Book excerpts - 0.2: Prolog for pragmatics
Two types of problems
There are two types of challenges: Those we recognize and know how to address and those that are unclear in their shape or processing.
Innovation efforts (and operations), especially in complicated situations, confront us more often with second-type challenges - and our unfulfilled desire to resolve them is a source of multiple dramas.
In a world that's changing faster and becoming increasingly complicated, we need to attend to second-type problems, also known as wicked problems, more frequently. And to transform faster than the pace of change, we need to attend to wicked problems faster, more efficiently, and obviously, more effectively.
Despite our instincts, attunement to dramas is the best way to improve our ability to handle second-type problems. Attention to dramas will increase the impact of our creative efforts and strengthen our ability to transform. Therefore, dramas are discussed in this book not as tragic outcomes but as opportunities for prosperity.
To support the re-evaluation of dramas as a lever for prosperity, this book will offer innovators a simple and robust method for clarifying dramas, decomposing wicked problems, and revealing core constraints, disruptions, and hedging issues that shape progress.
Things To Be Done is a method for clarifying how efforts, capabilities, and morality fuse together to generate progress or drama.
If drama is a general name for the space between progress and decay, then Things To Be Done is the flashlight that will guide you through it.
This publication is an excerpt from my book, The Innovators Drama. You can buy it at theinnovatorsdrama.com, or subscribe to read weekly excerpts here on Substack