Beyond Solving: The Three Ways People Actually Respond to Problems

A consultant argues that solving is only one of four possible responses to a problem — and often not the one that happens. The other three, framed as ‘P’s, are pushing problems around, preserving them, and promoting new ones. Pushing problems around is the default outcome of local optimization inside medium and large organizations: a fix here quietly creates a mess there. The author’s advice is not to blame the people doing it, since they’re rationally playing the game their incentives set up, but to look upstream and correct the system and incentives at a higher level of management.

Preserving problems is captured by the Shirky Principle: institutions tend to protect the very problem they exist to solve, because their relevance depends on it. The practical takeaway is to identify who benefits from a problem’s continued existence — the people who lose if it’s eliminated — and account for them in any plan, whether or not you agree with them. Promoting new problems comes from the fact that every solution spawns fresh problems (Postman’s question ‘What problems do we create by solving this problem?’ and Weinberg’s observation that eliminating problem number one just promotes number two).

The deeper point is about mindset: a good consultant must dislike problems enough to hunt them down but be comfortable enough with their permanence to avoid burnout, giving up the illusion that the work of problem-solving is ever finished. The author’s own remedy is to build a shared diagram so a team can see their problems clearly, agree on what they are, and deliberately pick the few actually worth fixing rather than chasing all of them.