Solving interesting problems (E)

0:00You have a problem. It's a big professional problem. The problem is that Tom Hanks is busy. Imagine that you're a producer of a big Hollywood motion picture. Pre-production is wrapped. You're about to go into production. It's expensive. Two weeks from now, you're going to start filming. It's a psychological thriller, a lightweight one, maybe with a few laughs in it, about a psychiatrist and a patient. The patient has problems, and only the psychiatrist is able to help. And yes, Tom Hanks would sign on to be the psychiatrist. But now, Tom Hanks is busy. Hey, this is Emily in the Bronx, and you're listening to a special archived episode of Akimbo.

0:52Professor and author Scott Page has posed this question to lots of people, well-meaning people, and the list that they come up with of the folks who might be eligible to take Tom Hanks' place is pretty short. What if I put some boundaries on it? What if I say that the person you need to pick has to have been in movies that did more than$2 billion in total at the box office, a big-name star? And what if I told you that that person, it would be a bonus, had won an Academy Award or two. Well, who would you come up with? I'm wondering how many people listed Morgan Freeman, Gwyneth Paltrow, Don Cheadle, Cate Blanchett, or Meryl Streep, because all of them meet one or both of those requirements.

1:43If we go with our knee-jerk reaction to the easy, obvious choices, the short list, it's much harder to solve our problem. We learned this from Moneyball when we discovered that a low capitalized baseball team could come in second place simply by drafting talented people that others were overlooking. So let's talk for a minute about problems. Problems are what we do all day. If you work in a factory, it's entirely possible you do labor, the act of lifting heavy objects and moving them from one place to another, that you are solving the boss's problem by being a willing cog in a system. But most of us, most people who listen to podcasts are solving problems, and they're interesting problems because we don't know the solution before we work on them.

2:44Writing a book is an interesting problem. Typing a book only takes three or four days. Writing a book might take three or four years. What was all the time spent doing? Because it wasn't spent typing. It was spent solving an interesting problem. So a couple things to understand about problems. First, they are unexpected. Expected problems aren't problems because we have a solution ready to go and then the problem disappears. Problems are actually unexpected. Second, I believe we can divide problems into two categories, solo problems and group problems. Solo problems get a lot of play. Einstein was a solo problem solver, apparently.

3:32Jonas Salk and the polio vaccine that saved so many people, apparently a solo problem. Solo problems could be solo problems because the rules state they must be. For example, winning at the U.S. Open in the singles tournament. It's called singles because you're only allowed to play by yourself. Jeopardy, another example of that.

3:59Or it might be a solo problem because something about the way we approach it works significantly better if we have communication in and among only ourselves. So you could probably argue that writing a novel or painting a painting have largely been considered solo problems for a long time. But most problems, particularly now, are group problems. And interestingly enough, if you look at all into the history of science or math, or even writing plays or publishing books, you discover that they are solved by a group. In the case of the lone scientist, he or she was busy looking at lots of previous papers, lots of dead ends that others have gone down before they showed up to come up with the solution.

4:54They did not do it by themselves. It was a non-coordinated group approach, separated by time, separated by distance, but a group of people solved the problem. This podcast is better because Alex De Palma made it better. My books are better because Megan Casey and Nikki Papadopoulos made them better. That when we see something that's created that seems to be made by a soloist, what's actually happening is an entire team was involved. And often, if you don't like the final product, it might not be the fault of the person whose name is on it. It might be that they simply needed a better editor. If you're a fan of junkie TV or movies, you know the trope.

5:48There's a bunch of people in the A-team or the Mission Impossible Force or whatever geek squad you want to talk about, going into the field to solve an unknown problem. And so you've got the computer whiz and the makeup expert and the demolitions person and the guy with big muscles who can lift heavy objects and lose his temper. One of my favorites is the original Justice League. The Justice League, always hanging out in a clubhouse and casting shade on each other, consists of people like Aquaman and Superman and Batman, each of whom can bring something to an unexpected problem. What we've discovered is that in many situations, what you really want are specialists.

6:32You want the flute player to play the flute. You want the conductor to conduct. And you want the trumpeter to play the trumpet. You don't set out to build an orchestra in which everyone is good at the trumpet. It wouldn't sound very good. Nor do we set out to build an orchestra in which everyone is pretty good at every instrument. That what specialists do is they bring their natural ability, trained or not, to the fore to get that part of the problem solved. It's a little bit like that drawer in your kitchen, the one that is filled with OXO kitchen gadgets, because there is not one kitchen tool that can open a bottle, chop a tomato, spread a dosa, and blend a milkshake.

7:25You need different tools to do those things in concert to make one extraordinary meal. Is it possible to get by with just a knife? Of course. But if you were competing against a team that had all the right kitchen gadgets for all the right ingredients that were thrown at them, it's quite likely that they would produce something more efficiently and more deliciously that solved the problem. So if the first thing that we see is that specialists are worthwhile, The second thing is that having a bench pays off. That a football team with only 11 players on it is probably going to get defeated by a football team that has 25.

8:10Because the 25-person squad has a place kicker. They have a punter. They have a defensive end. That having a bench, lots of people with different specialties who are ready to come in and solve their part of the problem is worth it. Not mentioned yet is this. Teams that challenge each other to work together better, I think we can agree, will do better than teams that don't. That the open nature of information exchange in various forms of science or math is what enables forward motion. Information hoarding doesn't. The industrial age of scarcity taught us a mindset that says, if you get this seat, I don't get it.

9:01If you get this gig, I don't get it. If you are speaking up, I am not being heard. And so it's not an accident that we have created a culture based on this scarcity mindset, where we give status to certain groups of people, and they get access to more resources, they get access to a better seat at the table. Partly, in fact, largely because we believe that there's scarcity. On the other hand, if you can see the math of the bench plus specialists, we realize that solving problems creates value. It creates enough value that we can get more people to help us solve the problem. And so we are moving fast from the lone genius programmer, the irascible guy sitting up nights in his dorm solving the problem all by himself toward a networked solution in which Stack Overflow, strangers from around the world helping you, plus plenty of programmers often working in teams, challenging each other proactively to explain their work, to find bugs before they happen.

10:15Pitching in, what about this? Can I contribute that? These teams are able to outproduce the solo geniuses when it comes to solving interesting problems. On to the Rooney Rule. The Rooney Rule started in the NFL because they were embarrassed by the fact that most of their players were non-white and almost all of the management was white, was put in place to create a new norm. You must interview at least one person of color every time you're going to hire a head coach. That's it. That's the Rooney rule. What happened? Well, there was a lot of grumbling because the billionaires that own NFL teams don't like being told what to do.

11:07And as you can guess from the Tom Hanks experiment, almost all the time, the Rooney Rule doesn't actually work. It doesn't work because that one person who is being interviewed is being seen as a token. It's a form of obedience. Well, we have to interview someone and then we can get back to work. This leads us to the next idea, the idea embodied by Arabella Mansfield. 150 years ago this year, she became the first female lawyer admitted in the United States. Now, if you believe that lawyers are capable of solving interesting problems, and I do, the fact that we had said to half of all the adults in our country, no, you may not be considered for this role.

12:02You may not contribute in solving any of these problems. Well, it hurt all of the women who were deprived of something productive to do. But it really hurt our culture as well. Because then you're playing like a football team with only 11 players. That what you've done when you say to a group of people, whether you say it out loud or whether you say it through your actions, no, you can't play, then what you have done is limited the size of your bench. Arabella Mansfield is the namesake of the Mansfield Rule, and the Mansfield Rule is really different than the Rooney Rule. The Mansfield Rule, used at many big law firms now, says this.

12:52You can't interview for senior management roles unless at least 30 % of the candidates are women. And then something extraordinary happens. Because if you interview eight people and three of them are women, no one says, ah, go ahead and pick the woman. Because there isn't one woman. There are three. So now it's just, which of the lawyers are we going to pick? It normalizes our choices. It makes it not a big deal to pick the token because there isn't a token. There are simply choices. This shift is morally right. It creates a world where I would prefer to live. But even if you don't care about that, it is economically right.

13:44This is not about creating soft spaces for people who aren't competent. It's about recognizing the fact that it doesn't matter if it's Albert Einstein or a team of people trying to negotiate a real estate lease. The economics of diversity, which could accurately be called the economics of specialization demonstrate that we come out ahead. Professor Scott Page has written about this several times, and he's made it quite clear. The math is really easy to understand, that when you put five specialists in your kitchen drawer, you're way more likely to be able to cook a diverse set of meals than you would be if your kitchen drawer had five knives, all from the same manufacturer all trying to outdo themselves in their sharpness because a sharper knife doesn't make a better can opener.

14:46Where does this all lead? It leads to the idea of human asset utilization and development. What we've been doing for a really long time, for thousands of years, is brainwashing people from a very early age to persuade them that they will never amount to anything, to persuade them not to seek out specialization in an area that will help us solve a problem. We are sacrificing their future and ours by taking people out of consideration from an early age. So a group like Girls Who Code, how can you be against a group that seeks to persuade young women to learn to code a computer? Well, one angry email I got said, they're going to become incompetent.

15:42Leaving aside the fact that computer programming was invented by a woman, that the idea of a bug was named by a woman, that some of the greatest programmers of the 50s and the 60s and today were and are women. Leaving that aside, what we know is really simple. If there's a deeper bench of people with more specialties, we will be able to solve more interesting problems. And solving interesting problems creates value, and that value pays for an ever deeper bench. That what we know is that when we work in collaboration, whether it's the open, hands-off collaboration of much of published science, or the face-to-face collaboration that's possible in things like team programming, it makes no sense rationally, economically, or morally to say to a whole bunch of people, you can't play.

16:43You're not welcome here. It's really straightforward. As our culture moves forward, what we have to figure out how to do is undo the brainwashing to start as early as we possibly can with expectations about what it means to lead and what it means to solve an interesting problem. So I'm sorry Tom Hanks is busy and he won't be able to be in your movie. The good news is there's lots of people you can call. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.

17:45my question. Thanks as always for your questions and comments. You can ask your own at akimbo.link. That's A-K-I-M-B-O dot L-I-N-K. Just click the appropriate button while you're there. Check out the show notes. Hey Seth, this is Chad from Madison, Wisconsin. You've spoken and written about education quite a bit and also mentioned that you taught young people how to canoe every summer for a number of years. I was wondering, what are the most important things to teach someone before they even get into a canoe for the first time? And what are the most important things to teach someone after they get in and start to paddle?

18:25Thank you, Seth, for always showing up and shipping. And of course, you're probably reading my mind and know this question isn't necessarily about canoeing. You know me too well. Yes, I was reading your mind. And thank you for the chance to share a metaphor here. If you're going to teach somebody something scary and skill-based, like style canoeing, it helps a great deal to teach somebody important skills before they get into the boat. In this case, the skill is possibility, imagining that it is possible, enrollment, believing that you can actually learn something, signing up for the journey, not standing there with your arms folded, waiting for wisdom to come to you, but instead eagerly leaning in, choosing to learn something.

19:25So I bring a lot of hoopla to the canoe dock because canoeing is a labor, a labor of love. And if you don't love it, it's hard to do the labor. And so that hoopla, the energy that we share with each other long before the boat is even in the water, is critical. It turns out that doing something with a student, with an enrolled individual who's eager to go with you, is a hundred times more effective than doing it to them. And then the second half of your question, in the boat? Well, that one's easy. In the boat, it's how do you sit? Are you grounded? Where are your knees and your butt? How tall are you?

20:17How are you breathing? There are other people who would rather teach you how to put your hands and your arms in all sorts of weird akimbo positions. But no, that's not really what matters. I can tell within 10 seconds of somebody getting in a canoe whether they're going to learn something today or not because of how they sit. Because they're either fighting the system, struggling to find their balance, or they're embracing it, keeping their center of gravity low. At the very same time, their soul, their spirit, and their head is reaching skyward. Those two things, possibility and moment before, and grounding and posture within, open the door for all sorts of forward motion.

21:10When we say to a kid, you need to learn this because it will be on the test tomorrow, we are doing education to them. Compliance, power, coercion, control. So what I've learned is that while it's tempting to spend all our time on compliance and control, while it's tempting to raise our voice or to insist that people pay more attention, in fact, all of the effort we put in to setting the table, to opening the door, to leaving space for possibility and enrollment changes the entire process. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time. Thank you.