THE IDEA
The itch to fix everything
Solutionism is the belief that every problem has a solution - a clean, implementable, definitive answer that makes the problem go away. It’s deeply embedded in how most of us were educated: here’s a problem, find the answer, move on.
In simple and complicated domains, this works. A broken pipe has a fix. A software bug has a patch. An equation has an answer. But in complex systems, many problems aren’t puzzles waiting to be solved. They’re conditions to be managed, tensions to be navigated, trade-offs to be made and remade. Poverty isn’t a puzzle. Inequality isn’t a puzzle. Organisational culture isn’t a puzzle. They’re ongoing dynamics shaped by interconnected forces, and the search for “the solution” is itself part of the problem.
Solutionism is dangerous not because solutions are bad, but because the assumption that one must exist warps how we engage with difficulty. It makes us impatient with ambiguity. It makes us distrust approaches that don’t promise resolution. It makes us prefer a confident wrong answer to an honest “we’re going to have to keep working at this.” And it makes us vulnerable to anyone who offers a simple fix for a complex situation - because solutionism has already primed us to believe that such a fix should exist.
IN PRACTICE
The fix that promises too much
A company has a culture problem. People don’t trust each other, information doesn’t flow between teams, and decisions take too long. The solutionist response: hire a consultant, redesign the values, launch a culture programme, declare the problem solved. Six months later, the same behaviours persist under new language. The “solution” addressed the symptoms that were expressible in a slide deck. The actual dynamics - the incentive structures, the history, the power relationships - weren’t solvable in a workshop. They needed ongoing, patient, structural work with no clean endpoint.
A city has a homelessness problem. The solutionist response: build shelters, provide services, measure the numbers. The numbers go down in the measured area and up somewhere else. Or they go down temporarily and rise again. Or a new population enters homelessness while the previous one exits. Each cycle produces a new “solution” and a new disappointment. Not because the interventions were wrong, but because homelessness isn’t a problem that gets solved. It’s a condition that gets better or worse depending on dozens of interacting factors, none of which sits still.
A person feels anxious. The solutionist response: find the cause, fix the cause, eliminate the anxiety. But anxiety doesn’t always have a single fixable cause. Sometimes it’s a signal from a complex system - the body, the mind, the circumstances - that multiple things need attention, none of which will produce a clean resolution. The more desperately someone searches for “the answer” to their anxiety, the more anxious the search itself can make them. Sometimes the healthier move is accepting the anxiety as information and learning to navigate with it, not against it.
WORKING WITH THIS
Learning to manage instead of fix
The antidote to solutionism isn’t giving up on improvement. It’s changing the expected shape of improvement. Instead of “solve and move on,” try “improve, learn, adjust, repeat.” Instead of looking for the intervention that fixes everything, look for the portfolio of small moves that shifts the overall direction.
When you catch yourself or your team searching for “the solution,” ask: is this a puzzle or a condition? Puzzles have solutions. Conditions have better and worse states - and the work of improving them never finishes. Both are legitimate. The damage comes from treating a condition as a puzzle.
Notice the language of solutionism: “What’s the answer?” “How do we fix this?” “What’s the plan to solve it?” These questions assume a shape of response that complex problems don’t fit. Better questions: “How do we make this better?” “What can we learn from trying?” “What does good enough look like, and how do we sustain it?” These aren’t weaker questions. They’re more honest ones - and in complex systems, honesty about the nature of the problem is the first step toward genuine progress.
THE INSIGHT
The line to remember
Not every problem is a puzzle. Some are conditions you navigate, and the search for a definitive fix is how you waste the time you could have spent making things better.
RECOGNITION
When this is in play
You’re seeing solutionism when every problem is expected to have a single, implementable answer. When a project is judged as failed because it improved things without solving them completely. When people are frustrated by the persistence of a problem that doesn’t have a resolution - only better and worse states. When a leader promises to “fix” something that can’t be fixed, only managed. When the question “but what’s the solution?” shuts down a conversation that was making useful progress.