|
|||
|
Back to the Forum 2006
Archives A while back I wrote and essay about the problem our political and media hacks were calling the air traffic problem. In that essay I promised to get into the idea of problem solving in a more general way. I wanted to look at the differences between fixing a problem and creating a long term solution. My first look at these concepts was in an essay entitled "On Solving Problems." I pointed out that we cannot create long term solutions by dealing with the symptoms of a problem. We must step back and take a larger view. Since then I have notice that our government is not the only one culpable in dealing with symptoms rather than with the phenomena which produced them. Pretty much every one I know fails in this arena. Evie dealt with one manifestation of this behavior in an essay on Broken Relationships. She pointed out that we tend to focus on the missing party to the relationship rather than on the relationship. Hence, we do not ask the crucial question. We ask, why do men leave women or why do women leave men? Evie suggests that both of these questions are off the mark. There is a more inclusive question which is, why do people betray and abandon relationships? It is only when we look at the relationship that we can understand and perhaps solve the problem. With just a bit of though we must conclude people will abandon a relationship when the relationship is not giving them what they wanted or expected. Only from that perspective can we decide if the relationship can be repaired or should be abandon. Evie's essay does highlight one aspect of the difficulty of problem solving. That is we are often too close to the problem at hand. The problem is having to much emotional influence on us and we just want to make it go away. It becomes difficult to step back and ask, "Why or how did this happen?" Instead, we tend to do one and sometimes two things. We will, for sure, try to fix blame. In addition we may ask, "How can we/I fix this problem?" This is a symptomatic approach which will always lead to poor and usually temporary solutions. I believe in all cases that we should be asking a more inclusive question. Here is the procedure I believe we should always follow in attempting to solve problems. First we must make a clear statement of the problem. What this statement will usually be is the description of a symptom of some larger process. To deal with that larger process we must ask the questions, what caused this, what is behind this? To do that we will almost always have to raise our focus. We must keep asking, "What is behind this?" until the question stops making sense. Looking at the symptom rather than the real problem is the mistake we all make. The government in particular is guilty of this kind of illogic. Instead of stepping back and asking, "What caused this?" we ask, "How do we solve this problem?" Thus we end up treating with symptoms, while the basic problem grows out of control. This is the case with the, so called, energy crisis. It is also the case with the transportation crisis. This symptomatic approach is the very reason that nothing ever gets solved or resolved. The problems keep recurring. In both cases, energy and transportation, we are outgrowing our methods of creation and delivery. In the meantime we have discovered another problem of using fossil fuels. That is the greenhouse gas problem. The point is, we have outgrown perfectly viable solutions which one worked. They worked when we had a small population and appeared to have unlimited resources. That dynamic has changed. We now have an exponential population growth with rapidly dwindling resources and increasingly dangerous emissions. These problems will not be solved by dealing with the symptoms. They will continue to grow. They will only be solved, if at all, when we change our approach to creation and delivery. This is where the research money should be going, not into designing symptomatic patches for something which no longer works. Any solution which we create must be for the whole world. We can no longer hide or isolate ourselves from the larger population. We must solve the problems for everyone. The gasoline problem, the emissions problem, and the transportation problem, are not the problems to be solved. These are nothing more than the symptom of the energy problem. We simply do not have enough clean energy resources to produce all of the things we want and do all of the things we want to do. We must either find a better, more abundant, source of clean energy, or give up on our current life style. No other outcome is possible. If we continue to dink around with stop gap measures on symptoms of the problem, the problem will solve itself. Our culture will degenerate. We will be forced into a more primitive life style. Another manifestation of dealing with symptoms manifests with our so-called gridlock problem. We have gridlock on our highways. All the signs are there. We are headed rapidly toward disaster. This should lead to a discussion of what we really want to do. However, it more often leads to stopgap solutions. We keep asking the "how do we fix this" question while we keep assuming our current structure. It is this current underlying structure that is pushing us toward disaster. We do not examine the what. What do we really want. The system we have now just grew. It is not necessary to assume it as a base. We need to go back and ask the key question, "What do we want to do?" We must not answer it within the context of what we now have. We must answer it with basic statements. It is not helpful to say, "I want to go to Lansing and see my grandchildren." That answer assumes a certain structure which is the cause of our current problems. We are using up the earths resources with that structure. It is a structure which was not designed and though out. It evolved. Now we have it, but it is not necessary to assume it. We must answer the question, "What?" without assuming that structure. It is helpful to say, If it is true, "I want to be with my grandchildren regularly, not always." Only after we have successfully answered all of the what can we even consider addressing the how. Only then can we act to restore some of the quality that our lives should have. When we spend 8 hours working and 6hours getting to and from work, something is wrong. That will kill us. It will cause irrational rage. It will drain our life energy. People keep coming up with simplistic solutions which amount to interim stopgaps. If we simply address the question of preventing gridlock, we are at too low of a level to have any long term effect. We can make highways wider, we can do many things to delay the inevitable, but we cannot resolve the dilemma. The fact is, our basic structure is flawed. We cannot even see how it is flawed until we successfully answer the what question. Solutions within an assumed structure will necessarily be limited. It is that very structure which must be examined. That examination is not possible until we know what we really want to do. After we answer the what, we can address the how, but we must
never assume the current situation when we do that. The current
situation is exactly what is wrong. It does not work. Let's all
get that. It does not work. It is destroying our quality of life
and destroying us. We see desperation all around us. We see rage
all around us. These things have a cause. The cause in embedded
in our current situation. To answer the what question, we must
remove the active verb and the destination. Delete "go to".
Delete all locations. Keep the who and the what. The active verb
and the destination imply the current situation.
|