COMPLAINTS: YOU HAVE TO LOVE THEM!

What’s your frame about complaints? Our culture seems to be built around suppressing or minimizing complaints. Do a google search on “complain quotes.” You’ll find most of them use spiritual or practical means to suppress or minimize them. Manager’s say, “Don’t bring me complaints. Bring me solutions.” Civil servants respond to customer complaints by thinking, “What more do they want?” and “When will they stop complaining?”

I wonder how much human potential has been undeveloped by a frame that de-values complaints. Even the best of cultures, a self-actualizing culture, has a cornucopia of complaints. In “wrote of the paradox that the better the culture, the higher the complaints. 1[i] The nature and quality of complaints change as we move up Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Maslow himself concluded that “Everything…implies that human beings will always complain. Never expect a cessation of complaints.” 2[ii] Complaints are a way of life for humans. We can treat them as opportunities, unwanted intrusions into our otherwise stable and happy reality, or something beneath a highly developed, self-actualizing people such as ourselves.