Complex problems — the kind that feel overwhelming, that have many parts, that seem impossible to make progress on — rarely need more intelligence to solve. They usually need better structure. The reason they feel overwhelming is that our brains try to hold the entire problem in working memory at once, which is cognitively impossible for genuinely complex situations. The solution is decomposition: breaking the large problem into a set of smaller questions that can each be answered individually. A technique called issue trees does this formally: you take the central problem and ask what are the key sub-questions that, if answered, would resolve this problem? Then you take each sub-question and break it further. Keep breaking until you reach questions small enough to actually answer. Once you have a structured set of answerable questions, you can prioritise — which questions matter most, which ones block the others, which ones you already know the answer to. You cannot solve a broken education system, but you can answer: what specific outcomes are currently underperforming, in which schools or communities, and what interventions have shown evidence of working at scale in comparable contexts? These are answerable questions. Their answers, combined, build toward a solution to the larger problem.