Patrick McKendry

TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew has been given two bad options. On one hand, he can manage the sale and divestiture of the app from its Chinese parent company, ByteDance. On the other hand, U.S. lawmakers have threatened to ban the app if a sale does not happen. After a five-hour hearing with the U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce this week, neither Zi Chew nor Congress seemed willing to budge.¹

In brief, U.S. lawmakers have expressed bi-partisan concern around the legal capacity the Chinese government has to force cooperation on a range of security activities among private companies under its jurisdiction. Specifically, the U.S. has highlighted security concerns over the potential for data capture and content control by the Chinese government via TikTok as an extension of the Chinese based ByteDance.² At the hearing, Zi Chew adamantly opposed the hypothetical, citing lack of evidence. He also pointed to transparency initiatives, such as storing all U.S. data for TikTok on servers owned and maintained by Oracle, to highlight both his willingness to work with lawmakers on solutions and just how separate his company is from ByteDance.²Each side has a solution that they feel will work.

However, that is the exact issue. Congress and Zi Chew each have a solution to promote, but the two sides have not aligned on what, specifically, is the problem to be solved. This is a fairly common situation in business. Teams and their stakeholders often take a “solutions-oriented approach” where they start the conversation by jumping to what they each want to get as an outcome. Instead, I consistently find it better to have a “problem-oriented approach” where the conversation starts by first mutually defining the problem at hand. A problem-oriented approach is effective because it does a better job of increasing the context around a situation, but it is also harder to deliver because it often requires us to work through larger entangled issues. We’ll cover these approaches here and why the problem with TikTok is not really about TikTok after all.

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Be problem oriented - Solving for Context

Identifying Problems

I distinctly remember my very first management assignment. One of my most used phrases was “Give me solutions, not problems.” It was intended to develop a sense of ownership in a junior team, which I still think is important but now use other tactics to teach.

The phrase I find myself repeating now comes from a former manager - “The only problems we can’t solve are the ones we don’t talk about.” It rings akin to “See something, say something” and really focuses on the importance of bringing problems forward. This reduces the burden of speaking up, making it acceptable to not know what the right answer should be. Still, it sets an expectation of responsibility to address issues and concerns.

As a manager, note that your response to problems brought forward will be a key driver of whether or not your team feels rewarded for speaking up. Gratitude for highlighting the issue is a great start, but be careful to not then dump sole responsibility of finding a solution on to them. Also, when you first start practicing this you may be surprised at just how many problems come forward. It is natural to feel frustrated by the amount of hidden problems the team has had. That frustration can easily ricochet and leave your team feeling like they ought not have said anything. Be careful and intentional with your responses.

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Identifying Solutions

If your team is engaged you should soon expect that they will offer some form of a solution in addition to the problem. You want to train the team to get to a point where they are able to provide a solution or next step as an extension to the problem they identified. However, no one’s solution should be accepted until everyone has agreed on the problem at hand. This should be intuitive, but too often teams jump to solutions before they have clearly defined the problem. Starting with the problem gives you the opportunity to first ensure that you are getting to the root cause. Then you can use or iterate on their solution as it makes sense.

Often when someone brings a solution as the first step, it is wrong. Problems tend to be complicated and often result from a number of intertwined causes. In most cases, no one has the full picture. No one is as close to a project’s implementation as our team, but leaders tend to have broader context beyond the immediate scope. When leaders bring solutions in isolation, they miss the mark on implementation details. When teams bring solutions in isolation, they fail to tie-in to broader organizational initiatives. However, when both groups first align on the core problem they can fill in the missing context that each side has.

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What Does This Actually Look Like

All of us have been in the situation at some point where a senior leader has reached out with a request or recommendation that left us scratching our heads. For example, perhaps they ask us to launch a new marketing channel to reach a particular market segment where sales are lagging for the quarter. Our team might be confused because we know that standing up the new channel contracts will take too long for results to be realized against this quarter’s targets. If we do not define the problem, everyone ends up confused.

The action I would recommend is simple, but often not followed. When something does not make sense, ask questions. By asking clarifying questions, groups are able to describe their individual contexts. This can help identify whether the solution proposed was even pointed at the right problem. People often get nervous about pushing back against leadership and their strategy. But remember, we are all on the same side of the table with the same goal of making the organization successful. In the best case, we arrive at a better project strategy. In the worst case, we learn additional context from leadership.

Imagine the senior leader's proposal came across again. Here are a few questions that could help to align on the root problem:

“Our normal turnaround time on a channel launch is 2 months. Is our hope to diversify and get ahead for next quarter?”
“We have a few other tactics closer to launch to drive volume for this segment. Do we think that this will be more impactful than those tactics?”
“We think the problem we’re trying to solve is short-term sales on this segment. Is that right? And are there secondary considerations we should be accounting for?”

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The Problem with TikTok - Solving for Entanglement

At this week’s U.S. House Committee hearing, representatives appeared more interested in political grandstanding than solving problems. Committee members focused on highlighting their support either for an extreme solution - banning the app if it were not sold to new ownership separate from ByteDance - or against an extreme solution for fear of how it might influence the party’s standing with voters.³ Zi Chew was similarly at fault. Prior to the hearing, TikTok has been extremely open about its willingness for transparency. The Project Texas initiative to host all U.S. user data on Oracle-controlled servers in the U.S. was already known to the Committee - its name even became a point of questioning during the hearing.⁴ It should have been apparent to Zi Chew, that the project had not been sufficient to dissuade lawmakers from a potential ban; else, the hearing would not have been needed. Further, the CEO’s responses to many questions were largely categorized as incomplete and he was criticized by Committee members for dancing around questions.⁴ Ultimately, neither side seemed to make any in-roads with the other. This is a typical outcome in a solutions-oriented approach. Each party already had its own context and what it believed was the best option. New context was not gathered because neither side was looking to round out its understanding.

With TikTok, we actually have a great example of why problems are such a problem! The second reason people tend to avoid being problem-oriented is that it is often more difficult. Problems tend to come from multiple factors converging and getting entangled in a single knot. Fully solving the problem requires working out the knot and solving for each of the factors. This takes a significant amount of work and usually requires difficult decisions. We want to instead believe that a “silver bullet” solution can help us to move forward.

So, what is the problem with TikTok? Despite the overview headlines, the root problem is not fully a factor of U.S. consumer products being provided by a company with connections to China. China is, after all, the primary trade partner of the U.S. and regularly a top importer of goods to the country.⁵ The root problem is also not limiting China’s accessibility to the data that TikTok has on users. Zi Chew’s Project Texas offered control and audit practices for user data that the Committee largely rejected.⁷

The root problem with TikTok is, more or less, not about TikTok at all. The entangled problem is that social media companies like TikTok are able to collect and store a tremendous amount of detail about consumers in order to provide their services. For TikTok, the U.S. administration would be far less - if at all - concerned were TikTok capturing little to no consumer data. But, they do collect this information - just like everyone else. A 2020 independent security review found that TikTok collected roughly as much data as Facebook, which is not necessarily encouraging.⁸

This is where a problem-oriented approach becomes difficult. The U.S. is many years behind its European counterparts in enacting legislation, such as GDPR, to protect consumer digital data. Implementing those regulations is no small task. Similarly, content moderation on social media consistently raises questions around First Amendment rights and who should decide what is and is not acceptable.⁹ Further, to address the data collection practices of TikTok, officials would need to pursue Meta, Google, and similar tech providers as well. That project would risk further slowing down an already struggling digital economy. This would inevitably hurt the country’s GDP as digital is estimated to make up roughly 9% of GDP and account for nearly 6% of jobs.¹⁰ All while trying to manage a soft landing as the Federal Reserve raises interest rates to slow inflation. And that is without considering that China ranks #2 in the world behind the U.S. for digital market value.¹¹ Solving the root problem does not actually look so good for either TikTok or for the U.S House Committee.

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Moving Towards Problems

Teaching your team to become problem-oriented is not a complicated shift. It does require establishing some important underlying principles. There are three primary things to instill:

Psychological Safety - I’ve written before about why psychological safety is important to any team. It is a valuable operating principle that teams should seek to instill in every case. For a problem-oriented approach, this is especially important as teams need to feel comfortable raising concerns and stopping work if they feel that the underlying problem has yet to be defined.
Structure and Reps - If you want to start running effective meetings, one of the best things to do is include an agenda for every meeting invite. Similarly, get your teams in the practice of using questions and prompts that support a problem-orientation. For brainstorming meetings, make sure the agenda always starts with “Align on the problem”. Teach the team to evaluate all intake requests as with “Is this a solution statement or a problem statement?” Finding ways to put structure into the day-to-day will help establish the new practice.
Time and Planning - There is another reason that teams will take a solutions-oriented approach - they fail to plan and do not have enough time to fix the entangled problems. It can be tempting to try and find a silver-bullet solution that can keep problems at bay. In some cases, that solution may seem like the only option because the team did not plan far enough ahead to be able to properly dissect a problem before a looming deadline. As the team gets in the habit of raising concerns, this begins to sort itself out because problems will be raised earlier and when they are not immediate concerns. Getting out ahead of them can help make a problem-orientation easier.

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References

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TikTok and Congress - Becoming Problem-Oriented