Admitting You Have a Problem

I have a problem with people who have problems admitting that there is a problem.  Specifically, these sorts attempt to foster false optimism by reframing every problem as an opportunity.   I have some understanding of the psychologyof self-deception, and can appreciate that fear and panic can be paralytic, but thinking clearly requires seeing things as they are.  The practice of reframing every problem as an opportunity is dysfunctional, as it leads to clouded judgment, misguided thinking, and ultimately to poor performance.

The litmus test for whether something is a problem or an opportunity is simply this: is the situation acceptable as it is?    If the situation is acceptable, then there is an opportunity for improvement.    If the situation is unacceptable, then you have a problem and solving it is critical.   A company that is taking a loss on its daily operations does not have an opportunity to improve its profitability – it has a problem that, if left unchecked, will lead inexorably to bankruptcy.

Another dysfunction of the “everything is an opportunity” mindset is that opportunities do not have a specific solution.  A company with an opportunity to improve profitability may pursue this goal in many ways: expand markets to gain economies of scale, increase the price of its products, automate to decrease labor costs, and so on.   A problem can be diagnosed more specifically, to discover that the reason the company is not profitable is because of the high volume of returns due to product defects – and the cause of those defects can be investigated to discover a specific course of action that can be taken to remedy the problem.

If the problem is reframed as an opportunity and another course of action is undertaken, the problem does not go away – and it may in fact become worse.  If there is a problem with product defects, then expanding markets is not going to solve it: the number of returns will scale in proportion to the volume of sales, and the losses will increase.  The only way to solve the problem is to attack its cause, and so long as the cause is ignored it will remain.   In this sense, doing the wrong thing is even worse than doing nothing at all.

That’s not to say that this misidentification is always optimistic.  Manipulative people often portray opportunities as problems to panic others to take action where no action is necessary, or to make their desires seem more critical than they are.   In the same example, a company that is operating profitably, or even at break-even, does not have a problem because it can persist indefinitely with its present practices – so any change with the potential to improve profitability is an opportunity, not a problem, and may be pursued at leisure in any number of ways.

So in the end, whether it’s misidentifying problems as opportunities or opportunities as problems, the remedy is to know the difference and act accordingly.