PROBLEM-SOLVING — 1981

Alfred Schoennauer published his book, Problem Finding and Problem Solving (1981). What a great title! Given that, it should be a great book! That’s what I immediately thought. And even though I read it years ago, I was in for a shock when I re-read it this year. The shock came because I began modeling the phenomena of ‘problems.’ So in re-reading the book I realized something incredible—the author actually does not know what a problem is! Nor does he know how to find one or to solve one! Now if you’re thinking,

“Wow! That’s a pretty radical statement. He did not know what a problem was at all? Or how to solve it at all?” Then let me show you how I came to that conclusion.

First of all, how did Schoennauer define a problem? For him, a problem is a performance deviance. It is a “wrong course of action.” And in organizations, he views them as caused by the decisions of managers. As this is how he thinks about problems, his model is a stepwise search for deviations.

“Up to now the problem finder has been engaged in gathering historical data in order to determine the basic causes for performance deviations.” (153). Implications: problems are external things—performance deviations, and they are ‘caused.’ And if you do a historical search you can find the cause. Yet that sounds like searching for symptoms.

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“One of the most effective devices is to ask at each stage of the problem-finding process the simple question, Why? If resources are inadequate—Why? When schedules are inappropriate— Why? The purpose: Find the most basic decision that relates to a clue.” (101) “Why were inappropriate resources provided or allowed? Why did management respond in this way? Why did management make that decision?” (16) ‘Why’ is effective? Six years earlier NLP founders picked up on what Fritz Perls argued, Don’t ask why! It only leads to blaming. It does not help with solving problems.

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“Problem solving embraces a process in which an attempt is made to find a course of action that will erase the significance deviations in performance.” (171) The problem is the course of action that has deviated from being effective. This circular thinking doesn’t pinpoint the problem, it only identifies the external evidence of a problem.

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“Problem solving is concerned with correcting courses of action, or instigating new ones, for those decisions identified as probably inappropriate.” (235) More circular thinking. If a decision led to a successful result, it was appropriate; if it did not, then it was in appropriate.

All of this implies that a problem is an external course of action. And the cause is the manager who made some decision about the course of action. These ideas do not help!

Now because “the manager is ultimately accountable for the performance of his subordinates” it is “decisions that make things happen in the final analysis, and therefore, when things do go wrong, the chances are that decisions are the most significance contributing factor.” (33). “The aim of problem finding is to identify the most basic causes over which the decision maker has discretionary authority to make changes.” (101) “Problem solving is in essence decision making” (16).

Schoennauer was aware that where there are problems, there are internal variables, but he dismissed them by putting them under the category of “other considerations” (p. 200). He labeled them as “extra-organizational forces.” In that way, while thinking is implied everywhere in his book, it is hidden in such words as: consider, assess, decide, attitude, etc. Never once does he even consider the real problem as being in the mind. It is always in what is done (a behavior), in the course of action, in actions which deviate from plans and decisions. For him, it is always “decisions that make things happen.”

Because of this misunderstanding, the entire book is focused on correcting deviations in behavior by making better decisions. And while it does cover all of the areas of concern in an organization, style of leadership, planning, communication, attitude, payment, scheduling, relationships with peers, etc., the problem is always a superficial surface problem—one of what someone does or does not do. It is never viewed deeper than that. He did mention “attitude” frequently, but he never explored the thinking within an attitude. For him, what’s inside of a person is a “black box” and cannot be opened up (136-7). He did ask:

“Did the decision makers reflect a healthy attitude toward change? Toward strategic, long-term planning deliberati ons, toward risk, toward people, and toward authority? (142).

His problem solving in 1981 operated from a false premise, one that could have been easily corrected if only he had asked, “What is a problem?” If he had only examined the word itself, he would have realized it is a nominalization (that is, a verb turned into a noun). You can’t put a ‘problem’ in a wheelbarrow. You can’t weigh it or smell it or handle it. It is not a sensory-based phenomena. Instead, something is being “throw in front” of you as a block or hindrance. That’s the verb. What is being thrown in front of you? And literally? No. So it is actually a metaphor.

Metaphorically, a problem occurs when some mental idea, memory, belief, statement, etc. (the way you are thinking) is thrown in front of your mind and emotions so that you cannot mentally see the path forward and you feel stuck, blocked from moving forward. A problem is only a problem when you have an objective that you want to reach and do not know how or believe that something is interfering. In this pretty straightforward and simple way, we can quickly discern what a problem is—a mental-emotional state of thinking/ feeling blocked. Every problem is inside of someone’s mind. No problem exists ‘out there’ in the world beyond the mind. The solution to any and every problem occurs in the mind. And when you know that, you know where to search. You know your next step is to do a meta probe into the mind of the person.

Now in spite of my critique, there are some good things in the book. I liked his orientation about problem finding “before the fact,” before an external ‘problem’ arises.

“The perspective of problem finding, before the fact, is different from that of problem finding, after the fact. While the initial focus in after-the-fact problem finding is directed to results, the before-the-fact problem-finding focus is on the environment, on decisions, on resources, and on activities, in order to detect elements that in the future may cause unsatisfactory results.” (154)

And yet still there is no awareness in that paragraph about the true essence of a problem as a problem in thinking. About information gathering he did write, “The decision is usually only as effective as the information on which it is based” (139). That should have opened his eyes. He even asked, Is it sufficient, current, and based on the best sources? While that book was a good first attempt at problem-solving, today we can do so much better with the Neuro-Semantic modeling of ‘problems’ and ‘solving.’