10 Structures of Problems

# 10 Structures of Problems 1. Smashed Watch. There are so many issues at once that fixing one has no benefit unless you fix others too. 2. Leaky Pipe. Fixing one problem causes the others to intensify. If you plug up one leak in a pipe leaking in multiple places, that increases the water pressure causing the other spots to leak more. 3. Shark Laser. A proposed solution is not aiming at a meaningfully important problem, so it doesn’t matter how well you get it to work or how much you enhance it. 4. Oil Land. A big problem is so close to being solved that the benefits will accrue to whoever first bothers to put a little effort into it. 5. Lead to Gold. A problem is so hard that humans aren’t even close to being smart enough or technologically advanced enough to being able to solve it. We toil away pointlessly at trying to solve it. 6. Booby Trapped Garden. A problem is really hard to solve for reasons that are not at all apparent from the outside, leading to lots of attempts to solve it, all of them miserable failures. 7. Feature Creep. The problem keeps growing in scope. It cannot be solved because attempts to solve it keep increasing the definition of what the problem is considered to be. 8. Sleeping Horror. The problem is not that likely to happen, but if it does, it will be horrible. Nobody bothers to try to solve it because they assume it probably won’t happen, and plus, there are more immediately pressing concerns. The horror wakes up eventually. 9. Middle Court Shot. A problem could be solved pretty easily, but it falls between multiple people’s responsibilities. Hence nobody takes responsiblity for it, assuming someone else will do so. 10. Will-o’-the-wisp. A problem that nobody can solve because nobody understands what is causing it. Author: [[Spencer Greenberg]]  [Web URL for this note](http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/10+Structures+of+Problems) [Comment on this note](http://via.hypothes.is/http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/10+Structures+of+Problems)