Three ways people respond to a problem (other than solving it)

https://improvesomething.today/responses-to-problems/

by surprisetalk • 5 days ago

276 165 5 days ago

improvesomething.today

andsoitis• 5 days ago

There’s a fourth: deny

metalman2• 5 days ago

or perhaps thats the first response?

in any case, as a hard core problem solver who is currently overwhelmed with problems I am bieng forced into no choice paragmatic responses. where I have lost any reserve capacity, deflect, move, deny a problem and get some rest, eat, shave the yak, before rejoining the fray with enough energy to perform is just part of the routine now. ie: triage or go under, which may be habit forming

jagged-chisel3• 5 days ago

Denying the problem exists is not the same.

Denying that the problem is a “problem” would be.

In the first case, the affected do nothing because there is no problem.

In the second, it’s “not a problem” because they did a thing and moved it elsewhere.

1970-01-01• 5 days ago

There's a 0th: empathy. They want to hear you say you heard them, hear you say the problem is a problem, and have you say the problem is making things harder.

pessimizer• 5 days ago

The cool thing about this one is that you don't even have to understand what they said, just learn how to repeat it back to them with a sad look on your face.

hackable_sand• 4 days ago

Fascinating demonstration of denial

ActionHank• 5 days ago

My colleagues like this one.

0wis• 5 days ago

Nice article, interesting to keep an open mind. On "No. 0002. Preserving problems", it can happen to people too, no need for a complex system at the size of a company. I have often noticed recognized experts keeping the root of the problem unsolved because it was justifying their position. I may even have been subject of this curse. As an expert, you may know the root cause but have no incentive to solve it and it can be harder to mobilize ressources to solve the root cause than to keep solving the superficial issue. It is management or outside help role to identify and push for solving problems at their root, but it takes time and dedication because of expertise. As most of the time, incentives explain nearly everything.

jimnotgym• 5 days ago

I often found the opposite can be be true, people can, for decades on end, be totally ignorant of what happens next door. When you show them the effect of their ignorance you often get something akin to the stages of grief. Definitely the anger, and with you in particular. The, 'I don't care whose fault it is, I'm not here to apportion blame' line only goes so far, especially since other managers and even the CEO might be very interested in apportioning blame. At least they are allies for the change that needs to happen

mnahkies2• 5 days ago

In terms of the expert observation, I've seen this happen a number of times in conjunction with "not invented here" (and probably been guilty of it myself at times) - "the commodity solution doesn't do X that we want", "yeah our in house solution doesn't do x,y,z that the commodity solution does but just a little more effort and it'll be perfect"

Spoiler: neither the commodity solution or the in-house solution will ever be perfect, and you should be really self critical of whether you're building something in-house to scratch your own itch.

If you can find a commodity solution with the right extension points that's often the best solution, failing that many times it's worth accepting the limitations, rarely it's worth investing in the totally bespoke thing (outside of your core domain/proposition).

ocimbote• 5 days ago

This specific problem reminded me of Batman.

jagged-chisel3• 5 days ago

… they inadvertently perpetuate the problem

“Inadvertently”? Seldom.

shermantanktop3• 5 days ago

Do you think people look in the mirror and say “I’m going to be a terrible person today?”

They look in the mirror and say “good job playing the hand you’re dealt - keep it up!” even while what they do is objectively terrible.

Humans have an incredible capacity for rationalizing their own behavior.

jagged-chisel3• 5 days ago

That’s definitely not “inadvertent.”

bluefirebrand3• 5 days ago

Do you think people look in the mirror and say “I’m going to be a terrible person today?”

Not so directly, but I do think that a lot of people don't put any effort into being a good person.

Think of the shopping cart problem. Good people return their shopping carts to the store or a cart return. Many people can't be bothered to do that.

People think "oh I'm not bad for leaving my cart in a parking spot" they think "stealing or damaging a shopping cart is what bad people do"

But they're still kinda bad people for not returning their carts. They're certainly choosing not to actively be good people.

Tangurena22• 5 days ago

Do you think people look in the mirror and say “I’m going to be a terrible person today?”

There are plenty of people who are motivated by hurting/harming their "enemies". You may have heard them brag "own the libs", or similar rhetoric, while doing something objectively terrible.

cheschire• 5 days ago

Seems related to the four risk management strategies:

- Avoidance

- Mitigation

- Transference

- Acceptance

blitzar2• 5 days ago

Sounds like the classic 5 stages ... Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance.

Insanity• 5 days ago

Well, I guess both risk management and the 5 stages are inherently a human activity. Not too surprised that behaviour transfers across personal/professional boundaries. :D

AlienRobot• 4 days ago

I don't have a problem.

It's YOUR problem, actually.

I do have a problem, but problems are good if you think about it.

No matter how many problems I fix, there is always a new problem...

These problems aren't that problematic, they're trade-offs.

MarkusQ• 5 days ago

Three more common ways of responding to a problem:

Weaponize it.

Study it.

Blog about it.

black6• 5 days ago

The company for which I work seems to be run by engineers. When learning to be an engineer you're taught that doing nothing is always a valid option. In Army leadership courses we were taught that ANY decision is better than NO decision.

My company is stifled by a bunch of engineers in leadership positions who always choose to defer up the chain rather than make a decision themselves.

an0malous• 5 days ago

“Do nothing” can be a decision

jcs• 5 days ago

The person who decides owns the risk. The cost of waiting is spread across the whole team, so escalating is usually the safer move for the individual.

mnahkies2• 5 days ago

As another commentator said "do nothing" is a decision. There's a distinction between "don't make a decision and hope someone else makes a decision" and "we acknowledge we're deciding to do nothing about X until/unless Y"

The people in leadership positions should be active participants, and not all decisions will be ones they are are able to make locally - but they should feel comfortable to present a POV and recommendation/tradeoffs upwards when that's the case. If the buck stops with them then they should be aware that "do nothing" is a decision that they are making.

IshKebab• 5 days ago

The most common response I see is "unfortunately this problem is impossible for us to fix because I can't be bother.. err I mean because of these technical reasons. Yes definitely that."

functionmouse• 5 days ago

reminds me of an old meme

have "problem"; don't care: no problem

rawgabbit• 5 days ago

The "meta" problem is that political in-fighting usually results in local optimization everywhere. Various departments throw each other under the bus to steal budget/people/resources. When leadership finally decides to right the bus, they hire an outside consultant; this is an important signal to the departments to stop the nonsense and tell the consultant what everyone knows but doesn't want to talk about. Serious problems require serious solutions. It is much easier to say if Y department would give us X, then line go up forever.

blitzar2• 5 days ago

Not my problem - the best kind of problem.

chadcmulligan• 5 days ago

an SEP - somebody else's problem

didgetmaster2• 5 days ago

People often attribute the government's inability to solve a problem even after throwing billions of dollars at it; as a sign of incompetence. While there is plenty of incompetence within government; I think the 'Preserve the Problem' response is mostly to blame.

If we 'solved' crime, homelessness, drug use, poverty, etc.; then budgets would decrease and political power would diminish. Those in charge of solving the problem often have the least incentive to do so.

have_faith• 5 days ago

Does anyone within the system genuinely feel threatened by the idea that something like "crime" can be "solved" to the point that they're avoiding solving too much crime? Same logic for the others.

dmitrygr4• 5 days ago

A LOT of crime can be solved. A huge percentage of perps are multi-repeat perps. Putting them away permanently would solve a lot of crime.

"75% to 83% of released prisoners are arrested for a new crime" https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/2018-update-prisone...

dooglius• 5 days ago

It's going to be a much more granular detail than all of crime. If your job is to investigate counterfeited 27B-6 forms, you are going to be threatened by that form moving to being filed digitally with cryptographic signatures.

treis2• 5 days ago

It's not quite that black and white. You have fixed amount of policing resources and it goes to the most impactful crimes. If crime goes down then they start caring about petty stuff. If it goes back up then they stop.

This applies more directly to something like foster care. My state is going through a budget crisis and anecdatally the result is significantly fewer kids coming into and remaining in care. It moves at the margins so a borderline case that might have resulted in removal before now doesn't.

As you note it's unlikely that some problems can be completely solved. But our resource allocation is mostly fixed or varies based on circumstances beyond whatever problem is being solved.

didgetmaster2• 5 days ago

I don't think that anyone believes that some problems like crime and poverty can be solved such that it completely goes away. By 'solving', I meant take action such that the result is obvious in that the problem is greatly diminished.

And yes, I do think that individuals and departments feel threatened that they will be impacted if something like that actually happened.

cwmoore3• 5 days ago

The homeless provide a visible incentive to work harder and pay more in rent, and property owners and other taxpayers certainly engage city services (mostly enforcement) in competitive battle for the big bucks. There’s a lot of unrecognized coercion built into the incentive structure underneath the f** y* money tiers. About 50,000,000 hours every day are spent in incarceration, and however many salaries for corrections jobs. The same kinds of system have been around since medieval times.

deelayman• 5 days ago

The article is written from the perspective of a business / management consultant, rather than a public policy shop perspective. In general, I think social problems move slowly, and solving them in a three year business plan isn't realistic. You'll see many agencies use a version of Mayne's Framework or Contribution Analysis to report on progress for big social problems.

It's not that they perpetuate their own raison d'être, it's that they are addressing path dependent social problems, and changing a system with embedded systemic memory within a vast number of crevices (public, private, and cultural) to hide those memories is orders of magnitude more effort than creating the system at the start.

MattGrommes• 5 days ago

I'm genuinely curious about even a hypothetical more detailed example of how some group would go about preserving a problem like homelessness, even unintentionally. I can't wrap my mind about how it would actually happen beyond simplistic sayings.

I live in Portland, OR where we have a large homeless problem and I continually hear that the groups being given money to help are incentivized to keep homelessness high for their own purposes. Like, obviously people who are paid like to keep getting paid but how would they go about making this happen when their job is the opposite?

treis2• 5 days ago

You start by fixing the problem of people sleeping on benches and in tents. Then you go to those in cars, then those crashing on a couch, then those living 8 to a house, then families with small places, and so on. What the problem is keeps expanding until the resources allocated to it are spent.

SoftTalker• 5 days ago

In the homelessness example, it's not so much that the programs and groups want to justify their continued existence (though that might be happening too). It's that the programs themselves incentivize more of the problem. When they give things to homeless people, such as food, shelter, clothes, social services, even needles and a "safe place" to get high in some cases, and often with few or no conditions, they make being homeless more tolerable. Word gets around, and people who could not feasibly be homeless where they are are drawn to Portland because they will get more support there.

Tangurena22• 5 days ago

would go about preserving a problem like homelessness

My state chose to outlaw homelessness [0] and to make it illegal for cities & counties to offer places to lawfully camp unless the campsites are basically enough to be KOA Campgrounds.

Actually solving homelessness is politically unacceptable, therefore it will be criminalized & preserved.

Notes:

0 - The crime is "unlawful camping".

Swizec2• 5 days ago

how some group would go about preserving a problem like homelessness, even unintentionally

Simplistic version: San Francisco spends roughly $100,000/year on each homeless person. In services, salaries for people working on it, rent for office buildings etc. I am willing to bet many of these people would not be homeless if we just gave them $100,000/year without all the middle bureaucracy layers.

nostrademons• 5 days ago

All you have to do is promote policies that make the problem more palatable but don't actually solve it. Treatments instead of cures. As long as the problem needs treatment, the organizations dedicated to treating it will still be around, but as soon as it is no longer a problem at all, those organizations will cease to exist and everyone working on it needs a new job.

For homelessness, it's things like shelters, free meals, needle exchanges, etc. Make the life of the homeless easier without actually getting them into permanent housing. The actual solution to eliminate homelessness is to build more housing, along with financial arrangements to incentivize ownership and make it possible.

For taxes, it's accountants and tax preparation software like TurboTax or H&R block. The actual solution is to make the tax code simple enough that anyone can understand it and then withhold the appropriate amount so that nobody even needs to file. The big tax preparers have repeatedly lobbied against this.

For medicine, it's lots of prescription medication that you have to be on for life to "manage" your condition, as well as recurrent doctor's visits to diagnose and treat it. The actual solution for the vast majority of conditions that kill Americans today is diet, exercise, fiber, reduce stress, stop smoking, and wear your seatbelt. Modern medicine is also very adept at solving acute problems like broken bones, bacterial infections, appendicitis, etc. But once you've got a chronic condition of indeterminate source (many of which are actually solved by the advice above), you're in the system and can expect to pay through the nose for no solution.

For many construction projects (like say CAHSR), it's performing endless studies about how to build the project without actually building it. Some level of design is necessary for successful outcomes, but many agencies go around in circles with proposals and reports and environmental impact studies and voter referendums without actually having anyone actually pick up a shovel and start moving dirt.

im3w1l• 5 days ago

I think you could solve homelessness really simple by allowing something like a favela. It will be an eyesore so pick an area out of sight of rich people. Then split it into like idk 200sqft plots. Give everyone enough corrugated steel to build a primitive shelter. Have like a central sanitation place with a shitton of toilets and showers.

foolswisdom• 5 days ago

While preserving problems is undoubtedly a natural incentive, I think Hanlon's razor applies here. Just today I was reading Competent Bureaucracy - Rebuilding State Capacity (<https://cdn.sanity.io/files/d8lrla4f/staging/cf7eedaf5d21d27...>) on the topic of agency structure promoting success (the author has done a nice amount of work in the past - e.g. https://www.statecapacitance.pub into this history of this topic).

wombatpm• 5 days ago

Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy: every organization has two groups of people. The first group cares about the organization's main goal. The second group cares about the organization itself. Group two always wins, takes control, and writes the rules.

So NGO’s go from combating homelessness to being the organization about homelessness.

I sometimes think organizations should be set up with hard end dates. At which point the organization is disbanded and resources redistributed. If the problem still exists a new ord should be created with a new scope and new timeline.

grim_io• 5 days ago

Big Pharma is trying to preserve cancer. Wake up sheeple!

edoceo2• 5 days ago

Goldman Sachs asks in biotech research report: ‘Is curing patients a sustainable business model?’

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/11/goldman-asks-is-curing-patie...

oatmeal1• 5 days ago

Not quite, but big pharma promotes preventive screening in excess of what is justified. They don't care if false positives create stress and unnecessary, dangerous procedures that eliminate the benefit of screening. They just want to make sure before you die they get a chance to sell their most expensive drugs.

yongjik• 5 days ago

The interesting twist is: now what does that tell us about people who say they will cut the waste of government incompetence?

HPsquared• 5 days ago

It becomes a "problem farming" situation. Someone who profits from a problem existing, will work to preserve the problem either consciously or unconsciously, or perhaps even just through a process of evolution.

This applies to both public and private spheres. Just as justice systems farm criminals, dating apps farm romantically frustrated people and so on.

al_borland• 5 days ago

Problems like those don’t just get “solved” one time. They require ongoing maintenance to keep levels low/manageable. If that isn’t understood by those in government, I would say that is a level of incompetence.

This can play out in a couple ways. People can avoid solving the problem, because they think at that point the work is done forever. This is incorrect. People can also be scared (for good reason) that whoever is in charge will mistakenly assume no maintenance is needed after “solving” a problem and let everyone go. This would be incompetence in leadership.

I see both of these things play out on a smaller scale at work all the time. We keep solving the same problems, because ever time it’s “solved” people move on to new projects the upkeep falls behind, and the problem grows again.

DrScientist• 3 days ago

Indeed.

You could go even further and say that the modern Western preference for whack-a-mole politics rather than long term competence is one of the reasons that countries like China is on the rise.

skipants• 5 days ago

Am I wrong in thinking this comment is absolutely bonkers? It's basically a conspiracy theory.

When I lead teams and thought of how to motivate them to get certain things done, like code quality, I found it best to frame why certain things got done as a mixture of constraints and incentives. ie. What was preventing people from doing a thing and what motivated them to do thing.

You're basically arguing that there's no constraints to these problems and that people are incentivized to proliferate them. Do you distrust people that much?

Isn't it easier to surmise that there could be a lot of constraints and not a lot of incentives to solve these issues?

Or heck... just a shit ton of constraints than incentives?

I mean... there are people who are incentivized to keep drug use going: drug dealers and kingpins. And I'm sure there are some with their hand in governments. But there's no way that's the default.

fwip• 5 days ago

Yeah, it's a little bonkers. I've run into it a few times IRL, and I find that it tends to come from the kind of guy mocked in this XKCD: https://xkcd.com/793/ That is, somebody who is basically unfamiliar with the subtleties of the problem, thinks of an "obvious solution" for it, and then assumes that anybody who doesn't do it isn't trying to solve it.

QuiDortDine• 5 days ago

Possibly the dumbest take I've ever seen on HN.

Like politicians are going "without the homeless, I won't have anything to do anymore!". Like the street workers are thinking "shit, what'll I do if this goldmine dries up"?

Ridiculous.

Ferret74462• 5 days ago

It's just an incentive problem. If the people in the government would get fired or lose their personal income if they did not deliver results, then they would be effective like you wouldn't believe.

As it is, they're spending other people's money on other people's problems with effectively no accountability.

galaxyLogic• 5 days ago

3 groups are suspect: Doctors, Police and Firemen. If they did their job well, they would have no job.

Politicians too, by having big problems they guarantee they can get people to vote for them by promising to solve those problems. But people are getting smart to that. The Who said it well: We won't get fooled again.

Doctors have their Hippocratic oath. Do police and firemen have something similar, or don't they need it?

childintime2• 5 days ago

Why stop at them? Lawyers, politicians, psychologist, bookkeepers, the list goes on and on. Why? Because our GDP includes them. Look the numbers are higher. It doesn't matter if your work promotes a parasitic outcome. The system produces it's own problems and then diligently works to solve them... Yeah, right.

brabel4• 5 days ago

If we 'solved' crime, homelessness, drug use, poverty, etc.;

Crime is really hard to solve, but many cities in the USA and elsewhere have managed to largely do it.

Homelessness is something I think is very much an American problem among developed nations. It’s always shocking to see the campgrounds in American cities, some of the richest in the world, coming from Europe. I suspect it’s mostly related to drug abuse and the lack of social assistance for those in need which the Americans are allergic to solving due to the culture of freedom, or autonomy at all costs (which somehow gets interpreted as not having to pay taxes to help those in need).

josefritzishere• 5 days ago

hug of death?

sharadov• 5 days ago

The pushing problems around under the guise of solving them for political gain is what corporate and government malfeasance is all about.

The better you are at the game the higher you climb!

throw4847285• 5 days ago

There is a fourth that the author would never mention:

Hire consultants about the problem

QuantumFunnel• 5 days ago

Have unpopular solution or mitigation strategy, hire consultants, execute, blame the consultants

barrenko• 5 days ago

The problems you have are solutions to the problems you don't want to admit to yourself are actually having.

PeterStuer• 5 days ago

Somehow made me think of every 'modern' HR department.

llm_nerd• 5 days ago

Good article. I think a lot of people in the software development field should ponder over "No. 0002. Preserving problems", because a lot of rhetoric is basically advancing this position.

Software development traditionally is expensive, slow, adapts poorly, and so on. This worked in our favour as it gave us high paying jobs where we could always blame a framework, Microsoft, whatever, and estimate a week to move a button. These people are the ones who are the loudest at filling the silence with anti-AI propaganda because they desperately want to hold onto that problem.

aanet• 5 days ago

One doesn't need to be a consultant to realize how people respond to problems (other than solving them).

But it helps. Perhaps. Maybe even more so if you (=consultant) leave with just the recommendations, without actually implementing them. Which is what most of the Big 4 consulting companies do.

(Guilty, to be honest. And that's why (partly) I gave up mgmt consulting)

But it helps to understand where people are coming from to realize why the problems exist in the first place.

golly_ned• 5 days ago

My favorite is ignoring or downplaying a problem. 95% of apparent 'problems' are best ignored in favor of solving the worthwhile 5%.

Sometimes this means 'creating' a new problem by pointing to something unconsidered that's 10x more important.

mettamage3• 5 days ago

I do this at work a lot and often the problem goes away because the stakeholders above me couldn't agree on the problem being important enough to solve for a long enough time.

When a problem survives this, usually it's worth solving.

mettamage3• 5 days ago

I normally don't write stuff like this but I did not expect 9 upvotes. I expected a karma hit (but I prefer to just write honestly what I think). That's informative, thank you.

childintime2• 5 days ago

That's lesson number one for GP's. Second lesson is to pay attention to correctly catch the remaining 5%. You can get help to solve them later.

Choose your battles.

webnrrd2k• 4 days ago

Yeah, benign neglect is a good response for a wide variety of problems. FWIW, I also call it "the healing power of apathy".

throw9383848• 5 days ago

The most obvious example of how AI destroys the human ability to learn and think critically is its ubiquitous use in high schools and colleges. A study released in October 2025 found that 84 percent of high school students use AI to brainstorm ideas, edit or revise essays, and/or conduct research and find sources. Another 69 percent use ChatGPT to help with school assignments and homework.

Perhaps I am not as smart as author, but how is "brainstorming ideas" doing the "destroys the human ability to learn and think critically"? It is just cooperative work! Rich kids have private tutors, and do the "brainstorming" all the time!

I heard similar arguments when google search become widely available!

cgio• 5 days ago

My favourite pathology is change the problem. Piggybacking on an organisational problem to solve it while promoting a personal objective. This is a subtle pathology, quite common e.g. when a new framework is introduced etc.

zkmon• 5 days ago

You make two big assumptions - 1) The problem is really a problem, it is not invented by the consultant, it is well defined, deserves "solving", 2) the person or team is the one who is responsible for doing something about it. 3) "Solving" is justified by overall cost-benefit view.

The "pushing around" could be about letting the right person/team handle it. "Preserving" could be due to lack of business justification to "solve" it. Promoting new problem could be due to poor understanding of the problem and solution, usually due to consultants pushing for it.

Nevermark2• 5 days ago

This is a gross oversimplification of my experience with conservative vs. liberal friends.

But there is enough truth in it to at least be worth the humor.

My conservative friends respond to a problem by mashing all its symptoms, and often operate on assumptions they have never tested. And would resist testing.

My liberal friends respond to a solution, veering away hard from the solution's costs, without first asking how they can be mitigated or if the accounting still works out positive.

Disclaimer: Could be anecdotal. Could be projection. But for my population of five people, the correlation is 100%! They would all likely agree too. Given enough beer, and with my recorder out of sight.

gblargg• 5 days ago

Do you have any concrete examples of this? I'm having trouble picturing these.

inigyou13• 5 days ago

I think GP means "masking" instead of "mashing"? And then:

Conservative: "homelessness is a problem! make homelessness illegal and people will get homes because they are homeless by choice!" ("is there any evidence that people are homeless by choice?" *crickets*)

Liberal: "defund the police!" ("but who would deter petty crime?" *crickets*)

Nevermark2• 4 days ago

A couple examples. They are both common viewpoints that came up in low-key conversation. Other cases are similar. Self-described conservatives vs. liberals I know, seem to adopt a different set of highly correlated views.

Self-described conservative friend: Specific views about dealing with cultural differences that require some kind of resolution. The desire for immediate "simple" solutions, without any signs of awareness or respect for the "others" and why solutions were not attempted before.

My view: Patience is necessary for a real solution. Resolving these kinds of differences takes time, and often is best done case by case directly by the people involved in each situation until a common pattern emerges. The people needing accommodations deserve some extra respect, for the lack of it that made them invisible until recently.

Self-described liberal friend: Inability to consider economic closure over environmental costs, so the market maximizes resource/impact efficiencies relative to their actual costs. The dissonance being this would raise prices.

My view: We are destroying the environment, which economically should be viewed as a commonly held asset, not an unowned asset. The result is we are not optimizing its future value. Any (slowly introduced) rational pricing optimizes both costs and efficiencies, and incentivizes improvements for both. The longer we wait, the more damage our economy subsidizes.

These are reasonable intelligent people. I cannot tell you their nuanced views, just their reactions and a common human theme: reluctance to go deeper.

sdevonoes• 5 days ago

How are (tech) consultants typically hired? They also go through the nonsense of live coding / systems design interview? Or they get asked specifically about the problem they need to solve and see if they are a good fit or not?

biscuits1• 5 days ago

No. 0004. Pretermit new problems

https://dev.to/solidi/ways-people-respond-to-problems-3fhm

SuperNinKenDo• 3 days ago

It's neglecting a fourth: Refusing to actually solve the problem so that they can continue to complain about it being someone else's fault.

Three ways people respond to a problem (other than solving it)

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