A problem’s scope expands to the thinking horizon of who’s solving it

Norman Atashbar
2 min readJan 15, 2025

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I just created this post to coin the phrase 😉 I looked around and I couldn’t find any famous quote about it, so I made it my own.

This is what I mean: When you give someone a problem to solve, what they end up solving hugely depends on their thinking horizon, i.e. what is solvable according to them. Many will assume rigid boundaries they cannot go beyond and address the problem at the surface, but some will refuse to limit their thinking and tackle the root cause.

Photo by Abigail on Unsplash

Here is an example from engineering: Imagine you are running a service with a few reliability issues, caused by technical debt and historical baggage. Tasked to solve this problem, one might address the individual and isolated symptoms, another might suggest refactoring the most common pathways of the code, the next person might suggest simplifying the architecture and remove unreliable dependencies, and yet someone else might suggest that the whole system needs to be re-architected and some of the responsibilities must be moved to a platform service.

Each person suggesting a solution is fully capable of coming up with these options, but they also make assumptions about what can and cannot be solved. They also make assumptions about the time horizon they should address with their solution. It’s not a scientific term, but I would like to call it thinking horizon (covering both space and time horizons). Thinking horizon improves with experience and role power (a senior architect for example has a better chance of justifying large scale changes by connecting the dots), but I have noticed that the individual’s mindset plays a big role here as well. If you refuse to accept the invisible boundaries and start questioning facts, you might find out that the only reason we haven’t done X is because no one thought it is possible.

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