Are we solving too much?
What if the most complex challenges we face can’t be solved? It’s one of the toughest questions I wrestle with. The elusiveness of real answers flies in the face of reams of frameworks and hacks that purport to solve just about anything, backed by billions of dollars and the best minds directed like heavy artillery at a seemingly immovable enemy.
Yet enduring ills, what Rittel and Webber called “wicked problems” back in 1973, persist: conflict, addiction, hunger, housing and health insecurity, climate fragility. Not for lack of trying.
Perhaps the challenge is instead to dance with the problems. To accept their complexity and their tendency to confound even the best financed interventions. To see them as opportunities for creativity and collaboration, while accepting they’ll never be fully solved.
There’s an Indian proverb: “To watch us dance is to hear our hearts speak.” Dancing with problems may move us from an over-reliance on the head and let us hear our hearts.
Look at the world as dynamic, adaptive systems, and no state is ever steady for long. As a “solution” is applied, the problem shifts shape. It evolves. The fix maps to what was, not what is or what will be. So “solving” becomes a matter of thrust and parry, of sensing and responding, of anticipating and adapting. It’s not about the perfect remedy. It’s about relying less on what you know and getting comfortable exploring what you don’t, and what you can’t.
Dancing with a problem can lead to deeper exploration, not just of root causes but of the systemic conditions that let a problem persist in the first place: asking the hardest questions, testing our convictions, asking under what conditions the problem would cease to exist at all.
Perhaps the goal isn’t to solve. Perhaps it’s to dance until the fog lifts and clarity is undeniable.
“Dance first. Think second. It’s the natural order,” said the Irish writer Samuel Beckett. Let’s dance.
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