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.
