Don't Bring Me Problems

Tom Geraghty · Interpersonal Practice, Voice & Silence, Power

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Takes apart the instruction to bring solutions rather than problems, and is unusually honest about the conditions under which it is not wrong: where work is predictable, interdependence is low and expertise sits in tidy silos, the person who notices a problem is often the person able to fix it, and asking for both is reasonable. Most work is not like that. Consequential problems run across functions, systems and hierarchies, so the person who sees one first almost never holds the information, resources or authority to resolve it, and the instruction becomes a demand for silence dressed as a demand for initiative.

Four scenarios follow, ranked by problem resolution and by organisational learning, and the interesting one is not the worst. Scenario three has the employee arrive with a problem and several candidate solutions, the manager respond well, and the right fix get chosen: everything the leadership literature recommends, and the organisation still learns nothing, because the knowledge now sits in two heads instead of one. Only the fourth scenario, where the problem is opened to people from several domains, produces learning that outlives the incident, and the piece names that arrangement plainly as a cross-functional learning team rather than a courtesy.

The September 2026 revision adds the scenario the original missed, and it is the strongest part. People who cannot raise a problem mostly do not go quiet: they patch it. The nurse borrows supplies from another ward, the engineer scripts around the broken process, the account manager absorbs the pricing error into the next quote. This is Tucker and Edmondson's first-order problem-solving, and the argument here is that it is worse than silence, because silence at least looks like a gap while the workaround looks like competence, consumes the effort that would otherwise surface the pattern, and becomes part of how things are done.

The revision also introduces a distributional argument. Whether a person can afford to arrive with a problem and no solution depends on where they stand: the senior and well-networked are heard as thoughtful, while the new, contingent or junior hear their own sentence as an admission of inadequacy, and know which labels stick. So the instruction does not merely filter problems, it filters a particular class of problem from a particular class of person, and what reaches the leader is not a random sample of what is wrong but whatever the safest people felt safe enough to say. The same criticism then lands on the original four scenarios, which were written from the manager's chair: not knowing is the least of the costs, since the person sitting on the problem knows every day. The reframe offered is one line: come with problems, and with solutions too, the first mandatory and the second optional.

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Read the full article on psychsafety.com →