February 29, 2016
A Skill for Wicked Problems:
Create problems by extracting them from “messes” and making them Actionable.
A man holding an envelope in his hand approached J. P. Morgan, at the time the world’s richest man, and said: “Sir, I have here a formula that is guaranteed to bring success to anyone. I will gladly sell it to you for $25,000.”
“Sir,” J. P. Morgan replied, “I do not know what is in the envelope. If you allow me to see it, however, and I like it, I give you my word as a gentleman that I will pay you what you ask.”
The man agreed and handed over the envelope. J. P. Morgan opened it, took out a single sheet of paper, glanced at it, put it back in the envelope and handed it back. He then took out his checkbook and wrote a check for $25,000 and gave it to the man.
The contents of the note?
1. Every morning, write down a list of the things that need to be done that day.
2. Do them.
Brilliant! And not so brilliant! This is an example of what Hamlet called “The Rub” as in “Ay, there’s the rub..” In Shakespeare’s time “a rub” was a term used in lawn bowling and referred to an unevenness in the ground that impeded the bowling ball from traveling in a straight line. In other words, a difficulty, or an obstacle – in a word – a problem.
Making a list of important things to do in order to be successful is easy. Anyone can do it – and many do. What is not so easy, and sometimes impossible, is the next step: selecting the most important item on the “To Do” list and actually “doing it.” In other words, it is what must happen next that makes a difference: translating the good ideas and good intentions on the list into positive changes in one’s own life and in the lives of other people – “Ay, there’s the rub.”
Pope Francis’ Vision of Heaven on Earth
Recently, when I read the words of Pope Francis to the Catholic faithful in Mexico, I was reminded of the words of wisdom for which J. P. Morgan paid thousands of dollars: Name the essential things and then do them.
On February 15, 2016, Pope Francis spoke to hundreds of thousands of worshipers in Ecatpec, Mexico one of the poorest and most desperate of the many slums that surround Mexico City and told them what they should do. Standing on a giant stage with people stretching out in all directions, the Pope counseled them to make their nation into “a land of opportunities, where there will be no need to emigrate in order to dream, no need to be exploited in order to work, no need to make the despair and poverty of many the opportunism of a few, a land that will not have to mourn men and women, young people and children who are destroyed at the hands of the dealers of death.”
Underlying the Pope’s hopeful language were many of the devastating problems facing Mexico: unemployment, economic inequality, lack of education, lack of adequate health care for all, drug cartels, pervasive violence, corruption at all levels of government, organized crime, and human trafficking. Pope Francis was, in effect, asking his audience to confront the wicked problem that were making their lives so miserable.
I’m sure the Pope’s intentions were good. He was doing what Popes, pastors priests, and ministers do: describe a vision of a sanctified and beneficent society, a heaven on earth, and then encourage us to bring it into existence. What Pope Francis did not say – what he could not say – was to explain to the faithful in specific and concrete terms how to bring into existence this Heaven on Earth. The advice that the Pope and all religious leaders offer – “Be obedient, and follow the teachings of Christ, or God, or Allah, or Buddha” – does not get rid of the “rub.”
An Agenda for the 21st Century
It is not only the poor people in Ecatepec and other towns and cities in Mexico who are struggling with large number of seemingly insurmountable problems. All people and all countries everywhere have their own lists. While the problems that appear on the lists are different from one country to another, some clearly more serious than others, all people everywhere are trying to find ways to transform them into actual improvements and eventually social progress. So far, however, no community, no nation, no people, no religion has been able to create its hoped for Heaven on Earth.
Author and philosopher Rushford Kidder was interested this conundrum on a global scale: How can the problems of the world be transformed into actions that lead to progress? he wondered. Before he could begin to propose solutions to world-wide problems, however, he realized that he did not know what they were, and so he set out to discover them. He was guided by the following questions:
“What’s on the world’s agenda for the 21st century? What are the fundamental issues that humanity must address if the 21st centuries to be a viable age? Which ones are of first intensity, and which are important but secondary?”
In other words, what’s on the world’s list?
Unlike the Pope, who is confident that his vision of Heaven on Earth is the true one, Kidder knew that he was not wise enough or brave enough to create the world’s list His solution to this tame problem? He sought out people who should know – the most eminent and respected world leaders – and asked them to help him create the world’s list: the most important global problems that if addressed successfully, would result in, if not a secular Heaven on Earth, at least a global society that would survive and even flourish.
He interviewed 22 people – philosophers, historians, political leaders, presidents, business leaders, poets, novelists, ecologists- and presented his findings in An Agenda for the 21st Century, published in 1987. His analysis of the interview data yielded six “first intensity issues,” issues so important for the future of the world, that “humanity must devote its full attention and its unstinting resources” to addressing them. Here is his list:
- The threat of nuclear annihilation;
- The danger of overpopulation;
- The degradation of the global environment;
- The gap between the developing and the industrial worlds;
- The need for fundamental restructuring of educational system;
- The breakdown in public and private morality.
And once again, “There’s a rub.” Despite all of their experience and wisdom, none of these respected “wise people” could describe with any degree of confidence where to start and what to do in order for the world to begin addressing these critical issues, let alone to “solve” them. The wise men and women were good at naming the problems, but beyond insisting they were “critical,” not so good at suggesting what should be done about them.
Who’s Responsible?
In her Forward to Kidder’s book, An Agenda for the 21st Century, Katherine Fanning, editor of the Christian Science Monitor, understands this dilemma. While Kidder was able to identify the most important problems that the world is facing in the 21st century, problems so serious that the world “must devote its full attention and unstinting resources” to addressing them, she confesses that the book contains no answers: “This book does not attempt to provide solutions for all of the problems it raises.” So what needs to be done? “Agendas never accomplish anything until they are acted upon,” she observes, “the next step is to press toward solutions.”
And who should do the pressing? Each individual person is her answer: “We believe that each individual has an urgent responsibility to consider the impact of today’s decisions and…building upon the wisdom of this collection of thinkers, begins to form his or her agenda for the 21st century.”
Can Individuals Make a Difference?
If Mexican citizens as individuals are responsible for addressing such serious issues in their country as corruption and violence, inadequate health care, or human trafficking; when citizens of the world as individuals are responsible for the global crises of the degradation of the global environment, or the breakdown in public and private morality, then what should they do? What can they do? Where should they start?
While there may be many answers to the question, “What should they do?” there are no constructive answers to the question, “What can they do?” When it is Individual against “The gap between the developing and the industrial worlds,” few possibilities present themselves except “worry a lot!” Few possibilities that is, unless things change. What is needed is to find within the larger issue a problem of appropriate size and scale, one that is Actionable, one that when attacked by a person or a group, will give ground.
Human Scale and Its Importance
The dilemma here is one of scale. Human trafficking in Mexico is a societal problem. A single citizen can do little unless he or she can find a “human” sized aspect of human trafficking to address. As human beings, we are best able to work on problems that have been “right-sized:” These must be problems with the size and structure that allow us to understand them and, with our available resources and experiences, imagine getting our arms around them, and then developing a plan which guides our actions toward making that “human” sized problem better. Our first task toward creating an actionable problem, then, is to create a problem that has Human Scale.
Remember that the issues, problems, and crises faced by the citizens of Mexico and by the citizens of the world are not actuallly problems at all but “messes,” When individuals treat “messes” as problems, what results is an exercise in futility, one that is filled with endless debate over “what is the problem” and what to do about it. These debates are never resolved. As we have seen in previous essays, the designation of “mess” for our social and organizational problems comes from the writings of organizational theorist Russell Ackoff. Messes are large, complex, dynamic constellations of issues, situations, dilemmas, and conundrums, many of which are seen by some people as potential problems. The “problems” that the Pope named in Mexico and that Rushford Kidder summarized in his book are not problems but”messes.” Ackoffs conclusion is “[People] do not solve problems, they manage messes.” Problems, the kind that can be addressed, attacked and grappled with by individuals and groups exist within a mess in embryonic form. In order to bring them to life, they must be extracted from the mess, given shape and structure, and prepared so that constructive work can begin.
Make Problems Actionable
How, then, can Mexican citizens, mired as they are in an innevervating poverty, be expected to take action against human trafficking or the drug cartels? How are individual citizens of the world expected to confront the “the economic gap between developing and industrial nations?” The answer is, create Actionable Problems.
Here are the steps:
First: An individual or group selects some aspect of the “mess” – a potential problem – that is for them interesting, important, and doable, and begins to transform it into a problem that can be worked on.
Second: A workable problem emerges when a gap is created between the unsatisfactory present and a more desirable future. We are Here, and we want to be There.
Third: Once the gap between the present and the future is determined, then the individual or group begins the process of identifying the obstacles that stand in the gap and block the way from moving from the present state to the future one.
Fourth: An Action Plan, one that when implemented can be expected to remove or bypass obstacles and permit movement toward agreed-upon goals, then emerges.
In summary, a potential problem is turned into an Actionable Problem by concerned or committed individuals who locate in the middle of a “mess” an area of concern – a potential problem – and work to identify a “gap:” First they define a more desirable future, then they determine the present state or condition, and then they create a plan for eliminating the obstacles that stand in the way.
John Woolman Revisited
In a previous essay, I shared the story of John Woolman who, in the late 1700’s, became convinced that slavery was evil and needed to be eliminated. Yet there was little that Woolman could do as an individual to attack directly the institutional “mess” of slavery.
So he set about creating an Actionable Problem he could attack.
As a member of the Quaker community, he knew that many of his brethren were slave owners. Here was an aspect of slavery that he could personally address. In his mind, Woolman created a problem that had human scale, one that consisted of a “gap” between the unsatisfactory present and a desirable future. When he began, the present state was that many members of the faith owned slaves; in the future, Woolman hoped, those slaves would be freed.
His “action plan” consisted of traveling throughout the States and personally exhorting each Brother to free his slaves. He spent the last twenty years of his life implementing his plan. But even though the Brethren eventually freed their slaves, Slavery itself was not defeated. It continued on for almost a century until it was finally brought down by the Civil War.
Problems, Dysfunctional Practices, and Counterproductive Arrangements
Anyone who has worked for any length of time in an organization can agree with Rosa Beth Kanter’sdescription of what organizational life is like on the inside:
“Organizations are riddled with problems, dysfunctional practices and counterproductive arrangements. Though externally they may appear to be sophisticated and deliberate instruments of collective purpose, operationally they are…bulls in societies’ china shop, with people lurching from one point to another, often seemingly out of control, and steered more by this sheer momentum and by chance encounters than by design.”Confronted with such a description – and trusting the person who provided it – anyone who was responsible for such a place would ask is “What can we do about these problems?”
The answer, unfortunately, is “not much,” at least with the “bulls in societies’ china shop,” or “people lurching form one point to another, seemingly out of control.” What Kanter has described with these phrases is an “Organizational Mess.” What is needed is the creation of Actionable Problems of human scale that can be understood and addressed by a group of concerned people.
One place to begin is to home in on what Kanter calls “problems, dysfunctional practices and counterproductive arrangements.” People in organizations are all familiar with their own brand of problems dysfunctional practices, and counterproductive arrangements. They are everywhere, and the people who work there suffer their consequences on a daily basis. There are no organizations, either in the private or public spheres, that are not “riddled” with these kinds of problems and the people who work there know what they are! If the members of an organization are so inclined – which means that they feel safe enough and can see some benefit for themselves and for the organization – they can describe them in great detail..
Imagine for a moment that a company decides to learn more about its “dysfunctional practices,” and so invites a consultant to help it. After interviewing a large number of key employees, the consultant is able to name the most serious two dysfunctional practices: “Ineffectual Team Meetings” and the “360 Feedback Review Process” and identifies a number of specific behaviors and practices that they include.
Now that the two most important dysfunctional practices have been identified, named, and specific dysfunctional behaviors have been identified, work can move forward in creating Actionable Problems for each situation that when addressed, offer opportunities for consecutive movement forward.
“Consequential,” “Essential,” and Actionable
In The Future of Management, author and consultant Gary Hamel suggests that future success for leaders is predicated upon their “passion for solving extraordinary problems that create the potential for extraordinary accomplishment.” Yet in recent years, Hamel insists, most leaders can be faulted for a “lack of daring in the choice of problems to tackle.” His recommendation couldn’t be more clear: “Devote yourself to a problem that is consequential and inspiring, essential and laudable!”
Who could disagree? What I would add, however, is that before you begin work on these “consequential, inspiring, essential and laudable” problems, you make them Actionable! Then, and only then, can your work be productive. Otherwise, regardless of your passion, commitment and good intentions, you are destined to be wasting your time.