What Problem Today Did Yesterday's Solution Create?

By Carolyn Thornlow

Michael Scott, the catastrophically confident manager of The Office, created dilemmas for himself.

In the famous “golden ticket” episode, Michael encloses 5 tickets – each promising a 10% discount – in boxes queued for shipping. The intention was pure. The campaign to create delight and customer loyalty was inventive. And yet he created a problem.

Upon entering the warehouse, he put the five tickets into boxes near each other. It turned out that their largest customer, Blue Cross, would typically receive 3 pallets of paper every week. All five tickets were on the pallets going to this one big order.

Instead of writing off, say, $5 on a $50 order, he now had to give a 50% discount on an order approximating $7,000. It plays out like an O. Henry story. In order to improve cash flow, he made a decision to secure it only to have the outcome be a worse-off costly hit.

As managers, owners and executives, we all say that we would never make decisions like Michael Scott’s. In reality, however, everyone does. Let me qualify that: everyone without a disciplined big picture thinking practice does.

If you just walk through your typical day, you can imagine it. Let’s say that you look at reports and numbers. Arguably, a good thing to do. You see that sales and operating reserves are down this quarter. You jump into action. It feels right and good to do something that directly affects sales which in turn will ultimately affect operating reserves.

That’s what Need a Cake bakery owner Rachel Brown did. Her quick and immediate action was to create a Groupon that reduced the price of a dozen cupcakes from $40 to $10. Did it attract throngs of customers? You bet! So much so that she had to hire 25 extra workers to meet the demand and ended up losing $20,000 on “the fix.”[1]

While Michael Scott is fictitious, there are thousands of Rachel Browns who rush into the land of unintended consequences. And that’s because of the way we are built. We focus on what is immediate. It’s baked into our evolutionary biology. To ensure survival we have onboarded the orienting response – the autonomic internal voice that asks “what is this?”.

When we take in any deviation from normal, expected, or desired, especially when we’re responsible for outcomes, chemical messengers that ready the body for action get triggered. The secondary effect of this is that glucose stores, ordinarily reserved for executive level thinking occurring in the prefrontal cortex, get diverted to larger muscles that are preparing for fight or flight. Neuroscientist Dr. Amy Arnsten cites work in her Yale lab that found that signal-receiving dendrites in the prefrontal cortex shrink when we’re in a call-to-action state.[2]

Michael Scott may be a cartoonish rendition of a manager. But, we watch because his reflexes, thought processes and actions are very human. No one is exempt from this human architecture. Once aware of its existence, however, we know that it is not a shameful failing but a feature of being alive. That’s when we can do something about it.

Pause

The ground on which superb leadership stands is “the pause.” Too often, owners, executives and managers believe that taking quick action is the answer to everything. But action taken without consideration for the context in which it will operate is also the province of recklessness.

Decisiveness is certainly aspirational. A remarkable leader can not only present the best actions, of all imaginable, but do so quickly. But, that comes with discipline and practice. Because taking it all in, seeing the big picture, projecting consequences and payoffs rest upon knowing how things work. Not only does that demand knowledge in a vast array of disciplines but also a higher level of knowing the “chemical’ reactions when parts interact. All of this is a function of intellectual rigor.

In much the same way as a trained firefighter can save people from disaster without hesitation, so too can trained leaders quickly come up with the most bulletproof plan among options. But, the operative word here is trained. Not only does that rely on knowing the components and their likely interaction, but a willpower to look beyond the immediate. That becomes the mental model for business owners. But that only gets embedded – and thus owned – by way of repetition. The pause is at once the antidote to reactive management and the space in which senior leadership development takes place.

Once you’ve given yourself permission to not act, at least for a moment, then ask:

To what is this connected?

Pillars and Power Laws

This question is a Pillar (among others) in the big picture thinking framework developed by The Big Picture Plan™.  The question serves as orientation toward a fundamentally sound architecture. At the end of the day, a successful, viable, resilient  business organization is designed. It is deliberate. Good decisions factor in overarching Power Laws -- the way things work regardless of specifics. Like gravity. Isaac Newton noted the phenomenon by way of an apple falling on his head. Falling has nothing to do with apples nor pineapples nor Looney Tunes anvils falling from the sky. It is an immutable force, explained by much grander and deeper other forces. That is what a Power Law is.

For the sake of compaction, which also obviates the need to become a physicist in addition to being a business leader, considered Power Laws are folded into decisions by way of carefully crafted questions.

To what is this connected? forces consideration of related Power Laws. Following are some higher order Power Laws:

1.     Failure Traces Back to a Disconnect

Whether it is a fallen bridge, an exploding space mission or a bankrupt business, the cause traces back to a disconnect. The system had a fissure where parts that were supposed to connect or coordinate with each other had detached. This means that the most important job of a leader is to be on a constant search for disconnects in their business as a system.

   2.   The First Law of Ecology       

Barry Commoner was a cellular biologist who posited the First Law of Ecology: Everything is Connected to Everything Else. Beyond checking for disconnects within the structure you’ve created (and control, given you’re asking the right questions) he urges a look at everything that has a touch point to the system you manage. Farnum Street’s article Externalities: Why We Can Never Do “One Thing”[3] points to the lack of deference to this Power Law as the firestarter of second order effects. Commoner also stated second, third and fourth laws of ecology:

   3.   The Second Law of Ecology: Everything Must go Somewhere

While he applied this notion specifically to ecology, it is the same concept as the First Law of Thermodynamics: energy can be neither created nor destroyed. From a business point of view, it should be kept in mind that a decision in one area will always affect another. A compensation system designed to attract and retain effectively takes resources away from operational improvements which may in fact create dissatisfaction amongst those costly talented new hires. The big picture is needed to manage the whole system.

   4.   The Third Law of Ecology: Nature Knows Best.

Nature as the overriding Power Law of Ecology demonstrates that there is always an overriding Power Law that affects what you’re doing, no matter how clever the local decision appears.

   5.   The Fourth Law of Ecology: There’s No Free Lunch

Cornering a market today presents as a strategic move. Without considering the long-term and second and third level effects, today’s “free lunch” can turn into tomorrow’s ptomaine. This Power Law is adjacent to the Iron Law of Responsibility which states that any entity with power and control that ceases to be responsible with respect to the larger system in which it operates will eventually lose that power.                  

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As you can see, Power Laws abound. This is not to overwhelm, but to make you aware that there is far more going on than one imagines...especially when making decisions. Masterful leaders know these exist and build their thinking skill sets to include them, consider their relativity and use them to forecast resulting probabilities. Quick on-point decision-making is earned from this kind of practiced intellectual rigor. The payoff is a strategic elegance:  optimize current circumstances while also positioning the business to do that in the future and in perpetuity.

In much the same way that Michael Scott and Need a Cake endured second order effects  because they did not think about them in context, not taking the time to know Power Laws and natural brain defaults creates second order decision-making effects. The best thing you can do for yourself and your business is to pause and cast your eyes wider, especially with the help of a framework.

THE BIG PICTURE BRIEF

•     How You Know You're in the Weeds

A managing partner sees that revenue and operating reserves are down. Feeling responsible for correcting the deviation quickly, she introduces a steeply discounted service package intended to bring work through the door. It does. But no one has calculated how the offer connects to staffing capacity, existing client commitments, delivery costs or the kind of work the firm wants to attract. Employees become overloaded, deadlines slip and profitable clients receive less attention. The initiative solved the presenting problem—too little incoming work—while creating a more expensive one. This is how the unintended consequences of initiatives take root: the decision is made inside the problem rather than inside the system in which the solution must operate.

•     How the Core of This Article Gets You Out of the Weeds

The move is to pause before action narrows the field of vision and ask: “To what is this connected?” That question reveals that a revenue remedy is also a capacity decision, a pricing decision, a client-experience decision and a claim on future resources. By tracing those connections before launching the offer, the managing partner can test how additional work will travel through the firm, where pressure will accumulate and whether the proposed cure merely relocates or enlarges the original problem.

•     Big Picture Thinking Pillars and Frameworks

The Big Picture Plan™ walks leaders through Pillars and Frameworks, including To What Is This Connected?  Applied here, the question requires the managing partner to place the proposed offer into its operating context: demand, price, labor, capacity, quality, client promises and downstream effects. It converts the pause from hesitation into disciplined inquiry. Instead of treating slower revenue as an isolated fact demanding immediate action, the leader examines how each possible action will interact with the business she must continue to operate after today’s problem has passed.

•     Big Picture Thinking Relieves, Cures and Opens Opportunity

The ownership payoff is the ability to make disciplined decision-making usable and adaptable to plans that are more bulletproof than the available alternatives. The managing partner no longer has to gamble that motion will equal progress. She becomes better able to compare options by what each one sets in motion throughout the firm. That can make leadership feel lighter—not because uncertainty disappears, but because the decision rests on examined connections rather than the hope that today’s solution will not become tomorrow’s problem.

•     Follow the Series

This article is part of Hey, Leader Series 1 — You’re Alone But Don’t Have to Be.  It shows that although the responsibility for a decision may rest with one leader, the thinking behind it need not depend upon instinct alone. A disciplined framework supplies questions that widen what the leader can see. A table of contents listing the other articles in the series will be posted regularly on the website in the Big Picture Plan™ Group: The Ante Room.

•     Where This Lives in The Big Picture Plan™

This article relates to Module 2 of The Big Picture Plan™: Discerning What Is Important from What Is Familiar or Immediate. It shows how pausing interrupts the pull of the immediate, creating the space to examine connections and consequences before acting.                  

[1]Kim Bhasin, “This Bakery Had to Make 102,000 Cupcakes Because of a Groupon Deal and Lost a Ton of Money,” Business Insider, November 22, 2011, https://www.businessinsider.com/london-baker-makes-102000-cupcakes-groupon-deal-2011-11.

[2]Amy Arnsten, Carolyn M. Mazure, and Rajita Sinha, “Everyday Stress Can Shut Down the Brain’s Chief Command Center,” Scientific American, April 1, 2012, https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican0412-48.

[3]“Externalities: Why We Can Never Do ‘One Thing,’” Farnam Street, accessed September 14, 2026, https://fs.blog/externalities-why-we-can-never-do-one-thing/.