Seeking Solutions When Everything Seems Like Conflict
I know we are all swimming in a multitude of crises and conflicts happening in the world. And it can be easy to fall into a place of hopelessness and despair. We flail about for answers to problems that feel simultaneously complex and simple, leaving us feeling an intense disequilibrium. That discomfort from external forces easily seeps into our personal and professional lives and suddenly everything feels in conflict. Our ability to critique becomes stronger while our sight of solutions becomes a dense fog. Inside our institutions, we are now sitting in a place of deep fear, a stuckness, and the fears roll out a little like this…
What if I propose a solution and everyone hates it?
If I offer a solution then suddenly that’s more work on my plate.
There are so many challenges along the way, I’m afraid I’ll exhaust myself trying to get to the solution place.
Why should I offer solutions, if those in power will ultimately make the decision?
If we distract with the critique then no one will see we don’t have the answers
So how do we shift our people from the stuckness of being highly critical to being solutions-orientated? How do we move to acknowledge that things are hard and complex and still be in a liberatory place of possibilities? Here are some offerings of practices. And I invite you to suggest what you’ve tried in the comments.
Permission to Fail - When we’re trying something for the first time, it feels experimental, and the potential risk for failure can be high. But what if we acknowledged the potential for failure upfront and signaled to our people that failure is not only okay but welcomed? The agreement is if you try a thing and it does fail you are committing to taking the time to learn from what didn’t work and apply it to the next solution. Positional leaders in the organization can model the ‘permission to fail’ by being transparent about their own mistakes and lifting their learnings for all to see.
Solutions are Collective Effort - Just because you proposed a thing doesn’t mean you have to hold it alone. Whatever the group in which solutions get presented is, make sure folks know that if solutions get greenlit then those solutions are held by a collective - it may be a small group of 2-3 or it might be a whole team, but no one is going solo in this new venture.
Identify the Barriers. Then Move. - Because we are so good at seeing the roadblocks in the way of our solution, we should leverage that muscle and name all of the potential barriers upfront. Once we have a list of barriers, decide how big a lift they are. Is it something that can be easily addressed, a technical fix? Or is it something that might need more resources and time to address, an adaptive challenge? Maybe you need more information. You may be missing a set of skills. Maybe you need a system or technology you don’t currently have. Maybe you need more hands and minds. Whatever the nature of the barrier, the goal is to try and identify how you can remove as many barriers as possible so that the solution can evolve and move forward.
Engage in Generative Conversations - Sometimes, we get stuck in analysis paralysis and then don’t have the energy for generative conversations. One way to get to the generative is to engage in activities that unlock right brain thinking. Pull out the markers, butcher paper, pipe cleaners, music, and Play-Doh and encourage your people to model out their ideas in two and three-dimensional solutions. Getting folks into a creative space can open up idea generation in a way that just talking about a thing cannot. Once you have some ideas on the table then you can open up for conversation about how to bring the ideas to life, testing the ideas as experiments, and then iterating to get to an operational solution.
What have you tried to get your people out of the critiquing rut and working towards collective solutions?
