Persuasive Dreams

You’ve got a problem in hand. It’s a really difficult problem. You’ve been working on it for several years now. You almost gave up countless times, but you didn’t. This is bigger than you. You are obsessed. Your whole life revolves around solving this problem. You know this is going to benefit society enormously, and thus, you tirelessly work day and night on it. You are very close to finding a solution, you feel it, but at this exact moment you are stuck. You have not been making any progress for the last few weeks, so you decide to put the problem aside and go on a two-week holiday to Tenerife, one of the Canary Islands in Spain.

On your second day on the island you are walking towards Las Teresitas beach. Blue sky, warm temperature. It’s going to be another wonderful day relaxing at the beach. You choose a good spot, leave your stuff on the sand and you lie down. “What a wonderful place”, you think. “Life is good”. You close your eyes and 30 seconds later … BOOOOM !! There it is! right in front of you. You cannot believe it. The last piece of the puzzle you have been working on is right there. It came to you without making any effort. You take your notebook out of your backpack and start writing frantically. One page, two pages, three pages, it’s all coming effortlessly. It’s unbelievable, the solution is so simple. How could you not see it all this time? Your mind fantasises about winning a Nobel Prize.

Over the next few weeks and months you write formal documents, you present your project at seminars and media chase you for interviews. You feel on top of the world. You are the person of the year.

It’s Christmas Eve. Your family has gathered at your parents’ house and are having a nice dinner. The topic of your project comes to the table and everyone congratulates you. You are giving a brief update when a question comes out of nowhere, from the person you least expect it. You have been confidently answering questions from the most renowned scientists from all over the world but this one, from your 9-year-old niece, caught you off guard.
“When are we going to see your solution being used everywhere?”
You answer with a quick “Very soon”, but the question stays with you for the night.
For the next few days you cannot take that innocent question out of your head. You give it a lot of thought. You try to answer it from different angles. For each option you go deep into the details.
A month into the quest you realise you are confronting a problem harder than you thought. Even harder than the original one. Reality hits you in the face: Without a solution for this problem the solution for the original problem is useless. All your work and effort will be wasted. A shiver runs through your body. And you are not even sure there is a solution for this second problem. Your whole world collapses.

Quite often problems don’t come alone. There is one problem and there is a “Sibling” problem. The second one is usually about how to get the solution for the first problem into the real world. How to get from the current world to a world where the solution to the problem is widely employed. As widely used as useful it is. Not more, not less. Quite often the second problem is harder to solve than the first one. Sometimes the solution to the first problem is straightforward forward and the sibling problem is not only considerably more difficult but could even be unsolvable. Solving one is not enough. You need to solve both. Solving one without the other one goes nowhere, beyond feeding some egos.

History has seen many different systems for measuring and weighing things. There was indeed a need for a unified and rational system to bring sanity to that chaos. This problem got solved in the late 1700s with the creation of the Metric System. More than 200 years later, and living in the interconnected world that we have today, there are still countries resisting its adoption. Third country worlds, you may think? The U.S. is the most notable outlier. Yes, the United States of America, the world’s leading power.

Quite similar is the problem of different countries driving on different sides of the road. Most countries have right-hand drive traffic but a few, around 30%, still drive on the left. Australia, Japan, India, Malaysia or New Zealand to name a few. It is worth mentioning that traffic initially began on the left side until Napoleon Bonaparte gradually imposed a shift to the right in the areas he conquered.
The sibling problem here looks easy to solve but it must be so hard that no country has even planned to move from driving on the left to driving on the right. It could also be the other way around, since there is no particular benefit from driving on one side over the other one, but since there are fewer countries driving on the left-hand side it will be less of a combined effort to shift to the right.
There is one remarkable exception here. Sweden managed to shift from driving on the left to driving on the right, which officially happened on Sunday, September 3rd 1967, called the “Högertrafikomläggningen“.
Huge achievement and congratulations for being able to solve such a difficult Sibling problem. There is hope!
It could also happen that this problem dissolves altogether in the near future, once self-driving cars are widespread. A “pure” self-driving car needs no driving wheel, therefore, it can easily drive on either side. We humans are so obtuse that instead of taking advantage of this opportunity we may decide to force self-driving cars to drive on different sides depending on the country. Who knows. Human stupidity.

There are approximately 180 currencies employed around the world. Currencies are a great invention and solve big problems, allowing trade to happen at all levels. Unfortunately they all share a common weakness. They are under the control of governments. This usually leads to abuse, probably the most common one being inflation. Could we invent a currency that is universal, that could be used anywhere in the world, and that is not under the control of any government, or group of people? Very unlikely. That sounds like a really difficult problem to solve. I doubt it can even be solvable.
Well, although it may seem difficult to believe, this problem happened to be solved more than 15 years ago by a man named Satoshi Nakamoto, who described the solution in what is called the Bitcoin white paper.
Is Bitcoin widely used nowadays? Has it substituted all the other “inferior” currencies? I’m afraid it hasn’t. If finding such a currency as Bitcoin was hard, the sibling problem is several orders of magnitude harder. I doubt it will ever substitute fiat currencies. There are too many interests at stake. Nevertheless the solution is there. Bitcoin is there, in the shadows. It’s ready to enter the field at any moment. It’s ready to swipe out any currency that misbehaves over a reasonable threshold.
In my opinion, this sibling problem will never be solved, at least through deliberate planning and intervention. Given the right circumstances people could slowly start adopting it and one day, you look back and Bitcoin has been widely adopted, or any other similar solution. Clearly a Black Swan. Only time will tell.

International phone calls used to be very expensive. You really thought twice before making the call. With the development of VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) this problem was solved. The cost of a phone call could drop to zero, when both parties have VoIP devices. Otherwise, the cost of any call would be the equivalent of a short-distance call, since communications could travel most of the way through VoIP networks.
Even though the savings were massive, it took many years for this technology to be widespread, to the point that I thought it would never happen. I remember being an early adopter in this field, forcing our company to change to all VoIP-ready phones. It was a bold move, not exempt from trouble. That year I didn’t see any other company making a similar move. Two, three, five years passed and I could still see no change. I thought I had jumped into the wrong train, until I looked more carefully. The change had happened, adoption was very high indeed, but at a different level. I was looking at the devices people were using, but the change happened at the telecommunications network level. It happened silently. Even though devices were the same, most calls were already VoIP, for the most part of them at least. Nowadays nearly every call is digital and thus the sibling was successfully defeated.

Sibling problems are quite common in the IT industry. One thing is to describe a solution to a problem and a very different thing is to apply it to a running system. Quite often solutions don’t go ahead due to the complexity, or high risk, of getting it to production.

Can you think of any other problem, like the ones described here, which comes with a sibling? A language spoken by every single person? A new form of government better than democracy?

From now on, before I start working on a specific problem I will ask myself the question “Does this problem have a sibling problem?”, “If I manage to solve this problem, will I be able to put it to work?”. The answers could save me a lot of time and frustration. Or help me focus and see the situation from a wider angle.

Have you personally ever faced a sibling problem? Were you able to defeat it?