We Fixed the Glitch

I got reminded of Russell Ackoff’s problem treatments this week, and my brain immediately went to Office Space.

You know the scene. The Bobs — those eerily calm consultants brought in to “right-size” Initech — are reviewing the staff. Someone asks about Milton. And one of the Bobs explains, with the serene confidence of a man who has never once questioned his own methodology, that they’ve already handled it.

They fixed the glitch.

See, Milton was laid off years ago, but someone kept paying him due to a payroll error. So the Bobs corrected the error. No more paychecks. Problem solved.

But wait — did anyone actually tell Milton he was fired?

No. They find these things tend to work themselves out.

I laughed the first time I saw this scene. Now, after twenty-some years of coaching, I wince. Not because the Bobs are villains — they’re not. They’re just doing what makes sense from where they’re standing. And that’s exactly the problem.

Ackoff’s Four Problem Treatments

Russell Ackoff, OG systems thinker, identified four ways we can treat problems:

• Absolution: Ignore it and hope it goes away.
• Resolution: Do something “good enough” to reduce the immediate symptoms.
• Solution: Find the best answer available under current constraints.
• Dissolution: Redesign the system so the problem can no longer arise.

I’m going to spend the next few posts unpacking each of these, because I think most organizations drift toward the first two — often without realizing it. Today, let’s talk about absolution. Because the Bobs stumble into it perfectly.

How We End Up Here

Here’s the thing about Milton. By the time the Bobs show up, he’s already a walking systems failure. He’s been relocated to the basement. His desk is gone. His stapler has been confiscated. His job function has evaporated. His complaints go nowhere.

Milton is not the problem.

Milton is what happens when an organization loses visibility into its own humanity.

But the Bobs can’t see that. From their vantage point — spreadsheets, org charts, payroll reports — Milton is a line item. A glitch. An anomaly to be corrected. So they stop the paychecks and assume entropy will handle the rest.

That’s absolution in a nutshell: If we stop looking at it, the system will take care of it for us.

And honestly? Sometimes that works. Sometimes problems really do resolve themselves. The angry customer calms down. The struggling employee finds their footing. The weird tension in the team dissipates after someone moves on.

But absolution isn’t hoping things get better. It’s counting on not having to engage. It’s what happens when we’re overwhelmed, or avoidant, or just plain don’t know what else to do.

The Invisibility Problem

I want to be careful here, because absolution rarely comes from malice. Mostly it comes from not seeing.

Organizations are big. Complex. Full of blind spots. The Bobs aren’t evil — they’re just operating with a very narrow slice of information. From where they sit, Milton really does look like a clerical error. The human reality of a man slowly being erased from relevance? That’s not on their dashboard.

And this is true for most of us, most of the time. We’re not ignoring problems out of cruelty. We’re ignoring them because we genuinely don’t see them, or because we see them and have no idea what to do, or because we’re already juggling twelve other things and this one feels like it might just… settle.

The manager who doesn’t address the struggling team member isn’t necessarily negligent. They might be exhausted. They might be conflict-avoidant. They might be hoping — genuinely, optimistically — that things will get better on their own.

The trouble is: hope isn’t a strategy. And the system keeps accumulating pressure whether we’re watching or not.

The Quiet Accumulation

Here’s how absolution tends to play out:

• Nobody quite owns the problem. It drifts into the gaps between departments, between roles, between “not my job” and “surely someone’s handling that.”
• The language gets fuzzy. “We’re monitoring the situation.” “Let’s wait and see how things develop.” “I think it’s getting better?”
• There’s a quiet hope that time will do the work we’re avoiding.

I coached a team once where a senior developer had been disengaged for months. Everyone could feel it. Nobody said anything. The manager figured the developer would eventually move on. (That’s absolution.) The developer figured if it were really a problem, someone would say something. (Also absolution, from the other direction.)

Six months later, the developer was still there, still checked out, and the whole team was demoralized — not because of the developer, but because they’d watched the situation drift and drift and drift. No villains in this story. Just people who didn’t know how to start the hard conversation, so they didn’t.

That’s the thing about absolution. The immediate cost is low. No conflict, no discomfort, no awkward meetings. But the compound interest is brutal.

(In Milton’s case, that compound interest eventually involves fire. And embezzlement. And a beach in Mexico. But we’ll get there.)

Coming Up: Resolution

Absolution is what happens when we hope problems wander off on their own. But most of us can’t quite commit to that level of magical thinking. We need to feel like we’re doing something.

Enter resolution: the art of taking action without changing anything fundamental.

That’s next time.

This is part one of a four-part series on Ackoff’s problem treatments. Next up: resolution, and why your org keeps having the same all-hands meeting.