So, the problem is . .

Long before we start solving, we've already decided how to begin.

For a while, whenever I tried to think about our move to Santa Fe, my mind wandered somewhere else entirely. A few weeks ago, I realized it hadn’t been wandering at all.

When Anne and I moved to Santa Fe a few years ago, we chose our neighborhood with our daughter very much in mind. She is an adult and lives with us but doesn’t drive. So, where we lived mattered. Our previous house was in a beautiful neighborhood with huge pine trees. A problem was, you had to walk a mile before you could reach any destination, and that was a bus stop.

One of the features of that house was a park bordered our backyard. Every morning and evening people walked their dogs. Our daughter walked ours too. Naturally, conversations happened around dogs, at first, then other things. Before long she was regularly seeing people in our neighborhood.

When we found our house in Santa Fe, we thought we found something better. We now live within walking distance of lots of things. The Plaza is less than half a mile. Canyon Road is even closer. And the Railyard wasn’t much farther. There was a small grocery nearby. Tourists spend lots of money staying in Airbnb’s on our street.

We thought we were solving a transportation problem. Except walkability turned out not to be the same thing as independence. We are downtown, but doctors aren’t. Or dentists. Or most places that do hiring. Neither are the stores where people who actually live in Santa Fe shop. Tourists, though, there are plenty of them around.

When I was working for a tech company, our privacy meetings had a smell. It wasn’t a bad smell, like a gym locker. Just coffee that was made hours before the meeting. Stale cookies, left in a box from some earlier time, half-eaten, then forgotten. The box lid fit very precisely. The meeting had engineers, lawyers, designers, policy people sitting around a table with a Polycom. One of the product managers kept a tennis ball on his desk and squeezed it when things got tense.

Someone would describe a new feature. Someone else would raise a risk. Then someone would wonder about what users might give up for convenience. One time, before we’d even finished arguing, a calendar invite showed up for the next meeting. Same room. Same time, next month. Subject line already written. The “discussion” continued on. For years I thought that was just the third Thursday of the month stuff. Except my memory keeps dragging it in somewhere else.

Hangzhou. China.

I was doing fieldwork there around the same time as I was going to privacy meetings. In fact, I was there to do privacy research. The city had just put up cameras that could do live facial recognition in public. The cameras were everywhere. We asked people what they thought. I expected the usual list. Surveillance. Control. Privacy. Instead, people looked at me like I’d asked something about flying cows. The cameras were already up. Criminals were getting caught. Everything seemed to be working just fine. It was a little humbling.

Later that year, I did some privacy research at a police department in a small town in Oregon. They were testing a facial recognition system that had much smaller ambitions. They used only recorded video footage. It was trained to search just for people who had already been convicted of something. For every match, a person had to sign off on it. People were furious.

It was easy enough to call the difference culture. I think I wrote that in a report. And then of course, moved on. It just never felt like enough. Culture can be handy for explaining everything, which is probably why it bothered me. That difference stuck in my head — the way a splinter does, once you’ve stopped noticing it’s there.

Half dozen years ago, I taught a course called Ethnography and Wicked Problems. It went smashingly well. The students took the problems seriously. They examined wicked problems in the local context around the university like housing, climate change, and food deserts. They created some actionable solutions that were more than thought experiments. And the course got a teaching award, which is the university’s way of telling you that you did the thing correctly. But I never taught it again. Looking back, I still can’t tell you exactly why.

A few weeks ago, I read something that made these things feel connected. I don’t actually remember who wrote it. Probably not what the author was hoping for. It argued that “problems” are situations we expect to resolve. They have solutions. “Tensions” are different. They don’t resolve so much as move back and forth between different social forces.

I paused on the section a little longer than necessary. A kind of a “huh.” Not because I agreed with it but my mind started to wandered off to those conference rooms with the stale cookies and bad coffee. Apparently, my mind keeps an office there. Nobody in those meetings really expected issues around privacy and security to get solved. At least not permanently. We talked as if we were solving them. Every meeting ended with a decision. Every decision mattered in what people would do. Then, another meeting was already on the calendar.

Then I thought about Hangzhou and Oregon. For years I’d thought the interesting question was why people in two places reacted so differently to the same technology. I’d even convinced myself I knew roughly knew the answer. Reading that article, I realized I no longer believed my own question. I wasn’t so sure the technology had ever been the thing I was actually studying.

Embarrassingly late, I thought about the title of that course: Ethnography and Wicked Problems. It had sounded perfectly sensible at the time. Timely, even. I don’t remember ever questioning the noun. Not when I designed the course. Not while I taught it. Not even for years afterward.

Once that distinction got into my head, old scenes started looking different. The first memory to come back was the tennis ball, mid-squeeze. Nobody in those meetings expected privacy and security to be settled. Every decision mattered at the time but nobody expected the meetings to end.

The privacy meetings made sense to me first and then I thought about Hangzhou and Oregon. For years I’d thought the interesting question was: why people in two places reacted so differently to the same technology? I’d even convinced myself and a company that I knew the answer. Reading that article, I realized I’d been asking the wrong question.

Which brought me to the course: Ethnography and Wicked Problems. I never questioned the title for the course. Problem simply seemed like the natural place to begin.

Now I’ve began noticing the word problem everywhere. A friend, who is a UX researcher, was trying to solving for onboarding friction. At a Santa Fe city council meeting, someone referred to the affordable housing problem. The next ten minutes were spent explaining why there wouldn’t be a solution anytime soon. A consultant’s strategy workshop included a slide with a photo of a knot labeled The Problem. A few slides later, the knot was just gone.

The knot struck me as interesting. Somebody had to take the photo. Then somebody had to decide it belonged on a slide called The Problem. And that the problem should be the first content slide. All of that happened before anyone had said anything. By the time the first slide appeared, the situation already had a name. And when the second slide appeared, it had a solution.

By the time anyone has started talking, the situation was already a problem. I thought back to the privacy meetings and realized nobody had ever needed to say “Maybe this isn’t a problem.” We’d already decided that’s what it was, without anyone saying so. Calling something a problem doesn’t simply describe the situation. It shapes not only what we do next, but what we can imagine doing at all.

This week I was working with AI. I was trying to figure out how to have a conversation I wasn’t sure how to have with the plaster contractor. I pasted in an email exchange with them in. I hit Enter, and back came options. A plan. Steps. Priorities.

Yeah, no surprise here. It’s what we expect AI to do. We ask it to help solve things.

What did surprise me was a thing that didn’t happened. Neither of us stopped to ask whether this was the kind of situation that wanted a solution. I’d apparently answered that before I finished typing. AI simply got to work on it.

That’s when I realized I was seeing the same cultural habit again. The privacy meetings. The course title. The consultant’s slide. Software. By the time any of us started thinking about what to do, we’d already agreed what kind of situation we were in. It was a problem.

Calling something a problem doesn’t simply point us toward solutions. It also determines who can be part of the conversation and which kinds of expertise become relevant. Engineers. Consultants. Product managers. Therapists. Policy analysts.

And now AI. We’ve built AI systems inside institutions that increasingly understand intelligence as the capacity to solve problems. AI didn’t invent that cultural orientation. It inherited it.vOnce the situation becomes a problem, an entire culture already knows how to proceed.

Lately, I’ve started noticing how early situations get set. Somewhere in the first few minutes, someone says, “So, the problem is...” Friday I have a meeting with some former colleagues. I don’t remember exactly what is about. I would bet somewhere near the beginning of it, someone is going to say, “So, the problem is —”

I’ll still reach for a pen. I just have a feeling I might start taking different notes.

I wonder whether we’ve become so accustomed to beginning with “So, the problem is...” that we don’t even notice we’re making a choice.