When one answer fits everything

A friend in Dubai has one answer this year. The shop is quiet: build an app. The supplier is late: an app would track it. The customers do not come back: an app, with points.

He is not wrong about apps. Plenty of businesses are better for having one. What gives the game away is that the answer arrives before the question has finished.

Every few years something new turns up that genuinely changes things, and for a while it becomes the answer to everything. Before apps it was a website. Before that, a leaflet in the weekend paper. Next year it will be something else, and the people selling it will be just as certain.

When one thing solves every problem, it is worth checking whether I am standing inside a bubble. Sometimes the bubble is private. It is the tool I know, the one I am paid to recommend, the one that keeps me away from the parts of the problem I find dull or uncomfortable. Sometimes the bubble is shared, and a whole city of founders and advisers is carried along by the same conviction at the same time.

Either way, the bubble is restful. It saves the effort of looking closely. The quiet shop might be quiet because the street changed, or the prices crept up, or the man behind the counter stopped smiling. The late supplier might need a phone call and a firmer agreement, not a dashboard.

Change is coming regardless. The new thing will matter a great deal to some of these questions. Knowing which ones means sitting with the details long enough to see them, and that is slower and less exciting than having the answer ready.

That is exactly why the bubble is so comfortable.