THE EFFECTIVE PROBLEMSOLVER #108
There’s a phrase in tennis that I’ve been thinking about lately:
The unforced error.
It’s not when your opponent smashes a perfect shot down the line. It’s not when the wind pushes the ball just out.
It’s when you had every chance to make the play, and you hit the ball straight into the net.
Nobody made you do it.
You did it to yourself.
That image—hitting into the net—feels like an underused but deeply important way of understanding mistakes in problem solving, whether at the personal, organizational, or community level.
The Costco Diet
Think about trying to lose weight.
You set a goal: fewer calories, more exercise, a healthier you.
Then you walk into Costco and load your cart with giant boxes of chips and cookies because the deal is just too good to pass up.
On paper, you have a clear goal.
In practice, your own choices set you back. That’s not bad luck. It’s not because healthy eating is hard.
It’s because you hit the ball into the net.
We all do this.
I’ve done it more times than I can count.
The point isn’t to feel ashamed about it.
It’s to name the dynamic clearly:
my actions undercut my goals.
The Boss Who Wants Balance
Organizations hit into the net, too.
I once worked with a manager who constantly said she wanted employees to have better work-life balance.
She meant it, I think.
But night after night she sent “urgent” messages at 10 p.m. and expected prompt responses.
She said one thing but built a system of behavior that delivered the opposite.
Again, this isn’t about external conditions.
It wasn’t the economy or politics or bad luck.
It was her own actions contradicting her stated intent.
A clean shot into the net.
The City That Stalled Its Own Housing
Communities do the same thing.
In my city, the council invested heavily in redeveloping a former industrial site into more than a thousand units of new and affordable housing.
It was exactly the right move for a city struggling with high rents: increase supply, broaden options, bring costs down.
And then, not long after, the same council passed a rent control ordinance.
Builders suddenly couldn’t secure 30-year financing for half the new units. Construction stopped. Years later, the land still sits partly undeveloped.
You can almost hear the thwack of the ball into the net.
Why This Matters
Unforced errors are painful because they’re avoidable.
They’re not the result of tough competition or external barriers.
They come from misalignment between goals and actions—our own goals and our own actions.
Some people call this being shortsighted. Others call it stupidity, or failing to see second-order consequences, or ignoring that your actions exist within a system.
Whatever we call it, the effect is the same: we sabotage ourselves.
And yet, what we usually do is look for excuses.
We blame circumstances, conditions, “the other side,” or the fact that the world is messy.
Those things are true, but they don’t explain hitting the ball into the net.
Owning the Net
The discipline here is honesty.
When you hit into the net, own it.
Say: that was me, not the wind, not the opponent.
Because once you can see the pattern clearly, you can correct it.
You can check your next Costco cart against your real health goals. You can decide whether sending that late-night email really serves your leadership intent. You can ask whether a new policy builds on your past commitments or undermines them.
And we actually have tools for this. Here are three I’ve written about before:
- Problem Mapping – If you want to see the gap between goals and actions, start by mapping the problem. In The Simple Guide to Problem Mapping (only 4 steps), I laid out how to connect causes and effects in a way that makes missteps visible. Often the net shows up right there on the map.
- Fundamental Objectives Hierarchy – In 5 Steps to Your First Problem Roadmap, I showed how to build a hierarchy of objectives so you can trace every action back to the bigger goal. Without this, it’s easy to take an action that looks good in the moment but runs straight into the net.
- Mastering Emotions – Sometimes we sabotage ourselves not because we lack tools or clarity, but because we haven’t mastered our own emotions. In How to Escape Quicksand When You’re Mad As Hell, I wrote about how anger, frustration, and urgency push us to make rash moves that directly undermine our own intent.
This isn’t about perfection.
Everyone hits into the net sometimes.
But the fewer unforced errors we make, the more energy we can put into dealing with the actual challenges in front of us—the shots coming from the other side of the court.
And that, in the end, is where the real game is played.
See you in two weeks,
-Bryan
