Letting problems solve us
When confronted with a problem, human beings instinctively want to solve it. Most of the time, that instinct serves us well, especially when it comes to both routine difficulties and matters of life and death. But more often than we might suspect, there are golden opportunities not to follow our instincts and, instead, let the problems we face “solve us.”
Solve us you ask? It is an insight that I took away from my graduate work with Professor Robert Kegan in the late 1990s. As Professor Kegan says, “Each of us does the best we can coping within the world of our assumptive design.” To put it another way, the assumptions we make everyday about every aspect of our life experience shape the way we make sense of and interact with the world. In effect, our assumptions allow us to design the world in which we want to live, one that is often at odds with the “realities” experienced by others. We cope by resolving this dissonance, which is why we are very intent on solving problems.
But what if we had sufficient awareness to recognize that our problems might not be the actual problem? What if we could see that sometimes the problem is simply an indicator of flawed or, at least, untested assumptions? What if we could step outside of the problem and look at our relationship to it so that we might understand it in a new way? Without a doubt, it is easier to ask these questions than it is to do what they ask. Nevertheless, I believe what I am writing about here is an absolutely critical capability that both staff and volunteer association leaders must develop going forward.
Let’s think briefly about how letting problems solve us might influence our work on strategy. Strategic planning is clear-cut method for solving the problems we have with ambiguity, complexity and uncertainty. In strategic planning, we identify mostly what we know we know today, and we do a little bit of elaboration on it to give it a future feel. Then, we pre-determine the outcomes we want to achieve and work fastidiously toward reaching them. No mess, no fuss. This approach may be clean and neat, but it is neither authentic nor pragmatic, given what we know is true about the current strategic landscape. In contrast, letting the problem solve us challenges our assumptions along multiple dimensions, especially our commitment to knowing all the answers even before the questions are asked. Letting the problem solve us focuses instead on learning as we go, exercising judgment and constantly testing our assumptions. From this process, not only will we achieve different results, but our approach to strategic leadership also will be different.
So, the next time you confront a problem in your work, consider stepping back from trying to solve it immediately. Instead, see if the problem can solve you.
[...] Reflecting on my years as an association professional, I do believe we have a tendency to go out of our way to avoid conflict. Perhaps this is because we already feel vulnerable working in organizations in which scarcity and constraint thinking are deeply entrenched, so pushing back against it, as well as those who purvey it, seems like a zero-sum game, i.e., the organization wins and we lose. Perhaps we have been chastened by one too many run-ins with myopic volunteers and members who blithely ignore marketplace realities and appear totally content to live in the nostalgic world of yesteryear. Or perhaps we simply don’t want to be made uncomfortable by having the world of our own assumptive design questioned too closely. Whatever the reasons may be, there is an unmistakable preference in associations for steering clear of conversations that will stretch our thinking, test our assumptions and invite us to consider radical ideas. Given this unhappy state of affairs, it is small wonder that innovation suffers. [...]
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