[Timberwolf]

I spent four years at an organisation rife with this. I found two major routes for getting to work on hard problems.

The first was joining initiatives that were in such utter disarray people were willing to take any risk to get out of the "someone's gonna get fired for this" hole. They were typically rich in hard problems (the chaos was usually caused by failure to address one or more of them) and people liked the idea that someone else was taking on responsibility and becoming the person who was most likely "gonna get fired for this". I was happy taking that risk, considering the payoff in getting to work on interesting problems worth it.

In the absence of disarray, I had to go down the much slower route of finding small things that received so little attention I could just do them; nobody cared about them enough to worry about success or failure, and the time input was small enough nobody got upset about it. Over time the cumulative impact would gain me enough trust to take on something bigger, and assuming that went well things would snowball from there. In this way I "trained" one of my bosses from flipping out at the most minor suggestion to pretty much leaving me alone to get on with what I felt like, on the basis I would usually find things to do that reflected well on him.

Unfortunately I never worked out how to get anywhere with the kind of person who benefited from the hard problems not being solved -essentially those profiting from either the prevalence of bullshit or non-essential things being done as per points 3 and 4 in the article's section on what happens when you do tackle the hard stuff.

I'd also caution in my experience it wasn't useful in advancing my career at the same company - I did see a big benefit in credibility but it was among peers and the people I depended on to "get a VIP pass around bureaucracy". This has been general across organisations in my experience: the career stage benefits only come when I move on and have a load of experience in problem spaces I simply wouldn't have encountered had I kept my head down and merely done my job.