If the only constant is change then why do we think we can solve problems without understanding?

Imagine standing on a rock looking at a rough sea – things are always changing.

Many of the things changing we cannot know because no one can know everything. Are those unknowns important? How do we know? What we do know is we are part of that system just by observing it.

How we perceive is important to how we think the world works and some big misconceptions are created when we are at school. We are taught the best way to solve problems is to break them into smaller bits and analyse them to find something called a root cause. The theory goes if you address the root cause you will solve the problem. This is the theory we are taught and assessed against for our exams. Always showing our work. Even if we get the wrong answer, we get points for applying the right method. What we are never taught is how to identify the problem we should be addressing, and how to assess the setting, the environment, the people, the complexity, and the reality. It’s like we are given a problem, devoid of any environmental influences, like in a vacuum in a physics laboratory.

Yet in real life, that’s not how it works. In reality, we are dealing with situations, not isolated problems. Situations are complex, like the ocean, there are hidden depths and changes. For example, we cannot fully understand the consequences, interconnections and dependencies of any situation. All we can do is try to make sense of it and plan a strategy to intervene in a way that doesn’t make things worse.

Given the problem 2 apples + 2 apples = how many apples? One answer may be 4 apples. Another may question are all apples identical? Given that apples are a natural product, no apple is identical to any other. So size, shape, colour, texture, taste etc all matter, or perhaps they don’t. If not, why not? In real life, I may want 4 big red apples which are sweet and juicy. Yet I can only get 3 big ones and one small one. The big ones are 3 different types of apples, 2 are eating apples and one cooking apple. Are the requirements met for 4 apples? Sure, but not the other requirement for 4 large, red, sweet apples. It would depend on what I wanted to do with the apples. If it was to make an apple pie, then this may be the perfect balance as the cooking apple would add the right amount of sourness to balance the sweetness of the other apples. But what of the consistency of the cooked apples? Does the cooking apple reduce to the same texture as the eating apples, does it matter? Now some would say this is a very pedantic way of thinking, while others would think this is a perfectly reasonable set of questions. The truth is the math problem ignores the actual complexity of the situation. Some people are drawn to that simplicity, and some are confused by it. However, in the context of making a satisfying dessert, that’s when the complexity becomes a real issue. We do not just buy 4 random apples. We know what we want them for and generally prefer a particular type, colour, size etc. The same is true for everything. Yet we are encouraged by our education and often by employers to not consider the wide range of potential contexts.????

Imagine being dressed in a fine business suit, and walking into a place of work where people are sitting at their desks quietly working. You sit down next to one of the most junior people and introduce yourself as coming from the CEO's office to find out exactly what they are doing. What do you think you will learn? Do you think they will tell you how they work and what mistakes they make, how much pressure they are under and how awful their manager is? If you sit down next to someone and tell them you represent the CEO, their behaviours will be different than if you tell them you are a new employee, for example.

This is how Undercover Boss works (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undercover_Boss) the CEO goes in disguise to truly understand how their business works from an operative’s perspective. Often, they are shocked and surprised at how good people are and how badly their business works for those people. Now this is to some extent a constructed reality for television. But it does speak to a deeper truth about how we work with authority and our peers. When we perceive someone has power over us, we often behave how we think they want us to. This creates a false reality for the manager. In our example, the employee fearing they are being judged and assessed for competence will probably behave differently than if they felt safe to give their opinions and ideas.

Now think about someone who was sitting behind you when you introduced yourself. Someone at another desk you are unaware of. They hear that someone from the CEO’s office is on-site and asking questions. That person may also fear you’re going to judge them or their colleagues and so they tell everyone on their team to behave differently as you are in the building. Perhaps that message is passed to other teams and soon the whole department is behaving differently. Now to you, this may seem like a great team, with everyone working, getting back from their breaks on time and quickly getting to work. There is a saying “The king thinks the world smells of fresh paint.” Because every time the king visits, everything is freshly painted. In this case, you would perhaps marvel at how everyone works so diligently wherever you go. This is an example of you the observer becoming part of the system being observed.

This creates big challenges when a business brings in an external consultancy to investigate its operations. The people who work there are reluctant to tell the consultancy what is really going on. So, the consultancy often must think of imaginative ways to get the people to open up. The people though, are understandably nervous, and this is even more likely in companies that have announced redundancies. In this case, the people rightly feel their jobs are at risk and will do everything in their power to make their job secure. This creates a constantly changing system, with people motivated to make it as opaque as possible. So, any consultancy trying to analyse such a system would very quickly find it very difficult to get to any conclusions. Now imagine you are trying to improve an operation. Imagine the people in that operation see you as a risk. Their behaviours to hinder your work would make it extremely difficult to analyse what could or should be improved.

Even if the people are on your side and support improving things. They all have their own perspective of you and their system, and those systems are constantly changing. Every day they come to work and their mental models, cognitive distortions, mood, relationships, mental and physical health, environment, motivations, distractions etc. all combine to make their day unique. This impacts how they perceive their world and that impacts how they perceive their system. Add to this the variety of inputs to their day of meetings, conversations, other people’s troubles, news and interests. Even conversations they hear about someone from the CEO’s office visiting! Now add to that the variety in the makeup of their work. Each day different requirements, differing workloads and work content, changing expectations of management, the company, different types of work arriving in different formats, changing priorities and focus. Then add to that the environment, the bullying or support or apathy or confrontation. This is what we mean by an ever-changing system. Every interaction with any of those things can set changes in motion and those changes can lead to many others. It is people who are the cause of much of this variety, but it is also people who are the flex in the system which allows it to cope with that variety. Ross Ashby named this requisite variety, and all viable systems must have at least the variety of responses to deal with the variety of inputs.

In business, we are usually encouraged to use analysis to fix problems we perceive with what we often call “the system”. There are many problem-solving approaches that usually start with the problem. This is then analysed and broken down into smaller components until we discover a root cause. This is then addressed to “solve” the problem. This though assumes we know what the problem is, and that’s a big assumption. It is perhaps much better to talk of situations rather than problems. With a situation, we are encouraged to understand it, with a problem we are encouraged to solve it.

In any case trying to analyse something constantly changing, where even the analysis you do is creating changes, is going to be very difficult. If not, impossible. So instead, we look at diagnosing and making sense of things. Putting things together, gathering as much information about the current understanding and collating that into a view from the hill. From up there it is possible to make sense of things.

When you go to the doctor with a bad knee, the doctor does not open your knee and get the microscope out. They will probably ask you about your life, what you eat, where you work, do you exercise, smoke, drink etc. They are trying to get a complete picture before they analyse anything. With this picture, they can quickly understand your knee in the context of your life. Maybe you need to exercise more or less? How would they know that from analysing your knee? Maybe they could find out, but it would be bad for your knee to undergo that sort of analysis.

Reality is a lot more complex than most of us are equipped to deal with using the simplistic tools and methods traditional education provides us with. To truly address reality, we need to make sense of things before we rush to try to solve problems. First, we need to make sure we are addressing the right problem. Even then we need to be aware that just by looking, we are changing the very thing we are trying to address. This means we need different approaches to make sense and instead of treating problems as though they exist in isolation, we need to understand the situation and its setting. From there we can make plans about how we could intervene in the best way possible. This is a very different mindset to seeing a problem, analysing it and applying a solution.???

John Flach Fred Voorhorst