Archive for life problems

The problem of perspectives: learning how to identify what lies beneath

September 23, 2007 / Luke / 3 comments

In the haziness of everyday affairs we often are blinded by perceptions, beliefs and hidden assumptions. I have been thinking lately about how much of my life is a problem and how much of it I make a problem. What do I mean? Well consider for a moment that a lot of things we think are real problems are actually not ‘real’ as such. They exist in our heads informing of us that which ‘troubles’ us. As British academic Professor Peter Checkland puts it: an area of concern is something we find to be problematic. Sounds real obvious hey? Think about it for a minute.

The problem of causality

What I have noticed is that people often fail to recognise the difference between how we can cause something to bother us and how others can interfere. Think for a moment about this scenario. You are driving home on the freeway and suddenly a man swerves in front of you nearly taking you out. You react by slamming on your brakes and quickly lose control of your vehicle smashing into a nearby concrete wall. That is a real problem. You have been effected by somebody else’s poor driving. Same scenariobut somebody looks like they are going to cut you off and you react because of what might happen but never actually does. Your thinking caused you to respond not really the other drivers actions… although they were the trigger. In this latter example you can see that often in problem solving situations the real problem is your perception of what might happen. A problem is therefore a perspective that is the difference between what we expect (our point of view) and what actually happens.

The problem of perceptions

Perceptions are as real as reality itself. One might go so far to say that perceptions are reality. Hold on, I hear you say, what I perceive is actually real? No. That’s not what I mean. I mean this: what you perceive to be real becomes real by virtue of the fact that you have perceived it. When you understand or recognise a problem to you it’s real. The effects of it will be as real as if the wind blew the roof right off your house!

So what’s the real problem?

The real problem often is in your head. That’s right. You think something might happen and on the basis of that ‘reality’ you begin making decisions. I do this myself all the time. Ever thought of avoiding a social event because you might run into so and so and it would be a disaster only to go and find out it wasn’t. This kind of thing can get so intense that you begin seeing the pictures in your mind… day in and day out. You begin to imagine what might happen and sure enough before you know it you are making new plans to navigate around something that is deeply rooted in your mind.

Problems as perspectives

Problems are essentially ways of thinking (perspectives) that reside in our sub-conscious mental structure informing us of reality. You can begin to recognise them by asking yourself questions that expose them (I will talk about how to remove them in a later post). Things like: ‘Do I want to avoid the social event because it will be a disaster or because I am expecting it to be a disaster?’. See, we often build a reality to believe in just so we can make a place for the things we think are a problem.

I am going to end this post with a personal story. Before I started my present job I was warned about a member of staff by people I was hanging around with at the time. The people I was with told me that this person (called ‘Bob’ to protect the innocent) was not to be trusted and would rip me off. So believing what I was told I avoided them like the plague. However, I was assigned to work with Bob and found Bob to be helpful, courteous and nice. When I eventually told Bob what I was warned about… Bob told me she was worried about me because of the people I was hanging around! Essentially none of this was ‘real’ but it made for a ‘reality’ that become so real that two people were made to feel very uncomfortable and acted out of these beliefs. The real problem was the perspectives we had.

In closing today I want to encourage you to begin to look into your own life for limited perspectives. Once you see them… make a note of them and slowly begin to change the way you see things. I will write more on this so why not subscribe to my feed to see what I have in store. Thanks for reading!

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4 ways to find a problem

September 6, 2007 / Luke / No comments

How do we even know we have a problem? Well this post will show you four ways you can know you have a problem.

1. Look for symptoms.

The first thing you need to do to consider carefully the evidence you have before you. What are the facts? Write a list of everything you think the symptoms are and consider them carefully. What is the evidence telling you? Remember problems belong to people and people form the world around them largely in their heads. Evidence can be created and facts manipulated. Look carefully at these things and see if a conclusion can be drawn… does a problem then become evident?

2. Looking for things that concern us

A clever trick our mind plays on us is that it makes us think that problems are somehow separate to our understanding of them. That is, people will use the language of ‘well I have this problem’ or ‘the problem is I have …’. All the while not realising that what bothers them is in their mind. When you take a good hard look for things that bother you then you will begin to see the areas of life that you think are problematic. If you are from the mathematical tradition you will think I why I just said is rubbish. But consider this, you now have found a problem because I am bothering you!

3. What is effecting us?

Another way you can identify a problem is to look for things that you don’t control that are effecting you. For example, say you are out in the rain getting wet… you are in total control of where you stand but you are not in control of the rain. Problems are exactly the same. However, you can recognise that which comes from the outside and that which falls on you simply by thinking… what are the things I am not controlling that are effecting me in this situation. By doing this you can begin to see bigger picture realities. These bigger picture things are often how other people treat you, how your work operates, how the economy operates and political things. You can’t control those things to suit yourself but you can recognize their influence on you and begin to identify the problems you are seeing.

4. Looking for things that are ‘all in your head’

The final way to identify a problemis the issue of their not being a problem. Now, there are things that effect us in the way the world operates as discussed above but there are times when the problem we have is nothing more than a construction of our psyche. In a recent interchange with a person I work with I noticed that they were greatly upset by something I had said in a group email that was not even intended for them. I ended up having to apologise for something that I didn’t even do wrong. Why was this the case? The person who read what I had wrote took issue as if it was directed at them when it was directed as somebody else. They created the problem. Apart from them thinking it was an issue there really was no issue at all.

These kinds of problems are usually related to underlying issues of the mind and emotions. I ended on this point because it’s a really important one… what you think the problem is… the problem is. If you have a tendency towards technical solutions you will look for technical problems. If you are led by your heart then you will gravitate to heart solutions. Ultimately the rest is up to you but that is another post for another day.

There is a podcast associated with this post which you can download for free here. Thanks for reading.

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Why the Sherlock Holmes approach to problem solving is wrong

September 2, 2007 / Luke / 3 comments

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“I say let it be known that I am acting in self-defense!” Sherlock Holmes

One the greatest literary caricatures of the last 100 years is Sherlock Holmes. The image of the pipe bearing detective with an eye for the most indiscriminate detail is burned firmly into the minds and hearts of thousands of people. What I am interested in today is to talk about the reasons why Sherlock Holmes and the majority of western thinking about problem solving is indeed wrong.

Not-so-elementary my dear Watson

Sherlock Holmes often cautioned Watson not to come to a conclusion about a crime until he had the ‘facts’. Watson was framed as the bumbling detective who never really put the pieces of the puzzle together. Holmes, the figure of the rational/logical detective espoused ad nausem in today’s crime shows, always reasoned through available facts, evidence and such things. Watson was always leaping to conclusions that were off the cuff, spontaneous and available. Putting the pieces together in a logical fashion as Holmes did actually is not all to dissimilar to Watson’s approach. Consider for a moment that we all making meaningful gestures at what we think problems are all the time. As we come to understand the situation we are faced with we immediately think of solutions. Chances are that we come to the conclusion that problems we faced have many ‘not-so-elementary’ elements that are not obvious. Conjecturing is one way we can actually tease out the not so obvious and begin to build better solutions.

Reasoning Versus Conjecturing?

These two practices are not mutually exclusive. As a matter of fact they are deeply connected. For a moment think of a problem you have. Tell me what’s the problem? I guess you have either spoken out loud and said ‘the problem is…’. Have you ever watched the news and a story caught your attention enough for you to whine about it? Say it was about the rental crisis. What’s the problem… well I guess you could say the problem is a lack of housing at a cheap enough price. Immediately you have just conjectured what the problem is and now we have available to us certain types of conclusions. Whenever you say… the problem is… you are conjecturing (either based on no or limited ‘evidence’). Getting more information may be important so we can reason but the ideas that underpin our reasoning processes are even more important.

Facts come after we beginning looking for evidence

People often say to me, ‘well this has been my experience.’ I then sit back and wonder why can’t people see that their experience (or the evidence in this case) happened and the facts they have collected are coming from a way of thinking about that experience. Facts are always available. When we conjecture as to what we think the problem is, we begin to look for support for our ideas. NOT the other way round. Human beings are wired up to believe things first then either confirm or deny later. To say that we come to conclusions through reasoning is true to a point BUT the vast majority of our decision making takes place on the back of ideas that have little or no confirmatory evidence. Sherlock Holmes was ridiculing Watson for doing precisely the same thing he was!

Reasoning comes from somewhere

Reasoning comes from a set of underlying ideas. If you think that there is a problem the chances are you may be the only one thinking that it’s so. Contrary to the majority of western thought… the ideas that form the problem take place in the human mind and may not even have support from other people. If you think people are saying nasty things about you… that’s a problem you have conjectured. You will then act on these assumptions, build a new way of defending yourself and even begin treating everyone as a possible threat. Holmes allow the ‘facts’ to speak him as he often said but these facts led to a reasoning process which in turn leads to Holmes conjecturing (taking an educated guess) as to what his problem is. Holmes ‘faith’ was created through the facts which led to certain conclusions as a result. We all do it! It’s not like we are immune to it. It’ s just this false consciousness we create whereby we think that we are being ‘scientific’ but we are not. Things like faith and belief establish the conjecture or set of ideas and we follow through to a conclusion from there.

In concluding this post I would like to add that Sherlock Holmes was right to trust the evidence he found but if you read what he did he used an awful lot of guesswork, theorising, brainstorming and creative thinking. All of which require no so-called ‘evidence’ to lead to conclusions. They are merely ideas that suggest certain kinds of possibilities, concepts that suggest ways of thinking and educated guesses that stimulate the problem solving process. Take a look at your own life and begin to see the conjectures you have floating around in your head. What are you worried about? What makes you fearful? These are nothing more than ideas you have attached your emotions to which in turn creates a new reality for you to believe. Remember, it’ s not the ‘facts’ but where the facts come from that are important.

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How to know there IS a problem

August 29, 2007 / Luke / No comments

In the world filled with problems there is a great divide between stuff that’s a problem and stuff we think might be a problem. What do I mean? Well consider this: the problem of traffic in this fair city of Brisbane is a problem for me because I have to drive into it every morning when I go to work. To say it was a crisis would be a bit dramatic and probably amplify the thing way out of context. Yet in my experience, people do this all the time. So what I am going to do next is outline some ways you can know you really have a problem.

1. Is this problem an immediate concern

If the situation at hand is not solved immediately is there a chance that it can be solved later? If it can be solved later why are you so concerned about solving it right now. Why do you want to fix it and why on earth do you want to waste time and energy when other problems could be better solved now. Most people make something that’s an immediate concern where there is no need to do that. The reasons we do this could be because of: personal preference, political reasons, you think it has to be solved ‘right now’ and stuff like that. If the problem is not immediately a concern there is good chance that you are worried about something that may never occur.

2. Are you making something a problem because you want to see it solved

Consider your own life and the problems you have at the moment… are you creating new problems to solve because you want to. The reasons why you are doing that might be avoidable. In high times of stress humans fall back into crisis mode and make sense of situations differently than they do under normal circumstances. The consequences of what we are doing when we are looking to solve a problem often forms the area of concern itself. We create the concern so we can solve it. Over a period of time we build up an issue in our minds and then plan out ways to solve it as we create it. Why do we do this… it’s part of being human.

3. What is the evidence that has led you to think there is a problem

Evidence can be real (facts) or it can be the stuff in our brain that tells us something is real. Whenever you have come to a conclusion that there is a problem it’s because you have evidence that has lead you to this conclusion. What evidence do you have? Mental evidence… your thoughts? In your thinking process you have created a chain of evidence that links certain types of information together to form a logical conclusion. The conclusions you have reached are well thought out and logical based on rational (or in some cases irrational) thinking. To test this ask yourself what makes you think what you are thinking. The conclusion (problem) was reached through evidence (thoughts) what thoughts make you think there is a problem. Once you have isolated these… write them down and study them. Is it really that serious?

4. If there is a problem is there also a solution

Believing is intrinsic to human affairs. We find a problem it’s usually connected to certain kinds of solutions. When we look at a problem, in our mind is a subtle idea for a solution, that we have been mothering to the point where we are now finding a problem to birth our solutions. In the seventies they called this the garbage can of decision making. A problem can often be identified by overzealous people looking to test a ‘solution’ that is a personal pet project. Don’t be one of these people. As I will discuss in a later post problems and solutions are inexplicably related.

One final question to ask yourself as you look for problems is the question of meaning. What meaning does the problem have? If it’s a problem with a certain degree of importance (i.e. marriage) then you will be blinded by the all too familiar problem of being human. That however, is another post for another day. For now, think… do I really have a problem? Happy problem solving!

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5 ways to think strategically

August 23, 2007 / Luke / 10 comments

Much is made of modern management training in academic circles to which I respond with ha! A lot of the stuff you come across is life cycles this, supply chain that blah blah blah. What troubles me to my guts is that there is not a real lot of quality teaching around thinking strategically. Now, when we hear that term almost always makes you think… oh no not another chess metaphor. Chess is the worst possible metaphor for strategic thinking that I can think of. You know why… because it sucks. Chess is a game with predictable outcomes where if you know all the moves possible you can win. This takes me back to Herbert Simon‘s stupid idea that all we need is more information. What? Now, he’s dead we have all the information we could possibly get our hands on and the world is no better off! In fact, the more information we get the worse things become.

So how can we move to strategic thinking? Here are five ways to think strategically:

1. Look at something from more than one point of view

When you confronted with a problem you can’t solve find another point of view and use it. Go and ask someone who thinks the exact opposite way to the way you do and ask them what they think. This opposite point of view will tease out what’s wrong with your ideas and will help you to think strategically. Alternatively, deliberately think the opposite way to the way you do right now and notice what happens. When I do this it breaks bad thinking habits and usually good answers come.

2. Look for generative mechanisms.

According to Roy Bhaskar‘s view on reality there are things in our social world that generate the events we see. What is generating what you see? Now before you start think about this: what generates the social world is people and their thoughts. Thinking and acting on those thoughts creates the world around us. What thinking generates your thinking? What underlies things? To help you get along here I would suggest thinking about it like this: what are the conditions that created this?

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3. How are things related.

Remember a rule of systems thinking is to understand the whole in favour of the parts. So look at the situation and ask your self how are the different smaller level wholes related to make the bigger level whole. This means not breaking things down to the level of cause and effect… instead it means looking for the big picture and how the various parts of the picture relate to form it. Consider this picture:

Looks like a bunch of columns eh? Have a closer look… do you see people hiding in the shadows. The whole was obscured by the parts. So it is when you try to think systemically. Don’t study the parts … study the wholes. Look at this picture above and ask yourself what connects together to make it look like that.

4. How are things not related

One of the misnomers of strategic thinking is that the world is linear. The problem is that you can never predict the way in which the world we respond to things. Consider the outpouring of aid for the Tsunami or the levels of anxiety after September 11. Warranted though they were the depth to which people reacted was overwhelming. Looking for wholes sometimes can make you create relationships where none really exist. Always seek to explore how things are also unrelated. Lateral thinking is a good example of this. Looking towards something that is unrelated or lateral shifting in systems terms means looking for a new sideways ideas to how things are related.

5 .Think over dimensions

If you consider each part of something as dimensional or as containing the element of another element which contains that element then you may understand what I am talking about here. Interdisciplinary in academic terms is a fantastic example of this. In this case I am working with people from various points of view who are experts in something that I know little or nothing about. Each domain of knowledge is a new dimension that helps me to view a situation through a much bigger multidimensional view. This is the plural version of number one (listed above) and a major requirement for strategic thinking. Knowing the dimensions of what you are dealing with is impossible from just one view because systemically things are related differently on different strategic levels. You can’t know how a car works by driving it … yet if we assembled a team. A driver, the engineer, the factory people, the marketing team, the distributors and so on we could see the dimensions we were dealing with. Learning over dimensions is much more of a challenge because it creates knowledge that’s more complex, more general and heaps more useful than boring old analytical knowledge.

This is only five ways to think strategically there are lots more things you can do. I think it’s best summed up this way. What are the conditions (dimensions) that cause this to exist? It’s real so it exists…putatively! Take a strategic view of your job as an example. What is your job? What does your boss think about your job? Is your job related to other people? What is your job not related to? How many dimensions of your organisation does your job effect? Now you are thinking strategically!

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Learning from past mistakes

August 20, 2007 / Luke / 3 comments

The greatest thing you can ever do is make mistakes. I hear people say to me all the time… if only I could erase my past mistakes then I would be free. That, is a misunderstanding of epidemic proportions. If you erased your mistakes you would erase a great percentage of what you know and the information you have already got in your possession. Why would you want to do that? Because of how much it hurts.

The pain we feel we make drastic mistakes is terrible. When I failed in business for the second time I was devastated. I spent about a month in a complete daze because my whole world and all of my dreams came crashing down with it. To say that I was ruined would be an understatement. Then after a period of time I began to realise I know a few things about failing in business I could teach others. I began to share my stories of failure with people at the university where I work. The students gained genuine insight in what NOT to do. As a result of that my reputation as a not-so-bad teacher increased dramatically. The fruit of that was people following me into other courses and a great wrap from my boss.

When I was sharing with people the mistakes I had made I realised that one of the most important things for me to do is milk them for all their worth. It would be a tremendous shame if you simply let them slip through your fingers. What amazed me about this losing experience was that it has become leverage to me. Now, I can see others making similar mistakes and I can warn them about it. They often come back and thank me later. Now, I am still not physically rich but I am rich in knowledge and this I would argue is of much greater value.

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Life Skills: building skills that matter

August 9, 2007 / Luke / No comments

Over the next few months I am going to post regular sections about life skills in this blog. As a university lecturer I am astounded to find people that lack the qualities that make for a good life. I am not talking about reading and writing I am talking about being able to succeed in life. Have a look at this quote:

“You grab a challenge, act on it, then honestly reflect on why your actions worked or didn’t. You learn from it and then move on. That continuous process of lifelong learning helps enormously in a rapidly changing economic environment.” John Kotter (American Academic at Harvard Business School in Fortune, 22 August, 1994).
People I meet at University couldn’t grab a sandwich let alone challenge. I am not speaking only of undergraduates but people
who have been working for many, MANY years. These people are the ones that seem to think it’s okay to sit back and let things come to you
without having any idea what to do about it. I encounter this kind of victim mentality’ all the time. So what’s missing?

Life skills are those essential qualities we need to possess in order to have a reasonably successful life. Without them all we have is empty vein ideas
about what works and what doesn’t. At University all we do is teach people how to remember facts without actually imparting any of these skills
to the people that will be the managers of the future. I am speaking about generic skills like: problem solving, time management, creative thinking and the ability to learn and grow over the course of one’s life. People I meet in graduate and undergraduate circle generally lack these kinds of skills. Oh, they are good are knowing what to write and how to put the words to make it sound appealing to their tutor but they are these people the next generation of world leaders and problem solvers? I think not.

As a personal response to this problem I want to introduce the topic of building a skill set for life. These are the skills I see our graduates are missing and are in desperate need of attention. What are some of these basic skills:

  • Learning: Being able to think for oneself
  • Strategic Thinking: Understanding the diversity of views and opinions available and the inherent complexity of social things
  • Problem Solving: Being able to solve problems by offering better solutions to previously ill-defined problems
  • Communication: Being able to send a message clearly and understand not just what is being said but what the sender means
  • Managing relationships: Understanding the roles relationships play in our lives and how this works
  • Creative Thinking: Making use of lateral thinking and out of the box ideas
  • Perspective Shifting: Moving between different points of view to come up with ideas that match the problems faced
  • Bridge Building: Knowing how to take steps forward to improve problems rather than make excuses for living with them
  • Reflection: Thinking back on what’s happened, milking mistakes for learning purposes and planning future action to take advantage of it

Life skills to me are not being able to read so much as knowing what the writer means. It’s not being able to add up endless reams of mathematical equations as it is
the applicability of ideas to problems. It’s not knowing who to step over but understanding the chain of relationships in any environment and where you can go from there.
You see, the stuff of life is not like what we teach at Universities. It’s real. Really real. We need to move towards understanding these things if we are to get
serious about the future of our planet.

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Problems Problems Problems…

August 4, 2007 / Luke / 2 comments

Welcome to my first post on this blog. What can you expect to find here in coming months? Lots of articles, podcasts, things and more things! To start off this new venture I have embarked on I decided that the best thing to do would be to give you some kind of idea as to what you might find on this site. So here we go: what are problems?

The oft quoted definition of problems (by way of Herbert Simon no doubt) is that they are a gap between what we expect and what eventuates in life. So a better way of saying is that problems occur when our expectations are not met. So, for example, I recently didn’t get a journal publication I was really hoping for so a problem arose for me when I noticed that it was an issue. However, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that ‘reality’ gave this problem apart from me expecting it. That is, I really wanted to get that publication out and I really wanted it published. I had the expectation and hope that it would get up and I would have it but when I didn’t my expectations changed. The problem technically existed before I was rejected from the esteemed publication in question. More to the point the problem does not exist in reality because I have formed the problem in my mind. If I changed my mind there is no problem.

When we set expectations above our capabilities and think that the world will accommodate us we are sadly mistaken. Why? There are standards people set in these journals for whatever reason (academic gatekeeping ) that I think I could never really meet. At the same time, I want to publish my work and have a reputation. Getting into these journals is a career requirement for us academics. The problem came about by me perceiving the situation at work to be one where I am required to get high ranking publications in order to get my career going. This is a condition imposed upon academics in general and one that is of debatable value.

So my problem resulted out of the pressure of my work environment through me perceiving the need to publish in such a journal and through the various reasonings I had formed in my mind as to what the problem I really had actually was! In plain English: I made it up in my head based on what people told me to expect. Should we do this? No. Why not? Simply because the problems we perceive are the problems we receive. I cannot say for sure that I even need to get into this journal to have a career… perhaps I don’t nevertheless while I think about it … the problem remains.

I thought about it some time later and realised that perhaps I had the wrong kind of expectations and maybe this kind of journal wasn’t for me. If I accept that view then the problem ceases to exist. I can change the way I think about the failure and find another avenue for delivery. I can find somewhere to put that publication where it can still get some exposure but maybe not as much. But, the problem still remains in my expectations. At some stage I would like a publication in that journal! So not getting the publication wasn’t the problem as such it was me expecting to get the publication… that’s the problem!

So there you have it. I am not sure what I have written makes a great deal of sense … but I am new to this whole environment so forgive me while I learn the ropes.

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