If you've ever read anything about business, studied for the GMAT, or drank myself into a blackout at my friend's grad school party last week, you might have heard a little something about two emerging but contrasting business ideologies: problem-focused and solution-focused.
A stagnant economy, struggling enterprise, and diminishing middle-class give business theology about as much corporate credibility as pixie dust. And in all likelihood, 95% of board meeting run much like this:
Solution-Focused Therapy credits The Miracle Question. A basic thought experiment, its premise is simple: one night a miracle has occurred. All the problems in your world that would normally preoccupy your time and energy have magically been resolved. When you awaken the next morning, what's the very first thing, however tiny or insignificant, that you notice or experience which lets you know this miracle has occurred?
A stagnant economy, struggling enterprise, and diminishing middle-class give business theology about as much corporate credibility as pixie dust. And in all likelihood, 95% of board meeting run much like this:
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"Solution-focused" ignores the cause, details, and nuances of your problem and concentrates your efforts soley on a remedy, resolution, and positive outcome. While "problem-focused" ignores potential solutions and concentrates your efforts on "Bats! Bats! Dear God how did all these bats get in here?!?!"Solution-Focused Therapy credits The Miracle Question. A basic thought experiment, its premise is simple: one night a miracle has occurred. All the problems in your world that would normally preoccupy your time and energy have magically been resolved. When you awaken the next morning, what's the very first thing, however tiny or insignificant, that you notice or experience which lets you know this miracle has occurred?
Anyone else's miracle involve Alec Baldwin giving this pep talk
as they get ready for work each morning?
The Miracle Question doesn't promise to make our decisions for us, but what it will do is take us to a solution that we already have. It rewires our thinking to ignore the flood of distractions that a hectic 1990s life holds. When left to their own devices, these thoughts can keep us trapped in a perpetual problem-focused cycle. Only then do we we find our solutions, our resolutions, the lights at the end of the bat filled tunnels.
