Lots of Challenges no Solutions | Brussels Blog

Lots of Challenges no Solutions

posted by on 8th Jun 2011
8th,Jun

There is no shortage of Solutions in Brussels. These are not of course, of the kind that you flush down drains. I refer instead to the ones that have replaced what in the Dark Ages used to be described as “goods and services”. A few examples will make the point.

My local supermarket, sensing a certain cultural ennui surrounding the term “fastfood” has grabbed the zeitgeist and now offers “Instant Food Solutions”. Not far behind is the local patissier who offers as a panacea for all those bad farinaceous moments “Bread and Pastry Solutions”. Then there is the deeply ambiguous announcement recently spotted on a local white-van “Cleaning Solutions”. This cannot of course refer to the pink stuff that cleans windows because that would be “Cleaning Solutions Solutions” .(Its simple when you get the hang of it). However, the prize for inane branding solutions goes to the local car-hire firm who proudly announce that they “rent solutions”. I might ring them up and ask for an elegant new proof for Fermat’s Last Theorem or perhaps the answer to that old perennial, The Meaning Of Life. Just for the week-end of course, I only want a temporary solution.

What I find confusing about this plethora of solutions is that one looks in vain for the corresponding problems for which,presumably, they are intended. Anything that might reasonably be described as a problem or even problematical has been re-branded in that sort of eternally hopeful onwards-and-upwards way of the door-to-door salesman as a “challenge”. Challenges are everywhere, as ubiquitous as challenging environments. We are indeed, over-leveraged with them . But how much better to live in a world without problems,how much more invigorating to be challenged (in a manner of speaking).With this in mind we could revisit, update and upscale that iconic 14thApril 1970, Apollo 13 moment.

“Houston we have a problem”
(In reality, John Swigart said “Houston we have had a problem”)

Like so, “Hi Houston its a very challenging environment up here at this moment in time but going forwards I’m heading up a dynamic team who are passionate about delivering doomed space-capsule solutions”

So much better.

In fact, to speak of “having” a problem illustrates a point made by the French grammatician Du Marais in Les Veritables Principes De La Grammaire (1769). He observed that there is a trend in language towards the substitution of verbs by nouns. We can properly talk of having a watch but having a problem is a different matter. Really,we are troubled. A problem is a perception, not a thing that we can either have or not. We can distance ourselves further from this reality by substituting nouns which carry less emotional weight. Like dead civilians in Afghanistan becoming collateral damage or neo-colonial adventurism become liberal intervention, that kind of thing. “Challenge” sounds so much better than “problem” One can decline to accept a challenge. Climbing Mount Everest was not the solution to a problem, it was a challenge. Climate change or resource depletion are not challenges, they are problems.

Human beings wrongly accuse ostriches of burying they heads in the sand at the approach of a predator-a tactic that would make little sense from an evolutionary survival-of-the-fittest point of view. They would simply get eaten. Instead they run away-very quickly. It is human beings who bury their heads in the sand. The awful truth is that we have a lot of problems and very few solutions.

This morning the challenge word cropped up in the context of a news article about plunging airline profits. The International Airline Transport Association has slashed its profit forecast for 2011. Profits will be down 78% from last year and 54% less than was predicted for this year. This means that the return on the capital value of the industry will be .7%. Who wants to invest in airlines? At that rate of return, no one.

The causes of this parlous situation are easy to discern. The price of oil is the big one. As Willie Walsh Chief Executive of British Airways so acutely observed, “I think the high oil price is something that poses a real challenge”

Frankly Mr Walsh you should be very troubled not really challenged. Going forwards, as they say, this is how it will look. The price of oil will continue to rise. There will be peaks and troughs but the overall trajectory will be upwards. Japan will need vast amounts of oil to rebuild its coastal towns. Libya will not be producing oil for a few years to come and OPEC cannot substantially increase production. The easy oil is in decline. Expensive substitutes like biofuel and unconventional oils will come on stream in increasing amounts but they will not alter the price dynamic. Meanwhile China will, by hook or by crook, corner the world market. There will be shortages. The cheap oil has already gone and with it, cheap travel by air.

Fares will go up. People will travel less. Countries that rely on inward tourism for a substantial part of their GDP will suffer. Greece Portugal and Spain spring to mind. Greece will not repay its debts nor will Portugal. Banks and economies in the Eurozone will crash and there will be the financial crisis to end all financial crises. The airlines will suffer a catastrophic decline in revenue and investment . You might be able to persuade the EU to drop its proposed tax on carbon emissions but frankly, given the size of the impending storm, this will not amount to a hill of beans.

In fact, the current travails of the Air Industry can be unravelled like those structured investment vehicles which were peddled by crooks in the heady days before the fall of Lehman Brothers, to reveal in their constituent parts the challenges that are the essential ingredients of our present crisis. Energy, the environment and money.

There are solutions to all these problems but first we have to acknowledge them as such and not babble about challenges. Really we should be deeply troubled. If we were then we might do something to solve them.

Robert Urquhart Collins

comment

Well, there are challenges, and then there are Grand Challenges (http://www.se2009.eu/polopoly_fs/1.8460!menu/standard/file/lund_declaration_final_version_9_july.pdf)

What is interesting in all this is not the relentless and groundless optimism, or the gung-ho reflex concerning Chinese idiograms and opportunities, but an inadequate distinction between problems and predicaments.

Problems, even Fermat’s, may have solutions. Predicaments are not things you can solve; they are merely there to be dealt with. You may or may not reach the end of the predicament, and your actions may help you to survive it, but deal with it you must. Problems can be ignored. I feel I can sleep soundly without troubling my head too much over whether a^n+b^n=c^n, but the Meaning of Life will be thrust upon me, willy, nilly.

Whether it’s a problem or a predicament may depend on your perspective. Famine may be a problem to the UN or an opportunity for Novartis, but if you are a gaunt Somali child with a swollen belly and flies around your mouth, famine is your life-long predicament. Houston had a problem, but Swigart and his pals were in a predicament.

I would therefore suggest that Climate change and resource depletion are not opportunities or challenges, or even problems. They are predicaments.

Martin ( June 15, 2011 at 9:53 am )

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