Years ago at a client, I recall being asked how they could change the browser timeout to make it longer. They explained that what they were doing was taking too long, the browser was timing out, and users weren’t happy.
An interesting thing with humans is that the first problem we bring up is rarely the real problem. For the browser to have timed out, that means the user had probably already been waiting for five minutes. No wonder they were unhappy.
The fix in that case was to replace 4000 lines of Java code with a page and a half of SQL, taking the execution time from 5+ minutes to roughly a tenth of a second. While the technical details were interesting, for this post I want to focus on the framing of the problem.
They approached me with a problem that wasn’t the real problem. Had I just taken that at face value, we would have found some browser setting to make the timeout longer, and while that would have solved the immediate problem, it wouldn’t have made the users any happier.
Why do we do this? Why do we focus on the wrong problems?
There are a couple of reasons. One is what Daniel Kahneman called System 1 and System 2. Our brains have evolved to optimize for energy consumption and System 1 is very fast and uses very little energy. System 2, on the other hand, is much slower, uses much more energy, and is therefore less desirable. Wherever possible, our brains prefer to use System 1 to make decisions.
Unfortunately while it’s fast, System 1 is often wrong. The example above is a perfect example of System 1 thinking: “Let’s just extend the browser timeout”.
What I did in this case was to ask the kinds of questions that force us into System 2. “How could we shorten the entire time so that we don’t need to change the timeout?” Or “what’s the bigger problem we’re trying to solve?”
Questions that can be answered with yes/no, and questions starting with “why” will tend to keep us in System 1 so we want to avoid them. We want open ended questions and those often start with “how” or “what”.
The key to remember is that the first problem is rarely the real problem. Ask some questions. Dig a bit deeper. Force us both to use System 2, so that together we can find a better answer.
Another related reason for focusing on the wrong problem is called Attribute Substitution. It’s when we’re faced with a computationally difficult problem, and our brains unconsciously replace that problem with a computationally simpler problem and we solve for that instead. We’re usually not even aware that we’ve done this because it’s happened entirely at an unconscious level (System 1).
The good news is that the same questions that will switch us to System 2, will also help us identify that we’ve been tricked by Attribute Substitution, and will allow us to refocus on the real problem.
⮕ More on Attribute Substitution
In this particular case, we ended up with a solution that made everyone happy. That only happened because we were able to step back and see the problem through the lens of System 2.