The book The Heretic's Guide to Best Practices: The Reality of Managing Complex Problems in Organizations, has been sitting on my bookshelf for sometime. In our work from home condition I decided to read it. I randomly turned to Page 77, and found
The major deficiencies in management education are not in what is taught but how it is taught. A major part of management education is devoted to trying to solve problems given to students by teachers. As a result, students unconsciously come to believe that is is natural for problems to be given to them. In the real world, however, problems are seldom given; they must be taken. Nevertheless, students are neither taught nor learned how to take problems. - Management in Small Doses - Russell Ackoff, 1986.
Without first finding the problem, and then finding the root causes - conditions and actions - that created the problem, any hope of fixing the problem is lost. It is common to encounter a provider of solutions looking for a problem to solve.
