284: Second-Order Problem Solving: Why Busy People Stay Stuck (And Four Questions to Break Free)

Dear friends

On Friday night, in solidarity with Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez we drank a rather delicious 2013 R. López de Heredia Rioja Reserva Viña Bosconia. We ended the meal with Not Tonight Josephine, Duncan Savage’s superb small batch Chenin Blanc straw wine. Both are very much worth drinking. We also lifted a metaphorical glass to South African artist and pioneer, Zanele Muholi who has just won the world’s largest photography award, the Hasselblad (several of you forwarded me the announcement, thank you).

/strategy
 Amy Edmondson’s The Right Kind of Wrong was the 2023 Winner of the Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year.

In it, she describes research that she did with Boston University professor Anita Tucker: they documented, in detail, the work processes of nurses at nine different hospitals.

They observed that the nurses encountered process failures almost hourly.

“A process failure was anything that disrupted a nurse’s ability to complete a task, such as an unexpected supply shortage in bed linens or medications.”

All told, these process failures added forty-five minutes of unpaid work to each day. Yet surprisingly, or not, in only seven percent of incidents did the nurses engage in second-order problem solving, i.e. fix the problem and do something to prevent it from recurring.

Edmondson observes, “We can easily understand why busy nurses rarely engaged in second-order problem-solving. But this left them vulnerable to continued frustration because the workarounds didn’t reduce the frequency of future process failures… Like all quick fixes, the nurses’ workarounds created an illusion of effectiveness. Confront a problem, implement a work-around, get on with your day. End of story.”

This approach is true of many organisations. Indeed, popular strategy narratives tell us to only take the big and the complex, but multiply 45 minutes a day across each employee in your organisation, apply a mean hourly salary: that’s the cost of not pausing to solve systemically.

Richard Hackman’s research on team effectiveness concluded that a full 60 percent of effectiveness is a consequence of system and process design; 30 percent came from team design at launch –for example, how an airline crew or surgery team orient themselves to each other before take-off or operating, and only 10 percent comes from day-to-day tweaking (cited in The Friction Project).  

We can’t afford not to stop.

[You can explore previous letters on Edmondson’s research here].

//self
We get as easily caught up in the same rinse-and-repeat cycle in our own lives. We keep ourselves busy dealing with problems that could be eradicated by slowing down for some second-order problem solving.

These four questions are quite magical in shifting us towards system thinking for ourselves:

• What one recurring thing in your life frustrates you? Often just identifying an issue lays the seeds for its solution, or as Benjamin Disraeli put it, “To be conscious that you are ignorant is a great step to knowledge”.
• If you could do just one thing today that would make life easier, what would it be? Imagine the cumulative effect over a year. Saving 5 minutes a day seems inconsequential. Over a year you add 30 hours back to your life.
• What one request would you like to make from whom? Problem-solving is rarely a solo act.
• Where in your life do you already enjoy success and how could you amplify it or use it where you are struggling? In our rush to fix problems we often forget our existing superpowers.

///soul
I love this description from David Brooks’ How To Know a Person: “A person is a point of view. Every person you meet is a creative artist who takes the events of life and, over time, creates a very personal way of seeing the world. Like any artist, each person takes the experiences of a lifetime and integrates them into a complex representation of the world. That representation, the subjective consciousness that makes you you, integrates your memories, attitudes, beliefs, convictions, traumas, loves, fears,desires, and goals into your own distinct way of seeing.”

In it is a provocation: if our lives are indeed acts of creation, if we are the artists who are crafting our lives, it behoves us to envisage what we want, and to take consistent, intentional action to sculpt what we desire from the granite of life.

Best wishes

Karl
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