Problem vs. Situation

We are carrying a wrong definition of the word ‘problem’ from our academic life to professional careers. Outside academia, when we say we are facing a problem, we are wrong. Problems either have solutions or they don’t (unsolvable). It is always a 1 or 0 consequence. Remember the math problems we used to solve? Right or wrong (some marks for steps, thanks to our lovely teachers). Problems are things we create. They don’t exist in nature. Think about it.

Anything outside academia, and the proper word which we should use is perhaps ‘situation’. Or anything else, if this particular word is too American for your taste. Things not going so well in the office project? It’s a situation, a big set of multiple causes and corresponding direct/indirect and visible/invisible effects. It can’t be pinpointed to a single one, and if attempted, it will exclude a large range of vital factors outside the range, thus effectively invalidating the single cause.

So how does it matter? It can change the perspective of looking at and understanding things in day-to-day life. We have been trained and made to believe since long that there are actual solutions to the problems (rather situations) we face and if done right, the problems will dissolve. Have we ever experienced that outside academia? No matter what you do, how hard you try, how late you work, things just never get over. This can be a single lane expressway for frustration.

The word problem should be left only for the very technical domain. In our day to day work/life, we face various continuous situations, not problems. The situation changes with time, and the direction of this change is either random or too complex, something like the butterfly effect. The solution you might be working on for a particular problem might soon become invalid considering the new direction with time.

A fixed problem has constraints applied to its system, reducing the randomness in possible outcomes, giving the possibility of a finite set of solutions. But that’s not the case with the conditions we face on a daily basis. A small change from the top can bring about a big change in the bottom of any organization. One new government policy can change the entire business model of the organization.

So what? That’s the new normal. Increased interconnectedness among domains, increased exposure to unknown risks. The silent sea becomes a rarity, storms rock the ship daily. Reaching destination becomes secondary, survival is primary. The wind throws the weak in the sea, only those remain who are strong and holding on to something strongly attached to the ship. The change starts managing you, instead of you managing the change.

So instead of having a thousand different problems to solve, better to have a single situation to manage, and make benefits when it allows. Don’t blindly go by success stories, for every one success story there are 1000 failed stories buried in the crematory, which we don’t know about.