How to face problems that seem too big to handle?

At Impact Central we have the amazing privilege of learning from some of the most creative people on the planet.??Yes, some of them are the founders who arrive on our impact accelerator with unquenchable zeal to solve some of the most pressing issues facing society by building better businesses.??There are also our amazing faculty who join us on the programme to teach the founders how to achieve their goals.??After watching many brilliant faculty members interact with more than 50 start-up founders, I discovered an important secret.??Brilliant faculty members are not brilliant because they have solutions to every problem.??They are brilliant because they have a method for resolving a specific issue.??Thereby allowing us to move forward.

The importance of this distinction was explained to me by Dave Evans.??Dave is the NY Times bestselling co-author of ‘Designing Your Life’ and, in addition to also being a serial entrepreneur, has taught countless numbers of university students how to apply design thinking.??Dave shared the important insight that the world is filled with ‘wicked’ problems.??Wicked problems are characterised by having incomplete or even contradictory requirements that are difficult to recognise.??Additionally, wicked problems often have complex interdependencies that, in the effort to solve one part of a problem, reveal or create other problems.??Climate change is a wicked problem!

Unfortunately, our standard approach to problem solving and our organisational structures are poorly designed for wicked problems.??We are taught to isolate elements of the problem, solve those individually and the summation of these solutions will address the entire problem.??It is merely a question of agreeing on the approach.??This is what we are trying to do with climate change.??Global leaders keep hoping to land on the right approach which we can then execute and our problems will be solved.

But what if climate change is not a problem to be solved.??In a dynamic world of 8 billion people and resource constraints there will always be trade-offs.??I realise it sounds initially pessimistic to say that climate change is a wicked problem that cannot be solved.??The opportunity however is to see this as a liberating realisation.??Stop waiting for the perfect solution!??There are thousands of brilliant ideas that will improve a particular issue the planet is facing.??Sure, individual solutions might seem small and insignificant, but they don’t require complex organisations or international treaties and if enough of them can be given the oxygen and fuel to grow we will certainly improve on the current projections.??I guarantee that we will also have amazing new insights along the way.

At Impact Central we work with founders to identify social and environmental impact opportunities that can be integrated with business products and services.??When people ask me whether a start-up can address a global challenge my answer is emphatic. Yes! It took us decades to create our problems and it will take time to resolve our issues.??Stop talking and get to work!??