The Unknown Problem: Why AI Needs You
Photo by Thong Vo on Unsplash
This morning I attended a series of talks organised by multiple chambers of commerce in South Africa. The topic was, you will have guessed, AI. What else does anybody speak about at the moment?
Ricardo Rosa declared that artificial intelligence fixes known problems and accelerates them. The unknown problems, he insisted, remain stubbornly our responsibility as humans.
I liked that. It asks so many questions. AI is currently seen as a silver billet and the answer to any problem. Whilst it is very useful as tool, I think it’s use and capabilities deserve more circumspection and deeper human thinking.
What exactly do we mean by known and unknown problems? I am not talking philosophically here, but practically, in the rhythm of our daily operations. The boundaries are seldom clear; what is known depends entirely on the skill, knowledge, experience, and corporate memory of the person asking the question. The deeper question, the one that should keep every leader awake, is how we solve for the unknown. And beyond that, whether we even possess the capacity to work on our business, to deploy the critical thinking and meta thinking required to examine our entire organisation, its processes, its people, and its outcomes, and to ask what unknown problems are lurking there.
These are not abstract musings. An unknown problem means you do not have the solution, but you should not be caught unaware by a problem simply because it is unknown to you. The distinction matters enormously.
Luckily, we have the tools to answer these questions. Before you can pick the right tool, though, you must first understand the nature of the ground you are standing on. There is a way to categorise problems based on how well you understand cause and effect. Once you know which territory you are in, the path becomes clearer.
The First Territory: The Realm of Best Practice
This is the domain of the known knowns. Here, the relationship between cause and effect is obvious to everyone involved. The situation is stable, repeatable, and the correct answer is not up for debate. When a customer reports a password reset failure, or an invoice fails to generate because a field was left blank, you are standing in this territory. The work is not necessarily easy, but it is clear. The danger here is complacency. When you have done something successfully a thousand times, it is tempting to stop paying attention, and that is precisely when the ground shifts beneath your feet.
The approach is straightforward: sense the facts, categorise the problem, and respond with the established rule. This is the natural home of the technical problem solving toolkit. Standard operating procedures, process maps, checklists, and decision trees are your instruments here. If a problem lives in this quadrant, AI will indeed fix it and accelerate it wonderfully. A well written script or a robotic process automation will handle these problems far faster than any human, and without complaint. That is precisely the point the speaker was making. The creative toolkit has little to do here; you do not need a brainstorming session to reset a password. You need a workflow.
The Second Territory: The Realm of Expertise
Step across the boundary and you enter the world of known unknowns. Here, cause and effect are still linked, but the chain is not obvious to the naked eye. It requires analysis, diagnosis, and specialist knowledge. You know there is an answer; you simply do not possess it yet. This is the territory of the expert. When a production line slows to a crawl and nobody on the floor can identify why, or when a legal contract requires parsing by someone who understands the nuance of a particular clause, you are in this space. The risk here is analysis paralysis, the endless commissioning of reports while the business stalls. There is also the quiet danger of expert entrapment, where the specialist becomes so convinced of their own framework that they miss a novel solution hiding in plain sight.
The method here is to sense the facts, analyse them deeply, and then respond with good practice, not just any practice. Technical tools shine in this quadrant. Think of root cause analysis, the Five Whys, fishbone diagrams, and failure mode and effects analysis. These are the structured, rigorous instruments that help an expert dissect a problem and reveal the mechanism inside. The creative toolkit plays a supporting role here, useful for reframing the problem before the analysis begins, perhaps through a structured brainstorming method like brainwriting, where quieter voices can contribute without being shouted down by the loudest expert in the room.
The Third Territory: The Realm of Emergence
Now we leave the ordered world entirely. This is the domain of the unknown unknowns, and it is here that the speaker’s challenge truly bites. In this space, cause and effect can only be understood in retrospect, never in advance. There are no right answers waiting to be uncovered by a sufficiently clever expert, because the system itself is in flux. Launching a new product in a category that does not yet exist, or trying to shift a deep seated organisational culture, places you firmly in this territory. The old playbooks are worthless. The central trap is the desperate, very human desire to impose a false order, to demand a predictable plan when none can exist. Another trap is to leap prematurely to a single solution without first understanding the patterns of the landscape.
The discipline changes completely. You must probe first, run small, safe experiments to see how the system reacts, then sense the patterns that emerge from those probes, and only then respond by amplifying what works and dampening what does not. This is the home of the creative problem solving toolkit. Design thinking, with its loops of empathy, ideation, and prototyping, lives here. Scenario planning, storytelling to create a shared vision of a future state, and safe to fail experiments are your primary instruments. The technical toolkit does not disappear, but its role shifts from providing answers to enabling learning. You might use a minimum viable product or a low fidelity prototype not to sell a solution, but to test a hypothesis about customer behaviour. The point is not to be right; the point is to learn faster than the uncertainty can paralyse you.
The Fourth Territory: The Realm of Rapid Response
Finally, there is the domain of crisis. Here, cause and effect are completely unmoored, or shifting too fast to discern. There is no time to analyse, and there is certainly no time to probe. The building is on fire, the payment system has collapsed during the busiest shopping day of the year, a social media backlash is spiralling out of control. The immediate and only priority is to act decisively to stabilise the situation and stop the bleeding.
The mantra here is act, sense, respond. You take immediate, forceful action to reduce damage and establish some semblance of order. Then you sense where stability might be found, and you respond by steering towards it. In the very first moments, a clear command and control structure is not authoritarian overreach; it is essential. Technical tools for incident management, a war room with a clear chain of command, rapid communication protocols, and pre rehearsed disaster recovery plans are your foundation. The creative toolkit is not for the acute phase of the crisis. It becomes valuable only after stability is restored, when you need to analyse what happened and design a more resilient system so you never find yourself in this territory for the same reason again.
The end is just the beginning
We have just journeyed through four distinct territories, from the clear and orderly to the turbulent and chaotic. The fatal error is to not know where we stand and to use the tools of one territory in another: to demand a creative brainstorm when a checklist will do, or far more dangerously, to demand a predictable project plan with milestones and fixed budgets when you are standing in a fog of genuine uncertainty. That is how organisations stumble blindly into problems they could have seen coming.
Understanding the shape of the problem is not a theoretical exercise. It is the foundational act of leadership, the moment you earn the right to open your toolbox. It prevents you from treating a heart attack with a bandage, or a paper cut with a defibrillator. The speaker this morning was right: AI will handle the known problems with breathtaking speed. But the unknown ones, the messy, shifting, human ones that emerge from the complex and the chaotic? Those will demand the full spectrum of our intelligence, our judgement, and our courage. The tools exist. We simply need to learn which one to pick up.
If you are ready to map your organisation’s unknown problems and build the capability to navigate complexity with confidence, visit wholesystemsconsulting.com to see how we can help.
#Leadership #ProblemSolving #AI #Strategy #Complexity #OrganisationalDesign #WholeSystemsThinking