To solve the biggest problems facing us today and in the future, we must become better & faster at identifying the real problems.The most common reason problems go unsolved is surprisingly simple: they were never correctly identified in the first place.
What if The World Got Better at This?
When we mistake the manifestation of a problem for the problem itself, we can spend enormous amounts of time, energy, and resources working in the wrong place entirely. The real source remains untouched — and the situation either persists or worsens.
This is not a rare occurrence. It happens in business, in health, in systems, in relationships, and in some of the largest unsolved challenges facing humanity today.
Correctly identifying a problem is a discipline in itself. It requires the willingness to question what seems obvious, to challenge the assumptions everyone in the room agrees on, and to ask different kinds of questions than has been asked before. What Would Happen if New Departments Were Set Up on a World-Wide level for This Urgent Focus?
The right question changes everything. It points in a new direction. It opens what was previously closed.
This short video uses one of the most striking examples imaginable. Find out why becoming skilled at correctly identifying the problem may be the most important key to bringing in any solution.
Read the Full Verbatim Transcript: “Identifying the Problem” with Kim Greenhouse
Identifying the Problem
I want to bring up a subject that’s very, very relevant to all of us. I want to bring up the subject that has to do with identifying the real problem. Identifying a problem.
Part of what has thrown most of us off course when we’re talking about a problem is that often we think or feel that we know what it is. And that it should be obvious. It’s this.
So if we misidentify the problem and think of the problem, if we misidentify the problem and we think of the manifestation of the problem as the problem, we can miss the boat. We can miss the mark of solving something and bettering something and improving something that would have been able to be improved.
Let’s take an example.
Cancer has been around since I was a little girl, and I’m sure years before. It’s at least over seventy-five, eighty years around, at least. And we’ve never quite seen the proliferation of it like we have today. Never. Never. Not as fast, as speedy. You know. And so we have an industrial complex that relates to cancer and whatever it defines it as — as the problem, mechanistically, to be solved. Radiation, chemo. That the body is mechanical and it’s handled mechanically.
But we know it’s not just mechanical. We know it’s biological. We know that it has a physiology. We know it has a chemistry. We know that there’s a molecular structure. We know a lot of things. We knew that then. However, the public is not necessarily aware of what the military agencies are aware of — Navy, Army, DARPA, NASA, etc. And that is that the human body is an electrical Magnetic Biofield, if you will. And so, if what we want to do is solve cancer via eliminating it — if we keep looking at the body in the same way, we’ll never get there.
We’ll never get there. And of course, the industry is not designed to get there. I think we know this now after seventy-five years. It’s not designed to get us there. It can stop it, it can put it into remission sometimes. Sometimes people get to live longer, they adopt other methods as part of, or different than.
So when identifying the problem — if we say cancer is the problem — no. Something has changed about living biology and chemistry and physics and physiology. Something has changed us. And animals are getting cancer like there’s no tomorrow. So then we have to ask the question: what is it? Identifying the right question is an exercise in and of itself, when you’re talking about really getting to a solution.
And so, if you don’t identify the problem correctly, you waste time over here, when you have misidentified the problem.
And so, one of the keys I would like to be of support to those of you who would like to correctly identify — work on correctly identifying a problem that’s