All the easy problems have already been solved.
It’s been said about any leader that they only solve difficult problems – if it had been easier to solve, it would have been before it got to their desk. But we’re all leaders on the journey from the past to the future, and I think we’ve got to accept that the aphorism is true for us, too.
If the problem we’re facing were easily solvable, it would have been solved already. At every level, we face problems that stymie us because no one has found a workable solution yet. It’s up to us, then, to face these problems and find the solutions that are complex enough to actually work.
This is true in the classroom, it’s true in social policy, it’s true in science, it’s true in creative efforts. The easy solutions have already been found and used.
Accepting that we’re all in this situation might make it a little easier to stop searching for simple fixes and embrace the complexity we need to solve a problem. Whether I’m writing a composition or working to find long-term fixes to discrimination or global climate change – any simple solution can be assumed not to work. If it worked, it would have already been done.
Lead. Find the hard solutions.