If You Want to Solve a Problem, Think of It as an Iceberg

In business, lingering problems rarely have a single or simple solution. That’s why they linger.

Many work problems are relatively unambiguous and are easily understood by the people who deal with them every day. We solve them without thinking about them too much: Problem X → Action Y → Resolution Z. It’s easy to get used to that level of thinking, particularly if we have to solve the same problem over and over.

Getting Stuck In the Shoals and Shallows

People tend to base their judgments on what they can identify above the waterline, so to speak: immediately, and easily. Not surprisingly, if people think they “see” the answer, and it feels straightforward and satisfying, they may neglect looking any deeper. But with a thornier problem, a tougher review is required.

When something has been “hurting” for a long time, it’s not enough just to look at that particular spot. You need to step back far enough to view the entire structure and see its underlying conditions and history of symptoms; you also may need to bring multiple viewpoints together.

Before You Put a Hole in the Ship

Keep in mind that merely agreeing on what the problem is doesn’t uncover what went wrong or automatically make the situation right. Merely lopping off the tip of the iceberg doesn’t change the rest of the mountain of ice floating below the waterline. Agreeing on what needs fixing isn’t the same as designing a plan to achieve a better outcome.

Here are two very different examples of real-life situations that turned out to be more complex than the initial resolutions could address:

1. Navigating Rough Waters

What should have been a straightforward migration of an organization's email from one server to another became a nightmare.

Multiple technical specialists and providers opined on the matter. Each one assumed that their solution would fix the problem. But each single-focused solution left the providers blaming each other and the organization's employees and their customers increasingly frustrated and dispirited.

After the system’s hardware and software had been switched out in numerous configurations and reconfigurations, a comprehensive and astute review, at significant expense, identified multiple, simultaneous protocol conflicts that had kept the problem — and those emails — locked in place.

In a broken situation, the people who have the greatest need for a solution often have the least ability to resolve things. Yet they also feel the most tortured by the problem, especially when the supplier population is going through the motions of one fix after another.

Sometimes, looking out from within a problem, you can’t even see that the kind of fixer you need is one who brings a broader perspective.

2. Bailing Out

It’s a widely accepted truism that people typically leave bosses, not jobs. But when a department has a persistent turnover problem, it’s worth looking into the situation more deeply.

In this case, the manager could have been more skillful. But it was a terrible confluence — of intractable infrastructure problems, lack of corporate direction, outdated communication processes, and an overheated need for skilled labor in the local job market — that caused a constant outflow of employees, including those who actually liked their boss.

In fact, the manager could have been replaced several times without necessarily improving staff turnover or morale. Given that no individual was the primary cause of the turnover, no single person could be the answer. It took (1) a thorough review, both broad and deep, performed by an outsider, and (2) talent from throughout the company working collectively to confront the various institutional aspects of the problem and chip away at them.

Make a Titanic Discovery

If your team has lived with a problem for too long, and none of your attempted solutions has brought the hoped-for end to it, stop looking at the tip of the iceberg and churning the surface of the water. Dive deeper to look at the problem’s base, formation, and drift — and then choose a better course.

Liz Kislik is a management consultant and executive coach. She helps organizations from family-run businesses and national nonprofits to the Fortune 500 solve their thorniest problems while strengthening their top and bottom lines in the process. She is a frequent contributor for Harvard Business Review, Entrepreneur, and Forbes and spoke at TEDxBaylorSchool on Why There’s So Much Conflict at Work and How to Fix It. She has served as adjunct faculty at Hofstra University and NYU. You can receive her free guide How to Resolve Interpersonal Conflicts in the Workplace on her website.

An earlier version of this post appeared on Workplace Wisdom.