Why Can’t Big Companies Solve Big Problems?
Renaissance men and women, who can juggle concerns ranging from the aesthetic to the social, are in short supply. And they’re are needed more now than ever.
For the past few years, I’ve been trying to understand just what it is that prevents large organizations from doing great things. Clearly, one major part of the problem is their lack of empathy for the world around them. Without a gut sense for what keeps ordinary folks up at night, too many players within corporations, public institutions and nonprofits find themselves operating inside of a bubble. But, that’s just part of the problem.
Our companies, governments and social institutions have just spent the last 75 years creating systems and structures to handle incredibly complicated problems, starting with the storming of Normandy, and working right through the Space Race, the Cold War, and the building of the Internet. Today, if you can ask a good question, our organizations have the power to provide you with a very detailed answer to what ails you. You just need to know the right question to ask.
In fact, it’s that very question: “What is the question?” that seems to be the nub of the problem these days. In an increasingly turbulent and interconnected world, the ambiguity that surrounds us is rising to unprecedented levels. And that’s a serious problem that our current systems can’t handle. Fighting terrorism, fixing healthcare and restarting the economy aren’t just complex problems — they’re highly ambiguous ones.
It turns out that while large companies and organizations are phenomenally good at managing complexity, they’re actually quite bad at tackling ambiguity. A complicated problem is like playing a game of chess, an ambiguous problem is like having your in-laws over to dinner for the first time. In the latter situation, it’s not the number of variables that kills you. It’s what you don’t know that you don’t know.
Read more here.
