It is often (usually?) much more difficult to correctly identify coordination problems (due to the lurking danger of unknown unknowns, un-perceived strategic/game-theoretic considerations, insufficient domain knowledge, etc.) than it is to correctly identify simpler (or “object-level” or “technical” or “immediate” etc.) problems.
When attempting to solve such “non-coordination-problems”, it is often easy to get immediate, clear feedback on your attempted solution; whereas, when attempting to solve coordination problems, clear feedback on your attempted solution is hard to come by, may be obscured by a variety of factors, and may come in with a great delay (which itself is an obscuring factor).
(These two problems, of course, leads to the sort of situation described by this Russian saying: “It is very difficult to find a black cat in a dark room—especially if the cat is not there.” In the most pernicious such cases, you may end up contributing to the very problem you were trying to solve—while all the while thinking that your efforts are absolutely critical to preventing things from getting far worse!)
This is an excellent point.
To the list of “but”s, I would add:
It is often (usually?) much more difficult to correctly identify coordination problems (due to the lurking danger of unknown unknowns, un-perceived strategic/game-theoretic considerations, insufficient domain knowledge, etc.) than it is to correctly identify simpler (or “object-level” or “technical” or “immediate” etc.) problems.
When attempting to solve such “non-coordination-problems”, it is often easy to get immediate, clear feedback on your attempted solution; whereas, when attempting to solve coordination problems, clear feedback on your attempted solution is hard to come by, may be obscured by a variety of factors, and may come in with a great delay (which itself is an obscuring factor).
(These two problems, of course, leads to the sort of situation described by this Russian saying: “It is very difficult to find a black cat in a dark room—especially if the cat is not there.” In the most pernicious such cases, you may end up contributing to the very problem you were trying to solve—while all the while thinking that your efforts are absolutely critical to preventing things from getting far worse!)