For the Love of Hairy Problems

I remember telling my mother in 2015, just after it was clear that Trump would be running for president, “I don't particularly love Hillary, but what she has over Trump is she knows that solutions to real problems are not tweetable. They simply aren't.” Real problems, the ones that make it to the president’s desk, are big, complex, hairy problems. They are filled with dependencies, nuances, conflicts, millions of dollars, and billions of high strung emotions. 

I always liked hairy problems, admired them in away. I even had a system for attacking them. I would start with one person or task, put in the center of a sheet of paper, and go from there, slowly pulling the thread. I would branch out my circle one person at a time asking “who else should I talk to?”, “what do you think is the root of the problem?” and, “if one thing would make your life easier, what would it be?” I would ask the same set of questions to 15 or 20 people, building out a map. After a few weeks, it would typically look like a wheel, a colleague of mine once called one map my wheel of misfortune (everyone working on that problem was miserable). As soon as I started hearing the same thing over and over (I always did), I would stop interviewing and start assessing. It was the same story every time: one thing could be done right away to make everyone happier. Then there was a long tail of small impact, high emotional problems. Those were the ones causing fights and the reason no one wanted to touch the issue at all. We would fix that one thing and then spend a year or two working through the tail. Of course, in those two years new problems cropped up and we had to start from the beginning again, but hey, that's what we were paid for. 

I say all of this in the past tense, I used to like hairy problems. Now, they make me tired. I lose my temper, I shut down and I keep my head down hoping someone else will deal with them. What changed? I took a new job and encountered an unsolvable problem. I tried my method and it failed miserably. I chose multiple places to start and no matter where I branched out, I hit a dead end. I ran into people with agendas who would lie or refuse to answer at all; egos who asked me who the hell I thought I was; team leads who had given up so many years ago they couldn't give me a coherent answer about what they wanted to be changed, and managers who refused to admit there was a problem at all. I kept pushing, fighting, talking, asking and pushing some more but made no progress. In all this time, issues were mounting and in this giant, swirling mess, Trump was elected president and I forgot everything I knew. 

My method that had done we so well for so many years, the method I knew deep down was true had failed. Everywhere I went I heard, “don’t be stupid, it's not that complicated”. I felt stupid. Logic, discourse and in-depth analysis had failed; I gave in to the seductive tweet. Maybe problems were easily solved, it couldn't possibly be this hard. I caved, started telling people problems are simple, their solutions are compact and if you don't believe that you are stupid. It took almost a year for me to realize the reality. Those in-the-moment solutions from the people that thought everything was simply never stuck, the problems kept coming back. 

We are not stupid. Problems are complex, solutions elusive and decisions are hard to make. Instead of giving up, we must start somewhere and pull patiently on the string. Gather everyone's perspectives, fold each new experience into your truth and do the best we can to fix what’s in our reach. 

I have been watching my brightest, hardiest plant over the last few months. It looks the same every day until it doesn't. One day it seems to shoot up a whole new stalk out of nowhere. But it was just slowly growing the whole time, wasn't it?