When a problem obviously exists, but clarity to articulate it is lacking, no amount of effort in solving the problem will produce a solution. It only produces more unclarity.

But this does not stop us. We create tons of alternative clarity to distract us. We execute clearly defined processes in clearly defined plans. We produce clearly defined documents. We follow clearly defined best practices. We define objectives, key performance indicators, metrics, scorecards and track to those rather than think about whether the problem (whatever it is) is actually resolved or just ignored.

Anything to avoid struggling honestly with an undefined, unarticulated, yet clearly existent problem. This kind of struggle is philosophy, and very few people care to deal with it, even so far as to admit it is ever valuable, or even necessary.

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Wittgenstein: “A philosophical problem has the form: ‘I don’t know my way about.'”

Philosophy’s response to such situations is to learn — and not learn particular facts, but rather to learn to make sense of the facts that exist, because the problem is not incomplete facts, but how we are attempting to make sense of those facts.

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If you think about it, philosophy and innovation have a lot in common. They’re both about new and unfamiliar ground — about seeing things in a new way.

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Occasionally a charitable soul tries to scrounges for something good to say about philosophy, and says “philosophy teaches people how to think clearly” as if it is like logical QA for ideas. But that is an unphilosophical misunderstanding.

Philosophy, when it is actually philosophy, teaches us how to think about things we don’t yet know how to think about. But understanding what “thinking about things we don’t yet know how to think about” means itself requires philosophical understanding. It presupposes a level of insight into how thinking is done, and how thinking participates in our perceptions of the world and our experience of life.

So maybe it would be better just to say: when something’s going seriously wrong but in a way you can’t quite pin down, and nobody can communicate to anyone else without causing unaccountably intense distress, and everyone wants to follow a different course of action for different reasons, but nobody can agree on which reasons are most relevant — hire a philosopher, even if you don’t know what the hell he could possibly do about any of it.