IT’S ALL ABOUT YOUR APPROACH

Let’s begin with the presence of a problem. Imagine that you have a problem or someone you know has a problem. The first question is: How do you approach the problem? What are the first things that you think, feel, and/or do? There are a great many answers to this question. Of the following possibilities, which ones do you sometimes use?

∙ Avoid the problem. Turn your head and pretend you see nothing, hear nothing, and feel nothing. For this it is best to access a state of feeling defensive and a complete horror of being identified as the one to blame. Learn to distract, bring up emotionally laden issues, and be ready to fall back to stonewalling if necessary.

∙ Aggressively jump on the problem and try to immediately kill it. As soon as you hear the beginning of the word ‘prob...” you react with a fury and rage as you try to scare it off. Do this repeatedly and most people will not even mention the word problem to you out of fear. In that way, you can cut off all bad news right from the beginning.

∙ Analyze it to death. You get out your legal notepad and begin writing down everything you can about the problem especially things from the past. You make long lists of features, facets, and factors and create multiple intellectual possibilities to explain its existence. Think that the problem can be solved by throwing more and more data and statistics at it.

∙ Psychoanalyze it into a state of boredom. Another approach is to assume that some force in the past caused the problem and like a detective in a mystery story, you are going to find the culprit. You immediately suspect it is the mother, or the father and also that it has something to do with sex.

∙ Form a committee to study it. This seems to be the favorite approach of government agencies, Congress, Business and Educational departments. Form a committee. The larger the committee, the longer and more convoluted and impractical the conclusions. And be sure to write the final report using as many big abstract words as possible.

∙ Throw money at it. This is the approach of organizations and especially governments. If there’s a problem, then if we throw enough money at it, it will get solved. Of course, this mostly is how to waste a lot of money and effort and to create a context enabling those who have eyes for fraud and abuse to take advantage of it.

∙ Look for a quick off-the-rack solution. Think that “surely someone has created a rapid solution that is quick and easy.” Then be ready to jump when you hear about some new slick and amazing product that will solve the problem. Of course, this is the self-defeating framework that plagues most organizations. And they say so, “We want something quick, easy, and that’s not complicated.” That’s a great formula for doing ‘band aide solutions,’ which of course, will not last.

There are among some of the conventional ways, culturally, to address problems. Probably the approach that most people take is the next one:

∙ Treat the problem as a problem—as something bad that you want to make go away. On the surface, this seems logical and makes a lot of sense ‘common’ sense. Since a problem stops you from achieving your goal, it must be a bad thing. Therefore, let’s make haste to get rid of it. How do most people attempt to solve a problem? They look for what’s wrong. They may even make a checklist of all of the things that are wrong. Then they jump in fixing each item. When they finish the checklist, they think they have solved the problem.

Does that sound familiar? When a problem arise, we commonly begin asking, “What’s wrong?” and whatever answer we get, we take it at face value. We assume that by declaring that something is wrong, that’s all that needs to be said and so we then—as rapidly as possible—we jump in to fix things.

What’s wrong with that approach? Lots of things! First is the impatience to hurry up and make the problem disappear. That impatience usually prevents us from listening and from gathering more critical information. Second, we narrowly focus on the immediate, presenting problem without even questioning, “What is the problem behind the problem?” This prevents us from getting a larger-level, system’s perspective about what may be going on that’s not immediately present. Third, as a result we may only be putting a bandaide on the presenting problem and entirely missing the actual problem.

The bottom line is this: How you go about thinking about a problem and how you go about solving it is critical for effective problem-solving. If you react to a problem (rather than consciously and mindfully respond) to it, you have a high probability of working on the wrong problem. And excellent problem-solving of the wrong problem leaves the real problem still unsolved!

Further, life itself is actually a great tapestry of problems and you will never solve the last problem. There will always be a problem after your last solution. In fact, the solution-after-the-last solution will actually be one of the next problems that you’ll face. How is that? It’s because no solution is ever “the final solution.” In fact, every solution sets up the next problem. And that’s because everything changes and is always changing.

By accepting that life is one problem after another and that you are, by nature, a problem-solver, you now know one of the secrets for staying mentally and emotional alive, full of energy and vitality, and living with purpose and direction.