The many shades of solutions

The great Peter Senge said something to the effect, “Today’s problems are a result of yesterday’s solutions”. I believe it must be taught, reminded and hammered ad nauseam in all leadership development journeys — from the management classes of an MBA to the rarefied galleries of CXO development.
The irony is that there are more leaders who are trigger-happy in their zeal for offering solutions, however, poorly thought-through they might be. This unabashed exhilaration of being known as an idea factory makes them a believer of the brilliance of each one of these ideas. We must be fearful of them. In a way, we must question the way this folly of equating quality of talent to their ability to shoot from the hip a-solution-a-minute, and take a reflective pause to ascertain how have we come to this brink. There must have been a systemic fault-line that would have allowed things to come to the precipice of mistaking quantity of solutions for the quality of it.
Let’s step back for