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Comment by paulcole | Hacker News Reader

> Essentially, there are sometimes big, systemic, intractable problems that lower-level people might see but not have the perspective, experience, etc. to even begin coming up with a solution

I disagree with this and it’s an excuse for people who don’t want to think.

Which is fine, I guess. It’s everybody’s right to not want to think.

But it doesn’t change the fact that in the vast majority of situations, coming up with a solution is possible. The trick is then to come up with one that’s slightly better and then slightly better and so on until you run into the limit of what you’re capable of.

Challenge people to be creative. It’s a skill that can be developed with practice.

The next time somebody says they can’t come up with a solution because of their low rank or whatever, try offering them $10k out of your own pocket to come up with any solution.

Suddenly, I’ll bet, a solution comes to them!

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I mostly agree with you. I suppose we should distinguish between a "proposal" and a "solution." I guess a "solution" actually satisfies a set of constraints whereas a "proposal" could just be dead on arrival because it fails to satisfy one or more constraints. The lower-level person is probably not even aware of all the constraints, so whatever proposal they come up with likely isn't going to be a solution. Demanding that they come up with a throwaway proposal doesn't do a lot of good.

Example: The school lunch program is failing to adequately feed students. The first-year teachers stuck with lunch duty see it, the students see it, etc. No doubt that they can come up with some proposal that involves spending more money on the lunch program, and they can even identify some other area to take the money from, but they don't necessarily see the big picture to know why that might not be possible (e.g. tax dollars or grant money can only be spent in certain ways) or what the negative effects might be (e.g. why money is currently being spent in that other area).

This is another way I've seen people get squashed by executives. As people were trained to offer a proposal when reporting a problem, they did so, but then it gave the executive an opportunity to just focus on explaining why the proposal can't work instead of just listening and asking follow-up questions to better understand the problem.

I mean it seems more like the underlying issue you have is with how people respond to proposed solutions rather than that they are asked to come up with a solution at all.

But that is the entire "issue": for you to get an improvement implemented, you need to work with people with a broader context and more say in things. And they are human, so you need to make sure you don't put them needlessly on a defensive (even if they don't mean to be).

I mean, the thing you quoted and said you disagree with is just clearly true. Take it to the extreme:

Someone a week out of school can identify a problem that requires thousands of people coordinated by leadership across the organization to solve.

It isn't "people don't want to think" or a failure to "challenge people to be creative" to recognize that many problems require significantly more experience or expertise to propose a solution to than to identify.

> Someone a week out of school can identify a problem that requires thousands of people coordinated by leadership across the organization to solve.

I am not suggesting that the person solve the problem. I am saying that they are capable of putting forth a solution.

The solution may not be complete, great, reasonable, or feasible. But nobody ever got better at solving problems by not thinking of solutions.

And shouldn’t we try just asking someone for a solution before we get to thousands of people working to solve a problem?

> many problems require significantly more experience or expertise to propose a solution to than to identify.

You skipped over the part where I challenged you to put your own money on the line to test this belief.

You really think that a single solution is impossible to identify for “many problems”?

Hypothetically, imagine a problem you think I can’t come up with a solution for. I will present a solution to it.

Hmm, I've been going back and forth on what I think in response to this...

On the one hand, I do agree with you that anyone can come up with an unworkable proposal for a solution to any problem.

But on the other hand, most of the good people I've worked with would find it very unsatisfying to put forward an unworkable proposal and may well just be discouraged from reporting the issue at all.

But I think on balance we are probably more in agreement than I thought. I do think it's a useful exercise to encourage people to say "this is a problem, I don't really know how to fix it, my best idea is ____ but I'm not sure that will work because ____".

But I also think it's pretty hard to foster an environment where people of every seniority level feel comfortable doing that.

>But I also think it's pretty hard to foster an environment where people of every seniority level feel comfortable doing that.

That's because pretending to be unsinkable is much easier than working to prevent the ship from sinking. Especially when there's a perception that the problem carries very low risk. That creates situations where there's little individual benefit and a lot of reputational risk for raising the alarm.

To fix this you have to intentionally create a culture that aligns individual and organizational incentives around the behavior you want to see encouraged.

100%

Even then, people who are new will inevitably be skeptical that this kind of culture is real. And they may be right that it isn't real for them, even if you think it's real.

I saw this a bunch joining a ginormous tech company decades after its rise; old-timers thought things were true about the culture that may have still been true for them, but which didn't seem true to me.

(Also, nobody feels more betrayed than those old-timers when the culture turns cut-throat during difficult times.)

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