Trade up your problems
The goal is to trade up to better problems. When the same one keeps coming back, you patched it.
It took me too long to learn this. The goal was never to have no problems. It’s to trade up to better ones.
I worked for a guy named Tameem, now co-CEO at GrowthLoop, who used to say it was fine to have problems as long as they were new problems. That has stuck with me longer than almost anything else I picked up in twenty years. A new problem means you solved the last one and moved somewhere you’d never been. That’s what forward actually looks like.
We’ve been trained to hide them
Somewhere we decided problems were shameful. You’re supposed to reframe “we have a problem” into an “opportunity for improvement.” I’ve never worked out what that buys you, other than draining the one useful thing a problem carries: urgency.
A problem, in most of our heads, is wired to a small jolt of fear. Uh-oh, better fix this before we’re screwed. Now run the substitute through the same sentence. “Better use this opportunity for improvement before we’re screwed.” It sounds like nonsense, because it is. You laundered the urgency right out of it.
The tell that you didn’t actually trade up
You can tell you’re not moving when the same problem keeps coming back wearing a slightly different coat.
We call that a Band-Aid, and we say it like an insult, but Band-Aids are fine when you know what they are. A way to stop the bleeding while you fix the real thing. The trouble is most “solutions” are Band-Aids nobody admitted were Band-Aids. They treat the surface and leave the system that produced it untouched. So the problem heals, and returns, and heals, and returns. You’re busy. You’re also standing still, dead in the water.
A real fix changes the system. And the reward for changing the system is a brand new problem you’ve never had before. That’s a massive upgrade, even when it doesn’t feel like one. Which sounds exhausting, and is actually the entire point.
The metric nobody prints
So, a question that’s worth more than most of what’s on your dashboard. Are the problems you’re wrestling with this quarter better than the ones you had last quarter? Newer? Further up the chain?
If they’re the same problems, the business is stuck because it keeps solving the symptom. Problem quality is a growth metric. Almost nobody measures it.
Know where this has to go, and not how?
Twenty minutes. Tell me where you want this company to be in two years and I’ll tell you what I’d go look at first.