A Super Wicked Problem – The People That Want to Solve the Problem Also Create It

Earlier this week, I was meeting with a sales team. The team had experienced a number of changes since my last visit. Recently, one of the sales managers had left the company, followed shortly afterwards by one of the top salespeople. Another sales manager had been re-assigned to another position within the department and a third manager had been promoted to lead the department…quite a number of changes in a short amount of time. 

I was meeting with the team in small groups to try to understand how they felt about the moves, whether they viewed them as positive or negative, their thoughts about the departures, the management shuffle and promotion.

In my last group, I had two veterans, and one fairly new salesperson. One of the veterans was fairly outspoken and dominated the majority of the conversation. From this veteran salesperson’s point-of-view, some the changes weren’t that positive. As he was sharing his view of the recent past, he was passionately describing how frustrating he found some of the current process failures, and he went as far as saying he had modulated his own sales performance because the process shortcomings made it too painful to sell at higher volumes!

Once he finished, I asked him if it would be ok if I shared something with him that I thought might help him see the situation differently. He was willing, and the other sales team members were willing to participate too.

I began by acknowledging the frustration of the group. I reminded them that my particular area of expertise is helping people manage conflict. I shared a concept called a Super Wicked Problem. A Super Wicked Problem exists when: the people that want to solve the problem also create it. That means to say, if you want to productively manage conflict, you must first understand how you may be participating in it…in other words, creating it.  

I asked each of them to answer the following:

I’d like you to pretend you were describing yourself to a stranger. And you’d like that stranger to know everything about you that you’d want them to know about you, in six, or eight, or ten words…what are those words?

For the sake of their time, I simply asked them for one word each. The outspoken veteran was quick to give me his word: “loner.” As he went on to explain what being a loner meant to him, he explained that he considered himself self-sufficient, and he didn’t enjoy being dependent on anyone. He wanted to live in a world that he could predict and control. We agreed to use “self-sufficient” as a replacement for “loner.”

I had a second question for them to answer, and asked them each to:

Please describe a situation that tends to bring out your worst; that turns you into that person that you don’t want to be, but are anyway?

As we went around the room, I was paying close attention to the situations each offered. The outspoken veteran salesperson was last to share, and he proceeded to share a situation that brought out his worst. It was no surprise to me that the entire situation he described was connected to his feeling of being dependent, lacking control, and being unable to foresee an outcome with some degree of certainty. He reiterated several terse conversations he’d had with managers as a result. As he was telling us about it, to emphasize a particularly frustrating part of the story, he shoved his pad of paper across the conference table, with his glasses and pen atop, to portray a physical response to the level of his frustration with the situation.

At that point, I wanted to connect the dots for all of them by tying his two answers together. I told them that the reason it’s important for them to know their own values, is that all human behavior is a function of those values. I continued explaining that their values are also their triggers, so any situation that they encounter that challenges one of their values will “spin them up,” meaning that they will become emotionally reactive.

The real reason that the veteran salesperson found the situation he referenced so frustrating, was that the situation rendered him helpless. The antithesis of self-sufficiency. He was in that moment completely dependent on management, something he railed against earlier. He lost his ability to predict the outcome and had no semblance of control over the situation. That led to him becoming emotionally reactive…argumentative, angry, aggressive, combative. And while in that mode or posture, it would be easy for him to offend others, by their perception of his lack of professionalism, or his making interactions uncomfortable or even confrontational. Worst yet, he might actually create the behavior in them that he didn’t want, by virtue of his reactive approach.

What he didn’t understand was that that particular situation was a “hot situation” for him due to his value of self-sufficiency. If he had some other value, as did the other salespeople in the room, the situation wouldn’t be nearly as emotional as it was for him. And once emotionally reactive, his behavior contributed to the problem, not the solution.