Three ways people respond to a problem (other than solving it)
Three Ways People Respond to a Problem (Other Than Solving It)
- Pushing Problems Around:
- Many organizational efforts simply shift friction from one area or team to another, resulting in local optimization rather than actual system improvement.
- Rather than blaming individuals who are acting logically under their immediate incentives, root cause fixes require intervention from higher-level leadership to realign systemic incentives.
- Preserving Problems:
- Highlights the Shirky Principle: institutions and specialized roles often work to inadvertently perpetuate the very problems they exist to solve.
- Solving a problem effectively requires identifying stakeholders who benefit from its existence and incorporating their interests into the resolution strategy.
- Promoting New Problems:
- Solving a primary issue inevitably elevates secondary problems or introduces unintended collateral issues (referencing Weinberg's rule and Postman's technological questions).
- Consultants and problem-solvers must abandon the illusion that problems can ever be permanently eliminated, learning when to address issues and when to deliberately ignore them.
Hacker News Discussion
- Ignoring Problems as a Strategy:
- Commenters advocate for "benign neglect," noting that a vast majority of minor organizational issues disappear on their own when stakeholders fail to reach consensus on their importance.
- Waiting to see which problems survive delay acts as a practical filter for identifying issues truly worth solving.
- Expanding Scope and Problem Creep:
- Discussions point out that addressing initial symptoms often expands the definition of the problem until allocated resources are entirely exhausted, making boundary-setting essential.
- In-House vs. Commodity Solutions:
- Participants discuss how engineering teams often reject existing solutions over minor missing features, inadvertently creating massive maintenance overhead that pushes problems into the future.
- Political & Cognitive Approaches:
- Users share reflections on how different mindsets approach problem-solving: some focus heavily on reacting to immediate symptoms without testing underlying assumptions, while others jump straight to solutions without accounting for secondary systemic costs.