Sign in Subscribe
5 min read 37

UofWinds 420, Week 37 2025: The Blanket Exercise, When facing a complicated problem, don't try to solve it, try to understand it, The strategy is enquiry


Good morning. I am in the study, writing from the sofa with a coffee beside me. Thanks to the magic of a newly acquired subscription to a VPN service, I am catching up on episodes of Night Tracks from BBC 3. While I expect my son to wake up shortly to watch this morning's offerings of English Premiere League soccer, I don't expect my daughter to be up any time soon.

That is because yesterday a considerable subset of her fellow high school classmates gathered on the school grounds at 6am so they could collectively watch the sunrise together, with friends on blankets. I have no idea if Senior Sunrise is a thing elsewhere but I very much hope it is.

The Blanket Exercise


Last Friday, I was a volunteer for an activity that the law school, where I am employed as a librarian, runs for its first year students. We casually refer to the activity as The Blanket Exercise, although its proper name is The Kairos Blanket Exercise, to give credit to the organization that developed it. The event's description is kept at a minimum so that students should have little preconceptions of what the activity will entail.

The Blanket exercise is a 1 to 2 hour activity that requires participants to stand on blankets that represent the land of Indigenous people, pre-Contact. During the course of the exercise, the history of Indigenous people's interaction with the nation of Canada is told and as this occurs, blankets are removed from the floor. The exercise is well-designed; it encourages some discomfort but not at the expense of harm.

I helped facilitate a debriefing group after the exercise, and I want to share something that was widely shared in my group. The students recognized and reiterated that the physical experience of participating in an abstracted re-enactment of a history over two hours was fundamentally different than reading a historical timeline that lays out years and events as a matter of facts.

Of note, there are no "solutions" explored or sought out in The Blanket Exercise.

When facing a complicated problem, don't try to solve it, try to understand it


I recently read an insightful personal essay called, When facing a complicated problem, don't try to solve it, try to understand it. It begins with this quotation, which I'm including because it rhymes quite nicely with The Blanket Exercise.

Every problem cries in its own language
Go like a blood hound where the truth has trampled
—Tomas Tranströmer, “About History”

That being said, I think this quotation was an odd opener for this essay because it is less about the problems of truth and history and more about learning how to design a garden.

Skimming course literature and gardening books to get a sense for the field, Johanna learned about the more obvious things that can go wrong, like planting flowers that need a lot of sun in the shade, or making the garden too high-maintenance for your time budget. But when it came to figuring out how to make a garden look exceptionally right, there wasn’t much to be learned from the handbooks. The books would present tools and techniques you could use (pointing out, for instance, that it is good to work with contrast), but these techniques were used by both ok designers and great ones; the difference was that the great designers always seemed to pick precisely the right kind of contrast in the right place and the ok ones didn’t. And the question was, how do you do that? What did the great designers see that the good ones didn’t? And how can you learn to see it too?

It turns out that the approach that is prescribed in this work applies to both garden design and historical research: When faced with a difficult problem, don’t try to solve it. Instead, make sure you understand it. If you understand it properly, the solution will be obvious.

I think this framing that should be more widely understood and shared, so I wrote a blog post about it called, We go to school to better understand problems. It contains this passage:

The university is an institution that is made up of many disciplines that employ their own approaches to understanding problems. We go to school to learn these approaches; we don’t go to learn answers. One does not go to art school to find answers, but approaches to constraints. One takes courses in [the humanities] to learn and apply theory. The social sciences and the sciences have their own research methods.
I don’t know why this particular understanding is not more widely shared as the raison d’etre for going to or supporting higher education: you go to school to better understand problems. Instead, you are more likely to hear someone say that university is a place where you learn how to learn. I think this [is] a poor choice of words because it suggests that those who don’t attend higher education don’t have their own ways of knowing.

The strategy is enquiry


And here's a third thing that delighted me, which is a weird thing to say about a piece of writing on the topic of government strategy. But hear me out. It begins

I have a long-standing grumble about the way most government strategies are written and presented.

The typical model is this: a government strategy is a long document, published then rarely touched again, full of promises to deliver specific things, years after publication date. Strategies are littered with the telling two-word phrase: “We will”. It’s always the same, chock full of promises: we WILL do this. We WILL do that.

The thing is: often, we WON’T. Yes, even if the strategy says we will! I know! Even then, quite often: we won’t.

Author Giles Turnbull presents four strategies that he believes should be adopted instead. My favourite is his first one:

Stop promising what you’ll deliver, start promising what you’ll discover

Set out the context of the current circumstances, and immediately set out what you don’t know enough about. Promise to learn more about those things. Sure, speculate on what learning new things might mean in terms of delivery:

“If we find discovery x, we’d have excellent evidence that delivery y will work. But first we have to understand whether discovery x even exists.”

… but don’t make lists of deliverables the core of the strategy. Instead, make lists of good outcomes you want to bring about; then put some effort into documenting your progress towards them.

If your work is focused on testing and learning, find ways to show what you’re testing, and show what you’re learning. In your strategy, make promises that you’ll do this.

I think there is so much good that could come about from such an approach.

Member discussion