d mentioned something offhand about how they handled tangled delivery routes.
He said something like, “Forget the whole map. Just find the next closest stop. Get that one right. Then worry about the one after that.” It sounded almost stupidly simple for our complex tech problem. But we were desperate.
Trying Something Simple
So, the next morning, I went in and basically told the team, “Okay, forget the grand plan for a week. Let’s just pick the absolute smallest, most annoying part of this integration. The one single connection point that’s blocking everything else. And we’re just going to focus on making that work. Nothing else.”
Honestly, it felt weird. Like ignoring the elephant in the room. Some folks were skeptical. Asked how this would solve the bigger picture. I just said, “Look, it’s the Joe O’Toole way for now. Let’s just try getting to the next closest stop.”
- We identified the one specific data handshake that always failed.
- We put all other tasks on hold.
- We just hammered on that single problem. Debugging, testing, trying different small tweaks.
The Slow Turn
It wasn’t magic. The first couple of days were still frustrating. We hit dead ends. But because the focus was so narrow, we could actually see the progress, tiny bit by tiny bit. We weren’t trying to boil the ocean anymore.
By the end of the week, that one little connection point? It worked. Solidly. And you know what? Fixing that one piece suddenly made the next step much clearer. It wasn’t quite the next ‘closest stop’ like Joe’s delivery routes, but the principle held. Solving the immediate, tangible blocker simplified the path forward.
It taught me something important. Sometimes, especially when you’re overwhelmed, the best thing isn’t a complex strategy. It’s just focusing intensely on the very next step, however small. Get that done. Then look up and find the next one.
We eventually got that integration project finished. It was still hard work, took weeks. But that shift in approach, sparked by that random chat with Joe O’Toole, definitely broke the logjam. It wasn’t about some grand methodology named after him, it was just about applying a simple, practical idea when we were stuck. Find the next stop. Deal with it. Repeat.
