matchmaking
A problem that fascinates me (and occasionally infuriates me) is the one of matchmaking: party A needs something that party B can provide, party B wants to provide a service that party A happens to have need of… yet the two cannot find a way to collaborate.
It happens with people looking for personal relationships, and it happens for employers and job seekers. Somehow, a barrier of anxiety (”well, if someone wants to volunteer to help us, they must have something wrong with them, no?”) stands in the way of these otherwise promising matches.
Country A has too much corn, and country B needs corn. Still impossible to work things out.
When I was a grad student at UC Berkeley, we had a saying: “if you can’t increase your cross section, increase your flux.” Translated, that means if you are having a low success rate, do something more frequently.
Eventually, theoretically, maybe, it will pay off with the sensible match being made. Even if the hiring/meeting systems are mostly, almost entirely broken, things sometimes work.