Three People, One Problem, Zero Agreement

Why You Can't Train a Hurricane or Fix the Weather

Picture this: You're sitting in this conference room (above) discussing the enrollment decline that's been keeping everyone up at night. The President clears her throat and says, "We need to fix this enrollment problem."

Around the table, heads nod in agreement. Finally, everyone's on the same page.

Except you're not.

Not even close.

Your marketing director is already thinking about new brochures and a website refresh. "Simple fix," she's thinking. "Better messaging, cleaner design, maybe some new photos of happy students."

Your CFO is calculating budget cuts and already plotting program eliminations. In his mind, this isn't about better marketing—it's about getting out ahead of big, fundamental shifts in the economics of higher education. When he hears "enrollment problem," he hears "the value proposition of higher education is broken. We need to completely rethink everything!"

Your registrar might be somewhere in the middle, wondering if anyone has actually looked at the data to understand what's really happening with student retention, transfer patterns, and program demand.

Same words. Same meeting. Three completely different views of the problem.

The Daily Reality

This scene plays out in higher education leadership meetings every single day. We gather around conference tables like this one and identify problems, but usually just end up talking past each other. Not because we fundamentally disagree (we're all worried about enrollment), but we're not exactly talking about the same problem either.

One person sees a simple fix. Another sees a crisis requiring radical transformation. A third sees something in between that needs careful analysis and systematic change.

The issue isn't that people are wrong. It's that we're mixing up our problems.

And when you get the problem type wrong, you waste enormous amounts of time, money, and energy. And usually, you end up with solutions that don’t address the problem at all (or worse, create some other problem).

Four Different Creatures

If you've been following my writing recently, you know that I spend a lot of time thinking about problems. What they are, how to identify them, but also how to talk about them, and how to even think about what we mean when we say we have a problem.

What I've learned is that there are basically four different types of problems, and they're about as different from each other as a goldfish, a horse, a weather system, and a hurricane.

1. Clear problems are like goldfish. They're predictable. You know what they need, and if you give it to them, they're fine. Your website crashes—you fix the server. Enrollment forms are confusing—you redesign them. Application deadlines aren't clear—you make them clearer. These problems have obvious cause-and-effect relationships that everyone can see. There's usually a best practice or a proven fix that works.
   

2. Complicated problems are like horses. They're alive and dynamic, but you can learn to work with them. They have multiple moving parts, but if you understand how they work and bring in the right expertise, you can train them, guide them, and get where you need to go. Think about optimizing your financial aid process, implementing new technology systems, or restructuring academic programs. These problems have clear relationships between cause and effect, but not everyone can see them without expert analysis. They're solvable, but they take work and expertise.
   

3. Complex problems are like weather systems. They're constantly shifting, influenced by countless variables you can't fully control or predict. You can't "solve" the weather—you adapt to it, prepare for it, and respond to emerging patterns. Think about improving student retention, enhancing campus culture, or adapting to demographic shifts. These problems require experimentation—you probe, sense what's happening, and then respond based on what emerges.
   

4. Chaotic problems are like hurricanes. They demand immediate action with no time to analyze or experiment. Budget crises forcing immediate program closures, sudden leadership transitions, or emergency campus incidents. Here you act first to establish stability, then figure out what's actually happening.
   

The Goldilocks Trap

Here's where that meeting really goes off track. Each type of problem someone around that table identifies needs a completely different approach, but we often treat them all the same way.

This isn't just my observation. It's a core insight behind what Dave Snowden calls the Cynefin framework. Snowden developed this framework at IBM back in 1999 to help leaders understand that different problem situations need different approaches. The framework has since been used everywhere from military strategy to healthcare management—and higher education.

In their Harvard Business Review article, Snowden and Mary Boone explain that many executives are surprised when "previously successful leadership approaches fail in new situations."

But different contexts call for different kinds of responses.

Try to take on a weather system (complex problem) with goldfish (a simple fix), and you'll be frustrated when it doesn't work. Try to solve a goldfish problem by hiring hurricane specialists, and you'll exhaust everyone before you make any progress.

But here's the dangerous part: if you start to believe things are simple when they're not, you’ll fall off "the cliff" (Snowden’s words). You start to believe that past success means you're invulnerable to future failure. This is what happens when leaders get overconfident in their simple solutions and suddenly find themselves in chaos when reality hits.

Higher education leaders are particularly vulnerable to the cliff, I think, because we love to believe that our problems have clear solutions. They usually don’t, yet we get frustrated when we can’t turn our hurricanes into goldfish.

Let's Go Back to That Conference Room…

Remember our marketing director, CFO, and registrar all seeing different problems? Here's what happened next.

The marketing director won the first round. "This is clearly a messaging problem," she said. "Our brand isn't connecting with prospective students." The room nodded. Made sense. They spent $200,000 on a complete website overhaul with new photography, updated copy, and a fresh design.

Six months later, the university launched a gorgeous new website.

Enrollment still declined.

So it was the CFO's turn. "We need deeper analysis," he said. "This is more complicated than we thought." Again, the room agreed. They brought in a respected consulting firm to do a comprehensive enrollment study—the kind of systematic analysis you do when the problem has multiple moving parts.

The consultants delivered exactly what they promised: a thorough 150-page report with data-driven recommendations about admissions processes, financial aid optimization, and competitive positioning strategies. It was excellent work.

Still enrollment kept declining.

Then something interesting happened. During a routine student focus group about dining services, students kept mentioning feeling disconnected from campus. They weren't leaving because of poor marketing or complicated admissions processes. They were leaving because they didn't feel like they belonged.

The real problem wasn't a goldfish (fix the website) or a horse (analyze and optimize the systems). It was a weather system: campus culture. Something complex and constantly shifting that required ongoing attention and lots of small experiments.

The website redesign wasn't wrong. The consulting analysis wasn't wrong. They were both the right solutions, just for the wrong problems.

The lesson? Make sure you know what kind of problem you have before you decide how to solve it.

Try This

Before your next meeting, try this: Ask everyone to write down whether they think you're dealing with a goldfish, a horse, a weather system, or a hurricane.

You might discover you're not just talking about different solutions—you're talking about completely different things.

Once you know whether you need goldfish care, horse training, weather adaptation, or hurricane response, everything else becomes clearer. You can choose the right tools, set realistic expectations, and stop wasting money on mismatched solutions.

Because there's a difference between a server that needs fixing and a culture that needs nurturing. Between a process that needs expertise and a crisis that needs immediate action.

Of course, none of this will solve the problem.

But it’s a start. At least you’ll know what you’re dealing with.