THE META PROBE FOR PROBLEM-SOLVING

What you have to know, and not only ‘know,’ but fully realize at a feeling level, is that all problems occur in someone’s mind. They do not exist ‘out there’ in the world. Of course, this is so counter-intuitive for most people, it takes some time to settle in. Gerald Nadler and Shozo Hibino said this in their 1990 book, Breakthrought Thinking:

“Problems are reflections of states of mind. ... A problem is a condition or set of circumstances that a person thinks should be changed (p. 37).

Here are two phenomena. First, “a condition or a set of circumstances” and second, thinking, what “a person thinks” should be changed or different. What is external are the circumstances ‘out there’ in the world that we want to be different. It is the wanting it to be different that creates for us a problem—a gap between our present state and our longed for desired state. Where is that gap? The gap is in our heads—in our thinking about the external circumstances.

Once you come to terms with this fully and emotionally (somatically, kinesthetically), you develop a deep intuitive sense that problems always and only occur in a human’s mind. The saving grace in this perspective is that it prevents you from getting confused and working on the wrong problem. Yet working on the wrong problem is one of the biggest obstacles to effective problem-solving. How many times have you done that? How many times have I marvelously and wonderfully solved the wrong problem? More often than I like to admit! In the past I have been incredible about solving symptoms (my own and those of others). Those were great bandaides, but sadly, only bandaches which did not address the real problem.

For the real problem we always have to perform a meta probe. We have to take the person inside to his or her Meta Place and to the landmarks of the mind because that is where the problem exists. This is the challenge in the 5-Minute Conversation that lies at the essence of the 5-Minute Manager. To get there you have to learn to cut through all of the noise that covers up and hides the real problem. You will want to keep your eye on the ball—the meaning constructs that give birth to the problem.

How? Think about stepping through the person’s portal into her mental world, the landscape of your mind where she is the author of her constructs and therefore problems and solutions. There you will find her semantic associations, representations that make up the movie she plays in her mind, her house of linguistics by which she constructs concepts and beliefs and all sorts of meaning formulas, and there you will find her assumptive frames for herself, the world, knowledge, and being itself.

All of that describes the Meta Place. And if you know about the Meta Place and the primary Landmarks of the Mind— the thinking processes that create our sense of what’s real (reality). By taking someone inside to these landmarks, you will be able to facilitate the discovery of the real problem and simultaneously, of a legitimate solution. How specifically will this taking-someone-inside work?

∙ Invite the person to engage in a thought experiment. “I want you to imagine yourself in the situation where the problem occurs and this time imagine that the problem has not yet arisen. You are there, what’s occurring? Now for the problem to arise, what has to happen?”

∙ With this thought experiment (or any other), you can then encourage a specific experiential probe: How do you talk to yourself when the problem is not there? How to you talk to yourself when you notice the problem?

∙ You can use a sentence stem and ask the person to complete the sentence with 10 or so different endings. “If I truly and deeply knew that my value was unconditional and nothing could threaten it or take it away ...”

∙ When you come upon a defining metaphor, engage it fully and begin to play with it. “I feel really stuck in this problem...” And being stuck, just how stuck is this? And what are you stuck in? How deep are you stuck in that? What resource do you need to get out of that stuckness?

Because the problem (the real one) is inside, the person with the problem has to go inside. As you invite her on that inward journey, empower her to engage in one of various meta probes so that together you can identify the kind of thinking that has created the problem. The idea of probing also suggests going deeper (or higher) than just the first meta-level. It suggests going to the next meta-level, and the next until you reach the kind of thinking that has created the problem.