Category: Foundations

This is Part 2 of our series on the Reasonably Rational Thinking Process. Read Part 1 here.

Dejected, the man once again surveyed his surroundings. Trees, strecthing up towards the sky and blocking the sun, towered everywhere. The seemingly endless columns of bark were broken through only periodically by shafts of anemic light; nowhere was there any indication of a way forward. How can I escape, if I can’t even begin? he thought.

Helplessness may be learned, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t real.

As we discussed in Part 1, helplessness emerges in the face of two primary criteria:

1. They is no clear cause of the problem; and
2. There is no clear next action.

The process of solving an intractable problem, then, hinges on two primary elements:

1. Determing the critical root cause; and
2. Determining our most effective next action.

We will deal with each of these stages in turn by exploring the Reasonly Rational Thinking Process.

The Reasonably Rational Thinking Process is based on the Logical Thinking Process developed by William (Bill) Dettmer. Dettmer’s system was originally designed to help large organizations take poorly-defined systems problems and slowly, but surely, move towards a solution.

Dettmer summarizes his approach here:

Dettmer’s process is meticulous – he takes a great deal of time breaking down every possible component part of a systemic problem.

He does this because, at the level of large organizations, potential mistakes in defining the nature of systemic problems can lead to massive wastes of time and capital.

The problem for us – people who simply want to think more rationally about the problems we face in our own lives, or in smaller businesses – is that this meticulous approach makes the entire Logical Thinking Process incredibly unwieldy.

For normal, every day problems – or for businesses with less than, say 20 people – I don’t think a full and complete run down of the LTP is necessary to make progress.

In fact, I’d wager that speed of implementation and the ability to get feedback from efforts to make things better is more valuable in those situations than adding 10 points to the “rigorous thinking” scoreboard.

After all, the potential downsides in these scenarios – some wasted time, some wasted effort – is considerably less.

What we need in these instances isn’t a completely Logical Thinking Process – we just need to be Reasonably Rational.

We need to avoid the most common mistakes and pitfalls of complex problem solving…without becoming obsessed with complete logical accuracy.

(This is not a problem with Dettmer’s approach, by the way – in fact, Dettmer’s approach is absolutely the right one for the companies he typically works with.

We’re just going to hack his tools a bit to serve a different market).

With that, let’s explore my own simplified version of the Logical Thinking Process – The Reasonably Rational Thinking Process.

Reasonably Ration Thinking Process #1: The Goal Tree (or, What The F*** am I Doing?)

A huge amount of suffering is caused by the fact that we have no clearly desired outcome.

Many times we think we know what we want – more money, a better job, whatever – but we’re unclear about what, specifically, constitutes those end states.

How much money, exactly? Better job, how – less hous, more pay, better coworkers…?

Many situations call for optimization of one thing or the other – choices must be made.

• You can lose fat, but not gain muscle.
• You can maximize revenue, but you’re going to lose profit margin.
• You can date for variety, but have less time to spend with each person.

If we’re unclear about our priorities, and what really matters, we subconsciously avoid progress for fear and making the wrong choice.

What’s more, problems only exist in relation to a goal; no situation is an issue unless we have a desired alternative.

(Sure, it’s raining. But that’s only a problem if you need it to be sunny because you planned to propose during a picnic and you’ve already packed 400 egg salad sandwiches because you’re a compulsive over-cooker and they’re all going to go bad and start smelling up this uber unless you figure something out).

So, not only is a clear understanding of our goal critical for understanding what to do next…it’s crucial to even understanding the nature of the problem.

And yet…it can be frustratingly hard to know what our goal really is, sometimes.

I recently had a conversation with my wife, who is volunteering for a literacy non-profit. She goes into a middle school once a week to spend about an hour reading aloud with two young students.

Lately she’s been having an issue with keeping the kids on task; they’re still reading, but they often don’t enjoy reading aloud (one of the primary aspects of the program). They’d rather read quietly on their own.

Is this a problem?

Really, it all depends on the goal. Is the goal:

• The encourage in the kids a love of reading (one of the stated program goals)
• To improve their ability to read aloud (their teacher’s stated goal)

In this case, it seems these two goals conflict.

(In actuality, they may not – more on that later.)

In any case, it’s hard to determine what action she should take – or whether she should take any action at all – without truly understanding our primary goal.

When you’re in these kinds of situations, the best way to figure out what you really want is by creating a diagram called a Goal Tree.

The Goal Tree

A goal tree takes a broad, overarching aim and breaks it down into actionable component parts.

Basically, it takes a dream and tells you what to work on in order to achieve it.

The best part is, you don’t really need to know the answers beforehand in order to make it. In fact, the process of creating the diagram will itself help you to determine what needs to be done.

I think of the Goal as the benchmark – the thing against which we measure everything we do. Is it moving me towards, or away from, my goal?

Let’s take the above example: My wife’s students are resisting reading aloud.

Before we start addressing and diagnosing the problem, we need to have a clear idea of our goal. So let’s start there.

The first thing we need to ask ourselves is: What’s the ultimate goal of everything we’re doing here?

Another way of phrasing that is:

What’s the one aim towards which all my effort is directed?

It’s OK if we’re not 100% sure how to answer this question right now – we can revise later. But for now, we need a sense of what the big, overarching goal is.

So, for example, our goal could be:

The students are able to read aloud proficiently.

Something about that feels incomplete, right? It practically begs the question: why?

Why do we care if the students can read aloud in class? What’s the point?

Same goes for:

Encourage in the kids a love of reading.

It sounds nice, but again – why? Why do we care if they have a love of reading?

Let’s think it through:

We want them to be able to read aloud…because they have to do that in school.

OK. Good so far.

And we want them to love reading…because that’ll mean they read more, increasing their reading proficiency.

Great! We’re making progress. But…why do we care if they’re proficient readers?

Well…proficient readers will have access to lots of information from written sources, and be able to access those resources whenever they need. And that’ll make them more capable and resilient.

NOW we’re getting somewhere. All of a sudden, THAT sounds like a self-sufficient goal…something that is obviously worth while. Whereas before, they felt a bit intermediate – nice, but not the end result towards which all our effort is directed.

Let’s say after a few stabs at this process, we come up with this as the Ultimate Goal:

My ultimate goal is…

Students are resourceful enough to handle the challenges they meet in school.

Now we’re going to write that down at the top of a piece of paper (or, in my case, in a piece of flow chart software. Either way is totally fine.)

Now that we have our ultimate goal, let’s focus in on a single question:

What conditions are indispensable for this result?

In other words:

For the goal to be true, what other things have to be true?

These indispensable conditions are called Critical Success Factors. You literally cannot achieve the goal without them.

Typically, you are going to have no more than 3-5 of these.

Remember: we’re not thinking too broadly here. Our stated goal is that the students are resourceful enough to meet the challenges they’ll run into in school and life. What are the things they absolutely require in order to achieve that goal?

Let’s brainstorm.

To be resourceful enough to handle the challenges they meet in school, they’ll need:

• To know the resources available to them
• To be willing to seek those resources when needed
• To be able to access those resources

This makes sense, right?

If they don’t know the resources, they can’t be resourceful;

If they can’t access the resources, they can’t be resourceful;

If they won’t access resources, they can’t be resourceful.

Let’s add those Critical Success Factors to our chart. We’ll place them below our Goal, and connect them to the goal with lines, showing the relationship.

Now that we’ve laid out some Critical Success Factors, we need to ask:

What conditions are indispensable for the achievement of our Critical Success Factors?

We’re going to repeat the process we just went through – but instead of thinking about the Goal, we’re thinking about what we need in order to achieve our Critical Success Factors.

We call these Necessary Conditions.

To recap:

We start with a Goal – the benchmark against which we measure everything in a system.

Then we figure out our Critical Success Factors – what are the indispensable elements of achieving our Goal?

Then we figure out our Necessary Conditions – what are the indispensable elements of achieving our Critical Success Factors?

After some time brainstorming (and more than a few edits), here’s what I got:

What this tree gives us is clarity into why we do what we do.

If something isn’t on the tree, it’s not moving us closer to our goal.

Likewise, if we’re neglecting the things in the tree, nothing else matters.

This works particularly well for complex issues. Below is a goal tree I created when I wanted to completely rebuild our client success systems in my marketing agency:

I ignored the “sales” branch of the tree because I was focusing in on customer service…but you can see here how every important element of what we do plays a role in moving us towards our goal (“Large number of monthly clients”).

There’s another aspect of the Goal Tree that is incredibly valuable:

The easiest place to start is with the Necessary Conditions at the bottom of the tree.

While the system can look impossible complex, the only things we need to focus on right now are the Necessary Conditions with nothing below them, i.e., the bottom layer of the tree.

If you’re starting work towards a large goal, this is how you do it:

• Define the goal
• Define the Critical Success Factors
• Define the Necessary Conditions
• Identify the lowest level of Necessary Conditions and start there

This is also a critical step towards addressing problems…

Because, as we said earlier, problems exist only in relation to our goals.

More on that in the next segment – the Problem Tree.

This post is part of a series (currently in progress) on the “Reasonably Rational Thinking Process.

The sense that “I should have solved this by now” brings a sickening mix of anger, frustration, and shame.

There’s no excuse, we think.

We work so hard, for so long, desperately seeking an answer..and get nowhere.

Eventually, our frustration leads to despair, and that despair leads us to simply stop trying.

We’re now in a state of Learned Helplessness.

Torture a dog long enough and he will eventually stop trying to escape.

Psychologists Steven Maier and Martin Seligman discovered that learned helplessness emerged in the face of insoluble problems – and became internalized, changing behavior even in completely different situations.

From the New Yorker:

Seligman and Maier first attached dogs to a harness, a kind of rubberized cloth hammock, with holes for the dogs’ legs to dangle free. As the dogs hung, their heads were kept in place by two panels, which they could easily press with their heads. At random intervals, coming between sixty and ninety seconds apart, they would receive a series of shocks to their hind feet.

Some of the dogs could control the shocks with a simple press of the head against either of the panels; for others, the head-pressing did nothing. The moment the dogs with the functional panels touched either one, the shock ended. Otherwise, it lasted for thirty seconds to begin with, and for increasingly shorter durations thereafter.

The next day, each dog was set free inside a shuttle box, a two-compartment cage separated by an adjustable barrier. Each time the lights in the box went off, half of the floor would become electrified, shocking the poor animals. But if the dog jumped over the barrier and into the next cage, the shock could be avoided. This time, each dog had the power to end its discomfort quite easily.

When Seligman and Maier analyzed the results, they found a consistent pattern. The dogs that had learned to avoid the shocks by pressing their heads against the panels on the first day were quick to jump the barrier on day two. Not a single dog failed to learn to jump quickly after the first go-around. Those that had been unable to escape the shocks, though, weren’t even trying. They were free to move, explore, and escape—but they didn’t.

Two-thirds of them were still hovering in the electrified side of the box by the end of the experiment—and for the remaining third, the average number of trials to learn to escape was just more than seven, out of the total ten. A week later, five of the six dogs that had failed to learn were still unwilling to even try: they once again failed the shuttle-box test.

The effect of the harness experiment was been both severe and lasting.

— The New Yorker – 2002 https://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/theory-psychology-justified-torture

The lesson I take from Seligman’s work is that we all have a tendency to retreat in the face of helplessness; if we learn we can’t affect our future, then why bother? Why do anything?

Being faced with intractable problems creates real psychic pain. Eventually, the cost/benefit analysis stops working out, and we simply roll over and take our lashing.

But why are some problems so intractable, while others seem easy to solve?

In my experience, intractable problems have two key characteristics:

1. They don’t have a clear cause.
2. There is no clear next action.

Cause and Effect In a Complex World

Humans are narative creatures.

In all things, we try to explain our experiences through stories.

If we’re bullied in school, we may internalize that there’s something wrong with us. Contrarily, you could take that experience and come to the conclusion that people are inherently cruel.

In eithe rstory, the effect – being bullied in school – is not up for debate. Instead, it’s the cause that’s the subject of the story.

Why did this happen to me…and what does that tell me about the world?

Reality, however, is not so simple. Rather than basic cause and effect, the world around us is governed by complex system dynamics – a interlocking web of relationships.

The systems of the body…except that this map doesn’t include the connections between the varying systems.

All of these systems interact with one another, affecting each other in unexpected ways.

What’s more, qualities possessed by none of the component parts of a system can emerge from within the interactions of those parts.

Individual ants, which are extremely limited in their capabilities, can produce fantastic acts of intelligence at the colony level. No particular ant is smart; yet the colony as a whole is brilliant.

This is known as emergence – a trait not found in any of the component parts nevertheless appears in the system as a whole.

When you several complex interlocking systems together with emergence we get a world in which the “effect” is oftentimes very far away from the “cause.”

We dance, and it rains.

I pray, I heal.

I feel these things are connected…but how?

Late Night Snacking in a Complex World

Let me give you a real-world example.

For the past 4 years or so, I’ve been meticulously weighing and measuring my food. I tracked everything down to the gram and logged that data into a weekly spreadsheet.

I did this because my natural portion control is fairly poor, and it was the only method I found that gave me control over my weight without harshly limiting my food choices.

That is, up until 2019.

Around Thanksgiving of 2019 I decided to take a break from all the food tracking.

My weight was in a good place, and I wanted to enjoy the holidays without stressing about weighing my aunt’s broccoli and cheese casserole.

The plan was to take Thanksgiving to Christmas off and start up a new plan January 1st.

As I write this, we’re getting perilously close to March – and I’ve been absolutely unable to get back on track.

I find myself eating bowls of cerel in the middle of the night, raiding my kids Halloween candy stashes, and constantly craving snacks. I haven’t been able to remember to track my food consistently, even though this was something I did reliably for years. My caloric intake is see-sawing up and down, and despite resolving to fix the problem several times, I find myself repeatedly backsliding.

So – what’s going on?

Looking for a simple cause and effect relationship here can be frustrating.

Am I simply weak-willed? Seems unlikely, since I was able to follow this same diet plan for years.

Is it just access to food? Maybe, but I removed most of the offending snacks and still found myself eating random things from the kitchen.

Have I simply given up? Maybe, but I still feel like I want to eat on plan.

The reality is probably far more complicated than any of these options make it out to be.

If I believe there’s a simple cause and effect relationship here, all I should have to do to prevent the effect is remove the cause.

Remove the candy from the house, you’ll stop eating.

Strengthen your will, you’ll stop eating.

Renew your motivation, you’ll stop eating.

But if this isn’t a simple cause and effect relationship, it’s likely that the effect will still occur even when I’ve addressed what I believe to be the cause.

And that is a recipe for deep frustration.

Remember – taking action and seeing no resulting improvement leads to learned helplessness.

Just like the dogs who learned that they couldn’t control when they were shocked, constantly banging my head against a seemingly insoluble problem doesn’t just mean I don’t solve this problem; it means I start to internalize an inability to solve any problem.

Realizing that we’re just one part of an interconnected web of complex systems can leave us feeling powerless, because we can’t see a way to exert control over our situation.

In other words:

If nothing I do works, then why bother?

You Can’t Move Forward Without a Next Step

Let’s talk about procrastination.

I don’t view procrastination as an entirely bad thing – it might be that our expectation of permanent peak performance (or 3P, as I will now refuse to stop calling it) is more fantasy than reality.

But it’s certainly true that the experience of knowing what you have to do, and wanting to do it but simply feeling unable to get started is a deeply frustrating one.

We tend to attribute this kind of procrastination to laziness. But I think there’s actually a much more common culprit:

Not knowing the next step.

Many of us think we know what the next thing we need to do is – “research cancer rates,” or “send memo to boss” or “write blog post.”

These seem like relatively simple tasks.

But those “simple” tasks are actually quite complex – there’s some uncertainty built in.

Research cancer rates…how?

Send memo to boss…saying what?

Write blog post…but what’s my argument?

Every task has within it a complex series of subtasks.

Even “google my company name” has a series of steps hiding inside it that we take for granted ..

(open up your browser…oh, well, first you’ll need a computer. So get your laptop out. It’s not charged? Find the adaptor, plug it in…OK, now open up your browser. Find the URL bar. Type in “google.com“…etc.)

These sub tasks, if they’re not well understood, create the slightest sense of uncertainty.

And uncertainty leads to inaction.

Humans, in general, hate uncertainty. Acting under uncertain circumstances brings risk, and risk is, well…risky.

Better to avoid uncertainty altogether than risk looking foolish, or resource loss, or even (in some cases) death.

While it’s unlikely that you’re going to die while writing your next blog post, that tendency to avoid uncertainty remains, nestled deep within your reptilian brain. Hence, the endless ways we can find with which to avoid the task at hand.

(Ever find yourself suddenly cleaning a closet that’s been a mess for years, just so you won’t have to do the thing you’re supposed to be doing?)

Intractable problems tend to have no clear next step – whether because we can’t find the true cause (as discussed above), or because we can’t think of any way to help. Both of these situations lead to analysis paralysis – we don’t act because we’re not sure how to.

Solving Problems in a Complex World

Given that we’ve established the two characterists of intractable problems – a complexity that makes finding the root cause difficult, and no clear next step to take…

How do we go about solving them?

The best answer I’ve found is called the Logical Thinking Process.

Admittedly – not a great name.

It sounds pedantic, boring, serious – and not particularly applicable to everyday life.

If I go on to tell you that it was created in the 80’s by an Israeli physicist, it’s probably going to sound even less useful than it did before.

“I’m trying to stop snacking in the middle of the night, Dan, not send a god-damned rocket into space.”

And you’d be right.

The Logical Thinking Process, in the forms that it is currently available, is intimidating, overly complex, and not particularly useful in every day situations.

But.

What if I told you that by utilizing a dead-simple diagramming process, you could:

• Figure out the root cause of any problem, no matter how complex;
• Know exactly how to move forward towards solving that problem;
• Create a clear-cut path towards accomplishing any goal, and
• Align a team of people around solving any problem AND give them the tools they need to continue solving that problem on their own?

….Oh.

And it’s only going to take me a few minutes to teach you each step.

AND, once you know it, you will immediately be able to teach it to someone else.

Over the next few posts I’m go to show you this exact process – boiled down so that it’s instantly applicable to your life.

The key here is that we already have within us the ability to solve nearly any problem.

The key here is that we already have within us the ability to solve nearly any problem.

Part two of this series will appear next week.

All you need is one idea.

Most of us are operating with the mental model that change has to be hard.

“Nothing good comes easy,” we tell ourselves.

But that’s not really true.

In fact, transformative ideas can have instantaneous effects – and can fundamentally alter the course of our lives.

Want an example?

For my entire adult life, I’ve felt that clothes never quite fit me.

Everything was either too big or too small. Shirts that fit my length wise had necks that were too tight; anything that accommodated my (admittedly, large) neck would be so long it looked like a smock.

I was bemoaning this lack of well-fitted shirts when a friend clued me in to a simple heuristic:

A shirt will fit you well if the shoulder seam bisects the curve of your shoulder.

Here’s an illustration:

I used this rule of thumb the next time I went shopping…

And I picked out shirts that fit me very, very well.

Is that the only rule of thumb for understanding how clothes should fit? Of course not.

But did understanding this rule – this simple observation about shoulder seams – change how I understood clothing, and vastly improve the choices I made? Yes.

There’s a deeper point to be made here: This change was instantaneous. I received the idea, applied the idea, and immediately saw results.

There was no struggle, there was no back and forth, no “wrestling with the implications.”

Get the idea, apply the idea, see the results.

We’re surrounded by powerful ideas, just like this one.

Mental models, rules of thumb, systems and processes, ways of seeing the world…

That, if we could understand them, would radically change how we live our lives.

Help us make better decisions. Help us be better husbands, wives, neighbors, citizens, people.

Help us make more money.

Help us sleep more easily.

Help us live.

The problem is one of noise.

It’s a noisy world, and getting noisier all the time.

Too many things to filter though, too many things to block out.

The diamonds get tossed out with the kitchen garbage…

And we’re all too tired to go out and root around to find them.

I’m making this blog to do one thing, and one thing only:

Explore potentially life-changing ideas.

No less than that, in every post.

When I feel I can’t do that anymore?

I’ll stop writing.

No less than life-changing.

No less than what I’m capable of.

Thanks.