In the 1960s, a Stanford professor named Walter Mischel began an experiment by bringing children into a private room, sitting them down in a chair, and placing a marshmallow on the table in front of them. At this point, the researcher offered a deal to the child.The researcher told the child that he was going to leave the room and that if the child did not eat the marshmallow while he was away, then they would be rewarded with a second marshmallow. However, if the child decided to eat the first one before the researcher came back, then they would not get a second marshmallow. So the choice was simple: one treat right now or two treats later.

Published in 1972, this popular study became known as The Marshmallow Experiment, but it wasn't the treat that made it famous. The interesting part came years later.As the years rolled on and the children grew up, the researchers conducted follow up studies and tracked each child's progress in a number of areas. The children who were willing to delay gratification and waited to receive the second marshmallow ended up having higher SAT scores, lower levels of substance abuse, lower likelihood of obesity, better responses to stress, better social skills as reported by their parents, and generally better scores in a range of other life measures

Today the patience for delayed gratification is significantly tested with almost everything around us turning instant. My daily process to make coffee is 20 minutes and its extremely satisfying, but you can make this in two and its extremely tempting especially given the race against time. The primary question is why should we look at the long term solutions to todays problems in a world where tweets defeats thesis.

Correlation Between Length and Depth - In problem solving the time you have to solve a problem determines the depth to which you can go to find insights. I was given an urgent problem to solve in 2019 on Succession planning in a team and my stakeholder wanted this to be solved immediately. While looking for solutions I chanced upon meeting minutes from 2017 and it had the same problem of secession planning listed as something that needed to be solved immediately. Sometimes the drive to solve things immediately makes us to hallucinate the solution rather than visioning it. A systemic talent management could manifest itself as 'we don't have sufficient leadership succession' but the solution needs to address the root cause and not superficial and for this we need a vision and it might take time.

Obliquity Vs End Goal - Fix succession planning = find sufficient leadership successors=final goal. But we don't fix the issue by just solving end state, this is where the concept of obliquity becomes important. Obliquity describes the process in which complex objectives are typically best reached indirectly. Complexity typically is not easily defined and the environment is uncertain. This is why oblique practices tend to move backwards at first but end up being the fastest route. In this example solving issues such as how is our talent density, who do talent come into the organization, when do they get developed, how much risk we take with talent in the early stages of development are all part of solving this problem. All of these measures came into light when we started asking the question what must be true for us to be successful in 2025 rather than end of this year.

The direct and immediate approach to solving a problem would be the most efficient if we perfectly understood the problem we’re solving, the path forward and how others will react to this path. In a more realistic scenario for most problems we have imperfect information and the solution is found through adaptation and iteration.