Most of us pride ourselves on our problem-solving skills or lament when we or others fall short of the highly prized proficiency. Whether as a parent, leaders, managers, employees, or leaders of an organization, we dive into defining a problem, looking at options, analyzing possible results, and implementing. Likely a bit of evaluation and course correction. Problem-solving can be very useful but also cause great damage. Another great ableness is judgment and discernment. If we default to problem-solving, we are likely to fail to development and use judgment in all the above cases where humans and other living entities are involved.
How could that be? Problem definition is the prize starting point in every research project, in innovation or behavioral management, and most other processes that we brainstorm or group think (another error we will get to later) for a solution or resolution. It is so common, and it is probably hard to imagine why we are talking about it here.
What is a problem, and why is problem-solving not useful everywhere? A problem is defined as a matter or situation regarded as unwelcome or harmful, needing to be dealt with and overcome, or denoting or relating to people whose behavior causes difficulties to themselves and others. Here it becomes obvious that it always involves the assumption that something is wrong and needs to be fixed. This may be true for a machine but is inappropriate for living systems, including human beings. It applies a mindset appropriate to machines, to life and that is inappropriate.
Problem-solving is appropriate only when there is a non-living, material worldview of existence. And is inappropriately applied to living entities. It means we are treating life as an object, objectifying it as a thing, and imposing our human, anthropocentric worldview from a non-animate perspective, even when it is one of our children, a new worker, or an employee we maddeningly see as repeating the same mistakes. As the external force of ‘good and right,’ we go to work to correct course with feedback, incentives, rewards, or punishments. All of these are sourced from a flawed worldview of thinking when applied to life and only restricted to non-living situations. When living beings are experienced as alive, they can be miraculously re-experienced from a potential perspective.
Problem Thinking
First Error in the problem approach: Problem and Potential are sourced from a different worldview. A Problem Worldview is sourced from a fragment and category view. Fragmented, because each person or entity is perceived as pieces and parts that don't fit into a category and from a standardized behavior paradigm. When our child, for example, is evaluated or judged as being behind in a subject or misbehaving, it is because they are not matching the generic definition of a predefined box. Predefined categories into which everyone must fit. So, if the powers that be, define the age of reading competency as 3rd grade, then those who cannot read by then are in a problem box and need remedial tutoring. In Denmark and Amsterdam, all children speak two languages fluently by about age 10, most by age seven. No child is pointed to as below standard and put in a remedial class. They get there in many different ways and without being called out as a problem.
But in the USA, all kids are rated and ranked by a set of attainment categories. This is repeated with each child, thereby diminished by the very evaluation process. Any teen not meeting standards feels it acutely. They are pointed out and punished by the public posting of grades or ranking. Externally sourced problem-defining is always a push toward a downward slope in self-determination. As are employees in companies where they are ranked as high, low, or medium performers, often publicly. They are a problem.
Second error: With a problem approach, the effort needed always assumes Direct Work is called for. That means an external force decides what is needed and administers the solution. This is a demeaning and non-self-determining epistemology (how we learn and know.) They are always externally and comparatively assessed and never on their own terms. They are then put into a mental box of someone’s designation for problem and solution action where Direct Work is assigned.
Third Error: Working from existence. Existence is what is already manifest and where we then do problem-solving. We are trying to undo or roll back the outcomes of what now exists. But nothing new happens in the manifest. We have to recreate from the not-yet manifest to have a different outcome. E.g., with a different mindset that starts with potential.
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We have two ways of understanding living systems, particularly in humans. Personality or Essence. Experience precedes personality, and personality is formed by interpretations of the experience of life in an environment that shapes us. But Essence precedes existence. It is not shaped by existence. It uniquely comes with us at birth or maybe before birth, as wisdom traditions believe. I cannot speak to that, but Essence is singularly us or other beings, and not learned but ready to be expressed in a way that shapes the world, not the other way around.
Personality is what we try and shape with problem-solving to remove things that don’t fit within preferred categories and do not match the above-average in each category. There are no categories of Essence. Only one of “one’s.” Essence is the only source of potential. The essence of each individual and where there is a lack of expression and capacity.
Potential is the unmanifest of each Essence being. It is not the same as possibilities which tend to be iterations of existence reconfigured. Potential is present in each individuated living being. Potential arises from Essence of each singular being that is living. That is, when we can see and realize that.
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Potential is to be expressed, and we most often need to develop the ableness to do that. Ableness here is of the nature of Indirect work. We can build the capability to see from where we are sourcing our thinking, how well we are managing our behavior toward purposefulness, the quality of our mental energy, and the management of culture and consciousness. These are the opposite of behavioral management by others who seek to change us.
Problem-solving diminishes the ableness to see potential because it looks for categories and not Essence. It wants to reduce the disorder that comes from having things that do not fit in boxes and cannot be organized by type, which nothing alive can. Potential being discovered and realized requires stopping problem-finding and learning to engage Essence thinking every time we meet a living entity; proceed to see and develop Essence expression, and make that path the culture of your family, teaching and innovating.
To move from problem to innovation, and new thinking, we have to access potential, or we only see improvement of existence and problems in the current categories we force things into. To do new thinking, we have to pass through mental imaging and an experience of the Essence of a specific concrete situation, place, or person. You start by letting go of a current conceptualizing and seeing the problems. We turn around 180 degrees. And change worldviews.
Potential as a Source of Innovation: We ask instead, “What is at the heart of what makes it what it is? What is the highest singularity we can see at work? And what does it offer to the larger whole in which it is embedded that nothing else offers? Now, how do we build deeper capability, based on Indirect work, to make that distinctive contribution that nothing else can?