Solve the Problems, Not the Facts

The recent HS2 update was somehow both surprising and entirely expected. The cost has risen to somewhere between £87.7 billion and £102.7 billion. Trains once expected to reach 360 km/h will now travel at 320 km/h. And the opening date has slipped by up to six years (assuming this version of the timetable survives long enough to become history).

The Transport Secretary gave a refreshingly honest explanation of the overspend: about one-third came from inflation. Fair enough. None of us can negotiate with the economy.

The other two-thirds?

Underestimated costs, poor delivery and work that simply wasn’t included in the original plan. That breakdown is fascinating because it reveals something much bigger than a railway. It reveals the difference between facts and problems. Humans spend a lot of time trying to solve facts, while quietly ignoring the problems that actually need solving.

Facts

Facts are realities that exist whether we like them or not.

You can work with them, you can design around them and you can plan for them but you don’t solve them.

Examples include:

• People will disagree.
• Priorities will change.
• Projects will uncover things nobody anticipated.
• Forecasts will be wrong, especially the confident ones.
• Every solution creates new work. Buy a bigger fridge and suddenly you’re responsible for filling it.
• Organisations become political whenever resources are limited and opinions aren’t.

None of these are signs that something has gone wrong. They’re simply the conditions of being human. Trying to eliminate them is a bit like trying to remove gravity from architecture.

Problems

Problems are different.

Problems are usually created by how we respond to facts. They’re choices, habits, assumptions and unlike facts, they can be solved.

For example:

• Treating assumptions as though they were evidence.
• Believing the first project plan is the final one.
• Pretending uncertainty disappears once a business case is approved.
• Compressing a complex system into one neat story because it’s easier to present.
• Designing organisations around how we wish people behaved instead of how they actually behave.

These aren’t unavoidable realities. They’re avoidable mistakes and this is where HS2 becomes such an interesting case study. The ground beneath Britain wasn’t the problem. Engineering complexity wasn’t the problem. Changing economic conditions weren’t the problem.

Those were facts.

The problems came when those facts were underestimated, ignored or discovered far too late. Reality always sends the invoice. The only question is whether you pay for it upfront through honest planning or later through delays, redesigns and headlines.

This isn’t just about railways, it’s about businesses, governments, charities, families. It’s about every ambitious project we’ve ever worked on.

The irony is that the more energy we spend trying to eliminate the facts of life, the less energy we have left to solve the problems that actually sit within our control.

Perhaps that’s the real lesson from HS2. Not that big projects are difficult. We already knew that. It’s that progress begins the moment we stop arguing with reality.

So here’s a question worth taking into the weekend:

Which facts in your life are you still trying to solve, when the real problem is simply how you’ve chosen to respond to them?