Aeroplane Problems

In a conversation today one of my favourite topics came up: Aeroplane Problems. I don't mean problems with aeroplanes, but rather problems that are like inventing the aeroplane, where there are lots of different factors that all have to go right before you ever get off the ground.

An Aeroplane Problem is often poorly understood, which makes it difficult to solve because you can't tell exactly what's going wrong. "It's still on the ground" could be caused by any number of failures. If you think you've fixed the failure but nothing's moving, it could be that you haven't actually fixed it, or it could be that you have fixed it and there are still more issues. Worse still, maybe when you fix that next issue this one will un-fix itself again.

Aeroplane Problems are often deceptively simple to explain. "I want it just like it is now, but flying" is an easy thing to say, but actual flight requires mastering complexity far out of proportion to the simplicity of that goal. It can be a very long time between defining an aeroplane problem and even seeing something that resembles success. This can be enormously demotivating.

And to me, the classic (non-aviation) Aeroplane Problem is motivation, or maybe something closer what Covey called effectiveness. To consistently get good work done requires a lot of different things: meaningful work, good working habits, discipline, enjoyment, and probably more I don't know about. When these things fail and we stop wanting to do work, it's easy to assign labels like laziness or procrastination, but those are just synonyms for "not working". There's no reason to think they're any more meaningful than a bunch of different words for "plane crash". The plane's still crashed, and we still don't know why.

So how do you solve an Aeroplane Problem? Well, the only way I can think of is to break it down until it's a bunch of smaller, more tractable problems. The issue is that doing that requires theory. Now that we (basically) understand aerodynamics, aeroplanes are no longer an Aeroplane Problem. Chemistry got rid of the Aeroplane Problems of alchemy. And maybe someday motivation will have a theory complete enough to solve it too.

In the mean time, there's always random guessing!