Puzzles, Mysteries and Rabbit Holes

In my world of problem solving there are four classes of work, puzzles, mysteries, rabbit holes and black holes.

In my world of problem solving there are four classes of work, puzzles, mysteries, rabbit holes and black holes.

Puzzles are those problems where you have all the pieces and you know what the end result will look like. All you have to do to a puzzle is solve it. Puzzles are just a matter of time and effort. Some puzzles require a lot more patience, and sometimes pieces are knocked off the table, but that doesn’t change the class of the problem.

Mysteries are tougher. You don’t know all of the pieces and you might have to build some of them to get the solution. So you may know what things are supposed to be at the endgame, but how to get from point A to point B is, well, a mystery. Mysteries unravel as time goes on and soon become a series puzzles. If you’re crafty or lucky a single mystery leads to a single puzzle. Mysteries require a bit of inductive reasoning.

A rabbit hole is a problem whose solution begets more problems. When you begin to address it and solve one part, you create new parts because there are irreconcilable tradeoffs. These new problems may be puzzles if you’re lucky, or they may become new mysteries. There may even be rabbit holes within rabbit holes. Often the wisest course of action when faced with a rabbit hole is to avoid it altogether. Alternatively, the wisest course is bravado, overkill and simplification. Don’t even pretend that you can solve the problem with any finesse, just jump in and get busy. More often than not, this kind of bravado works in the short term but tends to look foolish over the long term.

The black hole might sound like an infinite rabbit hole from which there is no escape. But it’s actually worse. It’s a rabbit hole that you didn’t know you were already in. In the argot of the intelligence business, it is the unknown unknown. Not only do you not understand the class of problem, you don’t know if you have it, how long you’ve had it or what you’ve been doing all this time to make it better or worse. A black hole is where people in the Matrix live, who’ve never heard of the Matrix. One might equally call a black hole a black swan, but I’m trying to be original here and there is this subtle difference. Whereas a black swan is necessarily a future event upon which much or little might hang, a black hole is a present condition — one whose origins and ends are unknown.

Adding to this, I would say that upon the discovery that you have been in a black hole and that is revealed, you get one of those ‘everything you know is wrong’ moments. In that way it is like a black swan. A black hole moment is like discovering the lyrics to a song you thought you knew all of these years and suddenly you see them printed and you’re like ‘wow’. Sometimes it changes the meaning of everything you thought. Most of the time, you kind of interpolate yourself out of trouble — because you might not have been that far off with the mumble you mumbled in place of the actual lyrics. But it still warps you because you never knew you had a problem.

In business as in life, it is best to face all of these problems with an eye to understanding what might go wrong as you attempt to solve them. Each entails a different type of risk, and each therefore suggests a different risk management strategy.

When solving a puzzle, there is generally the single dimension of time. When a mystery is afoot, you cannot be sure that figuring out the mystery leads directly to a solution. In this case, it helps to separate the folks who are figuring out the mystery from those who are to solve the revealed puzzles. This is that canonical case of people with hammers looking for nails, but also the matter of self-interest which can lead to laying blame or hiding some aspect of the problem. So it is worth it to have people fresh to the area to work in collaboration with experts in a transparent setting until the mystery is solved.

When it comes to rabbit holes the problem with risk management is often one in dealing with time horizons since rabbit holes are often categorized as puzzles owing to the prioritization of problems which can immediately be detected. Without some kind of systemic reality check what might be a rabbit hole may simply be appreciated as a laundry list of seemingly unrelated issues. When you walk into a messy situation you may not realize it is such a mess because of something more than simple neglect. You start cleaning up and soon find that things you fixed are broken again. It may be quite some time until you discover the one place you were instructed not to change is key to a raft of problems. This happens with vendor lock in, for example. Fix anything you want, but always buy Brand X, may be a recipe for constant work and no improvement. Look for tradeoffs that people are reluctant to accept in your risk management.

Black holes are the stuff of life. Solving them requires a strategic vision that requires a cultural commitment. As the old Zen adage goes “If you’re going to dig for treasure, make sure that you love your shovel.” The risk here of course is that you may never solve the problem, so you should not commit to any sort of fixed price or schedule for your work. That is unless you understand that the situation may be terminal and your work is only palliative. In other words, you are only likely to discover black hole problems by accident, or in the course of stressing your systems. And having discovered these problems, it is best if you were in the course of doing something that is part and parcel of the way you do business all the time. Because it is only that kind of strategic commitment that will give you the time and resources to evolve your way out of such problems.