Acceptance Is Only a Strategy If We Choose It Early
Many problems have no solution. Some have solutions that would cause more problems. Others have solutions that are too expensive, or too impractical, to implement. This is not pessimism. It is simply how problems behave.
The sooner we know which kind of problem we are dealing with, the better positioned we are to move forward. That part is easy to agree with. What we do next is where most of us go wrong.
Often, a great deal of effort is spent finding solutions to such problems. We search, we try, we search again. Then we feel exhausted and discouraged, and we begin to accept the problem and adapt to it. The acceptance does come. But it comes late, and it comes because we ran out of energy, not because we decided.
Consider a council implementing a new payroll and HR system. Its enterprise agreement has allowance rules that the standard product cannot handle. The team spends months on configuration, then on a customisation, then on a second customisation to repair the first. Eventually the project runs out of time and goodwill, and a spreadsheet is added beside the system to calculate those allowances by hand. Nobody approves it. It simply becomes how payroll is done. The steering committee report stays green, because the item was never formally closed. It was just abandoned.
The alternative is to identify such problems early enough. Once we have, there are four choices open to us.
We can change our expectations about the problem’s solution. A business case promises “real-time reporting across every department”, but the legacy data cannot be cleaned within the budget. Better to reset the promise at the start, for example to reconciled monthly reporting in the first year, than to let the executive team discover the gap at go-live.
We can accept the problem as it is, and adapt. Take the same allowance rule. The honest option is a documented manual step, with a named owner and a review date, instead of a customisation that costs more than the process it fixes and breaks with every product upgrade. This is the same spreadsheet as before, but now it is a decision with an owner, not a workaround nobody admits to.
We can strategise to implement the solution with a long horizon in mind. Consider an organisation whose asset condition data is unreliable across thousands of assets. It cannot be corrected before go-live, and pretending otherwise helps no one. But it can be cleansed in stages over three financial years, timed to the revaluation cycle. The solution was never impossible. It was only too big for the timeline everyone had assumed.
We can choose to cut the problem and accept alternative problems instead. Suppose a legacy rates process needs an expensive custom integration to keep working exactly as it does today. The alternative is to retire that process, accept that some reports will change shape, and take on a different problem: staff who must learn a new way of working. That is a real cost. But it is a cost we can manage, in place of one that keeps growing.
Notice that in every one of these, we end up accepting something. The difference is whether we accepted it by exhaustion or by choice.
The key is awareness. Awareness of our situation, our environment, our genetics, our constraints, and the problem we face. Without it, we cannot tell which of the four choices fits. With it, we can strategise to win on our own rules, in a well-planned way, in advance.
So if most of us end up accepting our problems anyway, how many of us can say we chose to?
