We have all seen and heard them before, the questions that are so deep, complex and far-reaching that we both love and hate them at the same time. Impossible to answer and yet important to ask: wicked! Yet, leaders are often challenged to find answers – often without the necessary time to reflect, read or even understand. So what can you do?
There is an initial basic choice:
- To either ask, listen to, or hear the question
- To ignore it and pretend you haven’t heard it.
Option b) is clearly easier than option a). My hope is that I can encourage you to consider option a). For this, I am willing to abandon my cautious attitude and to jump into offering you a solution. Deal?
Here is my best attempt to offer you a fool-proof, easy-to-apply and quick HOW-TO METHOD to approach wicked questions or problems:
How to deal with wicked problems | Not really (1 point) | Unsure (3 points) | Very much (9 points) |
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Kathy asked a few really hard questions in her last blog – these made me think. Sometimes, trying to find answers is too overwhelming or simply too potentially disruptive in our busy lives. So we need to figure out if a question is important and relevant enough to spend time addressing it. If it is, we do need to dedicate – pragmatically – some time to figure out what a next relevant step is and then we need to immediately commit to undertaking that step by sharing our commitment with somebody who matters. This action alone won’t solve the problem, but it represents that first important step to shift your energy in the direction of solving it. And in the beginning, that is all that matters. After that, the next obvious step will emerge, irrespective if the first step was right, wrong or quite irrelevant.
I am convinced that if each of us would assume our responsibility in each of our roles and functions we have to address such wicked questions, we would have no problem at all to together – in a collaborative and cooperative way – solve these really impossibly large and complex problems the world has in store for us. Easily! Become part of the solution – apply this easy to use HOW-TO METHOD and watch what happens. I look forward to hearing from you!