Six questions to see any problem differently
A new perspective on the behaviors that make up your problem is the key to everything
My wife and I recently started watching the Swedish Death Cleaning show, which also happens to be set in our metro area. It made me start thinking about what I would want to say if I knew I only had one more opportunity to send this newsletter. It all comes down to one core truth and six ways to approach that truth.
The core truth is that there is ALWAYS a new way to look at any problem you are trying to solve. I spend a lot of time on this site talking about problems and how to transform our perspective on them, as opposed to solutions and how to imagine or realize them. That’s because experience has taught me that when you see the problem in the right way, solutions become clear. Not easy, necessarily, but clear.
Like everybody, I feel frustrated by the seemingly entrenched problems of our society today: gun violence, a dysfunctional health care system, structural racism, climate change. I also want there to be easy answers. But I shake my head when anyone insists that the answers to these problems are already known, or even more dangerously, that no real answers exist. To me, the difficulty of these problems suggests that the most important truths about them have yet to be discovered, and we need to be much more humble in the face of that.
That being said, here are six questions anyone can ask about any problem to see it in a new way. A problem is just a collection of human behaviors, and each of these questions widens the lens of what behaviors might be relevant or how we might change them.
Ideas stemming from these six questions run through every post on this site. But by telling you the root questions, I don’t feel like I am giving away the store. Because I have been using these questions with students and clients for years, I understand just how hard they can be to answer. All the exercises I share on the site are ideas to approaching these questions in new ways. Most of those are the result of my good fortune in getting to see other people reckon with these questions up close, then learning new ways to approach them myself.
I hope that by working with these questions, you will also find new ideas you can share with others. And even more importantly, I hope you will see our most pressing problems in new ways. We need them your new perspectives now more than ever.
The six questions:
How might we change the people and organizations involved in the problem, or the relationships among them? Learn more about how to answer this question
How might we change the rules around the problem or the way people respond to them? Learn more about how to answer this question
How might we change the stories told about the problem and where it came from? Learn more about how to answer this question
How might we change people’s expectations about the problem and where it is going? Learn more about how to answer this question
How might we change the categories and words people use to think about the problem? Learn more about how to answer this question
How might we change the problem’s relationships to other problems and efforts to solve them? Learn more about how to answer this question