There’s a pattern I’ve seen in someone I speak to regularly. I was having difficulty putting my finger quite on it, but I realized it was this:
She was not owning the solution
I’m not sure if I’m explaining it right, but this is my first pass.
If there’s something that’s bothering her, she is very clear on explaining, “X, Y, Z bothers me. These are all the problems with it.”
I would say, “My solution has been A, B, C: I think this solves it after addressing what I see are all the problems.”
But she would say I’m not caring about her side of it. And that’s it.
I would ask what she wants, and she would describe an outcome, but every time I ask, “How are you going to get there?”
She punts and says, “It’s not worth it. You’re going to shoot it down anyway.”
For whatever reason, it always comes down to that. We have this discussion every 3-4 months. The same topic.
This time, I told her: if you want to solve it, then you provide the solution. We’ll put some thresholds in place that, if they are met, whatever you come up with, we’ll do it.
“But,” I added, “if we face the risks that I am trying to mitigate, then you need to own it.”
She said, “See, you will just blame me.”
I tried to explain - and this is where I had my epiphany later — that there’s a different between blaming and saying she owns the problem.
It’s subtle, but different.
Blaming is about putting fault. It’s finger-pointing and saying that the person is the cause of the problem.
To me, I am trying to say she owns the problem, which I really mean, she owns the solution: no one is going to bail her out. I can still stand with her and listen to her options and explore them with her. But in the end, she owns the solution.
I would rather say someone owns the problem, but as I wrote this, I felt she does own the problem to the degree that she knows all the things that bother her: that’s the problem.
But owning it means digging into all of the alternatives, all of the options, and driving the change that solves it.
The difference is that someone can mistaken hard work as owning the solution. She’s a hard worker, doing the same thing over and over. But she doesn’t really try to solve the problem.
This becomes highly limiting if you think owning the problem means knowing, right away, the solution.
I would notice that she would be stuck trying to solve something.
I would try something that she would say right away, ‘I know that wouldn’t work.” But I do it anyway.
Why?
Because I know that, once that first try fails, I’ll do something slightly different. I just want to solve the problem. I’m not trying to be right.
If, however, you are stopped at trying anything because you know it will fail, it will be impossible to get to the solution which needs multiple failures to even get in the vicinity of a solution.
Anyway, after this last argument, I’m not exactly sure. I proposed X, Y, Z as possible solutions, and she said that none of them will work, so we won’t try. Only if we do option A.
But Option A has huge risk and takes a lot of work, and introduces a new set of problems without any guarantee it is a solution. But for whatever reason, it’s the only things she has been fixated on.
So I decide that I would write up a description of our current state and the rationale for the solution: what the future benefits are and the risks it mitigates.
From that, I would define what is the bare minimum threshold and the part I’m trying to define more clearly is this: what happens if Option A fails and we go past the guardrails?
She says I will blame her. I’m saying I hold her accountable.
Accountability means if it fails, there needs to be some acknowledgement that this was a bad decision 100% hers AND, as a result, needs to take a commensurate amount to fix it. It doesn’t mean I don’t chip in if she asks. But she needs to feel the full weight that someone else has sacrificed or some loss has happened.
Ownership means a commitment to restoration.
We can’t predict the future and we can’t anticipate all the problems. But ownership says that one will carry the ball and try whatever is necessary to achieve it.
Owning the solution means fixing eyes on an outcome — and trying whatever it may take to do it.
Owning the problem, to me, is the same thing; but I’ve seen that it can be misconstrued to just repeating over and over what the problem is. That is a false sense of owning the problem, but perhaps is a way to describe this behavior.
If owning the problem is restating, belaboring, agonizing over a problem with a vague definition of a “better state,” owning the solution is about finding the path to the solution.
Just because you know that there’s a problem is not the same as knowing the solution.