Leaders in high-performing engineering organizations encounter new ‘types’ of problems as their scope increases. As your scope increases the types of challenges requiring your attention get upgraded. Not only do decision-making appear to get harder, but these challenges also seem to have no clear or easily verifiable solutions. Oftentimes your only hope is to choose the less wrong solution.
Challenges that can be solved by straightforward solutions are handled before you become aware of them. In most cases, you never hear about those problems. Only the truly difficult and ambiguous questions make their way to you. As former president Barak Obama shared “By definition, if it was an easily solvable problem or even a modestly difficult but solvable problem, it would not reach me, because, by definition, somebody else would have solved it,”… “So the only decisions that came were the ones that were horrible and that didn’t have a good solution."
While day-to-day challenges of running an engineering team may not measure up to those encountered by a president, the sentiment remains valid. Solving problems with no clear solution or the ability to obtain immediate feedback on the efficacy of the recommended solution can be disorienting. This can in turn lead to self-doubt. Always remember that by definition these challenges have no clear-cut answers and if they do it often takes a long time horizon the play out. Cut yourself some slack, be graceful to yourself, and do all that you need to do to quieten the self-doubt.
