I’m here to set you on the path to solving hard problems. (Sorry, the easy problems have already been solved.)
The primary strategy to solving many complex challenges we face today is to assume an “outsider” view to discover the deep lever points. Let me unpack this idea.
An insider view only sees the deep rabbit holes and complicated interactions that were built over time. The insider view despairs at seeing a solution, in part because inevitably the solution will require breaking something about the current systems. Breaking something means someone loses, therefore the insider view unconsciously shies away from those ideas. The insider view defaults to saying, “It’s so complicated it can’t be fixed.” Therefore, the insider view cannot imagine enough of a necessary change.
The nature of systems is 80/20; small factors have disproportionately large effects in what the system produces. It takes careful digging and deep thinking to find the true levers at the heart of complex systems. Only the dispassionately detached can execute the thorough examination. (This is a good time for me to again recommend Peter Senge’s book, “The Fifth Discipline.”) This is a hunt for root causes and assumptions so deep that people have forgotten to question them.
If there were a specific formula, I wouldn’t give it to you; I’d charge big $$ for a limited license! In short, there is no precise formula or protocol. I’m inviting you to the adventure of the hard work.
Let’s look at an example: The US health insurance system. Horribly complex. Many participants, many stakeholders, massive cash flow, inequities, regulations, sincere workers, desperate patients, political angles, a black hole which absorbs efforts to improve it.
About thirty years ago, an outsider to the system named Paul Zane Pilzer proposed a solution:
Give individual citizens the same tax break on health care costs that corporations get.
Today only groups can purchase health insurance cheaply, because they get a tax break do so. The insurance companies get between the health care providers and the patients, with the full regulatory power of the government backing the system – this distorts any hope of transparent costs, undermines every incentive for efficiency, and makes free-market competition nearly impossible.
When you give an individual citizen a tax break for health insurance, then the insurance market would rapidly respond to offer whatever package individuals would be willing to purchase. It’s not hard to imagine Walmart and Amazon getting into the insurance business. You would see rapid downward pressure on pricing and incentives for quality that kept customers from switching to another provider. Though not guaranteed to provide health care for everyone, inevitably health care would be like technology, getting simultaneously better and cheaper every year.
I acknowledge that many of the existing jobs associated with health insurance would disappear, or no longer pay well. Existing companies would either transform or go out of business. A powerful deep lever like tax breaks for individuals would be catastrophic for some in the first few years. These stakeholders are well-connected, have deep lobbying capabilities, and would resist the change.
Therefore, learn from this example. Identifying a deep lever to solve a hard problem is the entry point to the next hard problem: Implementation.
