What shall we do about it?

If you’d like something interesting to ponder this weekend, here’s a quote about problem solving that comes from the philosopher Alan Watts:

“The question ‘What shall we do about it?’ is only asked by those who do not understand the problem. If a problem can be solved at all, to understand it and to know what to do about it are the same thing.”

That’s a mighty counterintuitive take on things, which is part of its charm. After all, the reflexive outlook is that solutions are hammers that we use to smash problems; lavishing too much attention on the problem itself seems like fraternizing with the enemy.

That’s a conceptual trap that’s easy to fall into.

I’ll admit that it might be a stretch to actually like a problem, but I think that having a reflexive hostility to everything we call a problem can set us up for even bigger woes. That’s a common situation. As a result, there’s a lot of unnecessary hostility in the world.

I like to keep this quote from Watts in mind for a couple of reasons. One reason is that I don’t want to wind up considering every circumstance I encounter as a problem to be solved.

After all, many circumstances are just that, circumstances, and they don’t all demand that I have some sort of reaction to them. If a problem really isn’t a problem, then there’s no need to worry about a solution.

One way I cultivated this outlook was by working on the high seas on fishing vessels. Actually, I didn’t cultivate the outlook, the outlook cultivated me. I had no control over a ship’s operational realm; no idea where I’d be in one, two, three, or six months; and no idea what was going on in the outside world.

So I just learned to accept each day on its own merits. This was alien to the goal-oriented, make-the-most-of-your-time, always-be-planning, always-update-your-forecasts, always-be-optimizing conditioning of my earlier days.

But, of course, some situations do require problem solving. This brings me to the second reason I like the quote. It reminds me to really think about a problem in terms of its own nature. Otherwise, I might just steamroller over it by imposing my own agenda from the outset.

Fortunately, this is one case where the lecture hall held some real-world wisdom. In school, knowing how to set up a problem was more important than penciling-out the actual solution. Getting the right equations laid out was probably 80 percent of the battle.

As for solutions, well, many were merely rote calculations. They can save time and effort, but they can be real booby traps if they’re applied to the wrong types of problems. In fact, having the right solution to the wrong problem is a common way of messing things up.

One common problem I’ve seen in the business world is the desire to influence what customers are going to do without taking sufficient account of what customers actually want to do. The latter realm, which demands getting improved insights into the customer’s preferences, is very difficult. One reason it’s so difficult is that it requires being able to ignore your own preferences in order to consider somebody else’s preferences.

It’s far easier, and, in some realms, far more common, to simply try to manipulate the customer.

We’ve all been on the receiving end of that stuff: marketing gimmicks, deceptive pricing or “discount” schemes, callous reductions in service quality, stealthy reductions in product quality. When these are “solutions” to the problem, it’s likely that the problem itself should have been defined more carefully.

Given that situation, although I don’t think managers usually set out to take the low road, it’s easy to wind up there anyway if they’re expected to show some action as a solution to a poorly-defined “problem.” Once this spiral starts, it’s self-reinforcing.

In those cases, any manager, or, for that matter, any executive, who suggests circling around and re-examining the problem itself will wind up on the streets right away, free to pursue, as they say, “other opportunities.”

Anyway, those are a few examples of what comes to mind when the question “What shall we do about it?” comes up.