My speaking schedule brought me through Omaha, Nebraska yesterday, which afforded me the great luxury of some face time with Joe Gerstandt. We had no agenda, but spent the morning quite productively talking about all things leadership. One of the insights from that conversation has been rumbling around my brain, and it has to do with problem solving.
As a society, we've been growing for centuries and centuries. Every generation we're more impressive. We can do more, build more, accomplish more. Along with this growth in our capacity to do amazing things, however, we simultaneously build our capacity to create really nasty problems. The two go hand in hand. The more amazing things we can do, the more nasty problems we can create. Lighting our homes by candle light is great, but sometimes the houses burn down. Powering cities nuclear power plants is far more incredible, but note we've also got some bigger problems to deal with (nuclear waste, meltdowns, etc.). The amazingness and the problems seem to scale together.
This is all fine as long as our capacity to SOLVE these nasty problems also scales. For the most part, I think it has. The three things have been growing more or less together: amazing things, nasty problems, brilliant solutions. Not every problem gets solved as quickly as we'd like, but for the most part we're doing okay.
But what if our problem solving curve is not keeping up any more? What if we have organizations and institutions that can create nasty problems like the BP oil spill or our health care system, but these same groups lack the capacity to solve them, or at least to solve them quickly enough before they get out of hand?
And what if our systems of leadership and the way we ran our organizations were central to our capacity for solving problems? Hmmm. More to come.