LinkedIn didn’t literally destroy publishing, but bear with me.
Imagine the software engineer who discovers a critical security vulnerability but doesn’t tell anyone because he doesn’t know how to patch it.
Imagine the epidemiologist who notices a rise in teen suicides but keeps quiet because he doesn’t know the cause or the solution.
No competent organization would tolerate that.
Recognizing a problem and finding a solution are often different skills, but we often treat the first part as if it’s just negative, grumpy talk.
Warnings are valuable because they recruit other minds to the problem.
Bill Withers sang, “Lean on me when you’re not strong, and I’ll be your friend.” A time’s coming when I’ll have a problem you can help me with, and vice versa. We all need somebody to lean on.
LinkedIn says, “Here’s five bullet points to solve a problem you didn’t know you had.”
The LinkedIn mindset might be called solutionism. “Don’t bring me a problem unless you have a solution.”
You can see that mindset in the articles that get promoted by the algorithm and in the comment section.
“Okay, but what am I going to do about it?” If there’s no answer to that question, then why are you bothering me with this negativity?
That attitude has dominated publishing — especially what we see on LinkedIn and at industry conferences. Every talk and every article has to have takeaways and action items. If there’s no “what to do now” section, it’s not worth your time.
This is a self-destructive mindset.
Think of how it’s affected publishing. Alarms about fraud in online ads, the danger of making content “free,” Google’s monopoly power, the misaligned incentives of the platforms, and now, of course, AI, have often fallen on deaf ears because we suffer from an addiction to optimism and solutionism.
Highlighting a problem other people aren’t seeing is a valuable contribution.
I’m reminded of the comments I’ve heard from publishing conference attendees over the years. They often say the most valuable part isn’t the talks. It’s the conversations in the hallway. It’s the Q&A. It’s the chance to share a problem and get your colleagues to help with the solution.
My friends at Renewd do the same with their executive retreats. People come with problems and they work on them together.
“I’ve got this problem.”
“We ran into that last year.”
“You need to talk to Joe at Acme Publishing.”
We shouldn’t expect the first person to have all the answers. Simply identifying the problem recruits people with different experiences, different perspectives, and different potential solutions.
Publishing is not the same thing as journalism, but think for a minute about the job of a journalist. Journalists often expose problems long before anyone knows how to solve them. Their job isn’t to provide answers; it’s to make the dark clouds impossible to ignore.
Publishers aren’t the only ones who don’t like problems without solutions. It’s a common mistake that many people make, and I suppose that’s why the algorithms prefer the happy talk with solutions over the grumpy talk about problems. Solutionism is everywhere.
We have to push against that.
Now – falling for the trap myself – I’ll end with some solutions.
- Reward people who discover problems, not just people who solve them.
- Ask “What are we missing?” as often as “What should we do?”
- Build a culture where it’s acceptable to say, “Something doesn’t feel right,” even if nobody knows why.
- Don’t insist that every conference presentation have five takeaways to solve the problem.
It’s okay to say, “There’s something wrong here, and I don’t know what it is or how to fix it.”
That isn’t negativity. It’s an invitation to solve a problem.
We all need somebody to lean on.
