A problem-solving tool we teach in the Certified Peer Specialist 5-Day Basic Training involves, among other things, looking how a person is negatively impacting his own problem, asking how one’s actions or beliefs may be exacerbating that problem or preventing it from being solved. This is an aspect of problem-solving we tend to shy away from or ignore.
I suspect that’s because doing so brings us into contact with all sorts of things we don’t want to hear. Brainstorming practical solutions makes us feel effective; looking at our own role in causing a problem can make us feel uncomfortable. Coming up with solutions might change the way we act in the short term, until the immediate effects of the problem seem to be alleviated. But examining how we’re contributing to a problem may force us to change who we are and what we believe—and that has implications for the long term.
Indeed, fostering long-term solutions is exactly why we examine what we are doing to create and perpetuate problems. How many “solutions” have been implemented, their effects measured, and congratulations extended to those involved, only to have the effects reversed by a new set of problems or another bout of the same old thing? We see examples of this everywhere, from weight loss programs that fail to address our basic attitudes about exercise and food to military “victories” that precede the chaos of a failed state. To admit to how we are negatively impacting a problem is to admit that we are flawed. But to do so is also to take responsibility for a problem, or at least for that part of the problem that is under our control.
For individuals, this might mean measuring our espoused values against the beliefs we express through our actions: I may agree that the local coffee shop wastes an appalling number of paper cups, but my own vanity may prevent me from bringing my battered travel mug in for a refill.
For an organization, taking stock of what it’s doing that contributes to a problem could force an accounting of institutional values for the first time—and that might reveal how incoherent or contradictory those values really are. For instance (and to keep a theme alive), the desire to stock the office break room with pricey fair trade coffee might go against the value of keeping operating costs low.
But this also reveals the power of reviewing our own negative impacts: the organization might decide that the value of doing right by the grower of the coffee beans outweighs the value of cost-effectiveness in this case. Confronted with the values underlying the impacts, a person or organization is empowered to act intentionally. And sometimes, through reviewing how we negatively impact a problem, we may realize that it’s not actually a problem, and that the proper solution is no action at all.
The idea of considering our own role in a problem also connects to other leadership development work CCSR is part of, including our close partnership with the Kansas Leadership Center.
ReplyDeleteOne question we sometimes ask ourselves and others is "What's your part of the mess?" In fact, we sometimes use a peer consultation protocol in which five or six people brainstorm all kinds of interpretations of one person's challenge -- including the ways that person may be part of the problem. This can be uncomfortable, even painful, but it also sometimes gets people "unstuck."
I also see a connection to the idea of comparing our espoused values with the beliefs reflected in our own actions. In leadership development, we attempt to help people identify values that are in tension with one another; these competing values exist in a single person and in any organization. We suggest it may be an act of leadership to articulate and consciously choose among those values.
I hope others will point out more connections between ideas presented at CPS training and ideas presented in other leadership development settings.
Is it also, perhaps, an act of leadership to keep some competing values in place and work at ways of creating dynamic action from their tension?
ReplyDeleteThe example that comes to mind is academic freedom at an educational institution, especially a research institution: it's vital to assure some amount of academic freedom in order to give faculty members the leeway to expand their fields of study, but that same freedom can also lead to faculty members making conclusions and expressing opinions that might be uncomfortable for the institution, its funders, and its friends.
The debate created, though, gives everyone at the institution, and often many outside it, opportunities to really understand the ramifications of what those eggheads up at the local U are gassing on about.