Core issue analysis

We have many things to do and to think of. So we invented to-do lists. Most lists are too long and have the habit of growing at least as quickly as we shorten them. So we invented something else: priorities. The scary thing about setting priorities is setting posteriorities: postponing or rather deleting things from our to-do list. When we don’t dare to let go of anything, we get a firm grasp on nothing. We have to choose, to commit ourselves to one line of action instead of another, to deal with one problem and leave another alone. We know in our private lives people who are afraid to commit (usually men who are not yet ready for … eh … commitment). They all have something they do not wish or dare to let go, like freedom (e.g. to  engage in noncommittal relationships and activities). Even if we have the courage to choose, we need the wisdom to choose well. And even good choices can turn out wrong. As Harry Truman said: “A schoolboy’s hindsight is better than a president’s foresight.” We need good-luck as well.

But how do we acquire the necessary wisdom? The biggest danger of many priority lists is that the most important items may have been forgotten or overlooked. We overestimate acute and urgent issues, and we underestimate gradual developments that may eventually be decisive.
Of course we want to find out which issues should get the highest priority.  Let’s take this one step further. What is the most critical issue in your life and work right now? Imagine to focus on one issue and one issue only, rather than diluting your attention over multiple issues, however important each may  be. The assumption that every organization, community, group, and perhaps every individual as well, faces at any time one single overriding challenge – the core issue - is attractive and probably also true.

Arnold Toynbee, the historian,  has developed this proposition about the evolution of civilizations, following the ideas of Henri Bergson. Toynbee says that civilizations advance when they respond successfully to their dominant current challenge. Then a new, more or less stable situation comes about that will gradually present a new challenge. Civilizations stagnate when they have spent so much energy on solving their challenge, the tour de force, that they lack the stamina to deal with or even recognize new challenges arriving at its doorstep. Civilizations collapse when they fail to respond effectively to their greatest challenges.

Core issue analysis is the methodical identification of the prime actual challenge facing an organization, community or individual. Core issue transformation means to tackle and solve this problem and so to advance fundamentally as a person, a group or an organization. When we solve our key problem, we transform ourselves. The opposite occurs as well. When we leave the essential problem unattended because it is too difficult or we refuse to acknowledge it, we fill our days with matters of secondary or even tertiary importance. When we don’t solve our key problem, our energy level goes down. Sooner or later this leads to demoralization and lethargy of the organization – for example to rampant sick-leave that has nothing to do with the objective work conditions and everything to do with a bad work climate and lack of spirit. Even though it is not written down or formally admitted, everyone knows or feels that they are just fumbling around what is really relevant. 
I suspect that each core issue involves a dilemma, a paradox that needs to be resolved. Whenever we pursue a simplistic, one-dimensional goal, we are either rambling on a path to nowhere or marching into a dead-end street. If we solely focus on one criterion, we lose sight of everything else. When analyzing management positions, I discovered that each time the primary responsibility of a position was to reconcile a conflicting set of demands and criteria. With the project leaders of an engineering firm, it was about resolving the tension between satisfying the customer and all what that meant, and controlling the costs and all what that entailed. Satisfying clients is easy at high cost.  Saving costs is even easier. It just leads to dissatisfied customers – and discontented personnel. In such a position, core issue analysis is about finding a way to make customers happier while reducing costs.
Hypes arise from one-sided, ‘self-evident’ truths. They are proclaimed by the-sun-is-always-shining philosophers and like-minded managers: quality awareness, customer orientation, motivation, cost-effectiveness, shareholder value.

• "It is about saving costs." 
• "Our people must become more flexible." 
• “Customer-friendliness, that’s what it all amounts to." 

All these goals are ‘motherhood statements’: nobody objects to hem. Such hypes are third-rate imitations of core issues. On a personal level such motherhood statements are: it’s all about love, understanding, awareness, peace, or what have you.

A core issue is probably always emotive. We tend to avoid it, we ridicule it, we passively worry about it, we are paralyzed by it, we suppress it. Many people have a gut feeling about what really matters. A gut feeling or an intuition often is an awareness displacement. Whatever is really important while we are not aware of it, seeps into our consciousness through feelings and hunches.  That is all right, yet hunches are hard to communicate and go awry when we become entangled in emotional or energetic problems.
If you want to find out the core issue, start with looking in the dark - if you can. To what is the least attention given? About what people avoid speaking? If an organization is continually busy with internal matters, chances are that the core issue is an external one.  If an organization solely occupies itself with the market and with clients, chances are that the core issue is an internal one. Where is your attention going? To your children, to money, to your next diploma, to your reputation, to your health? Chances are that’s not where your core issue is.
More roundabout ways to find the core issue are:

• Look for problems that are really persistent or recurrent.
• Look for flip-flops in your life, going from one extreme to another.
• Look for gradual developments that may be not too serious right now, but seem unstoppable.

A good issue-analysis leads to an ‘eureka!’, when the half felt, vaguely suspected becomes focused, transparent and analyzable. When we get to the root of the matter, rational thinking and intuition come together. When you find out what your core issue is, the world stops for a moment. It’s like being hit on the head.
When your survival is at stake, the strategic core issue is the decisive factor for your survival – or demise. In a crisis, core issues are often dual: one on the short term and one on the long term. When your survival is not immediately threatened, when you stay outside the danger zone, the core issues are invariably linked to our raison d’être, to our mission in life, to our ability to be successful in that and to the external changes that affect both.
Is a core issue found or chosen? To what extent is it objective? The more the core issue is a matter of survival, the more objective it is. The farther we are from the danger zone, the more our perception of what your life means and where it is heading to, will determine the core issue.  A core issue is essential as well as existential: what you are here for, what your mission is, where, how, for whom. Theoretically, the core issue is difficult to define, yet in practice, finding it, releases a particularly certainty. Finding the core-issue and dealing with it are not mere intellectual  processes. They electrify.
Find your real priority and dare to concentrate on the most essential point of it. Success in that is much more than solving a problem, defusing a threat or grasping an opportunity. Solving a core issue transforms people and situations.  You become more energetic, skilled, effective or efficient. Usually all of those. A popular idea is that personal transformation is the consequence of a shift in awareness. That is self-evident. However, not every increase in awareness will transform you. Transformation does not result from growing more conscious, perceptive in general, but rather from a growing awareness of your factual situation as you really stand in your actual environment. That includes real other people and their real motives.
The relief of ‘Eureka!’ doesn’t mean that everything is or will be easy. Crucial decisions have to surmount excruciating doubts. An action that intends to solve all your problems at the same time, meet all criteria, is a proposal by the incompetent to the weak.  Solutions with only advantages do exist – in never-never land. "There is no such thing as a free lunch."
Hitting the nail on the head: it separates the men from the boys, the women from the girls. The deepest analysis leads to the most powerful conclusion. The deepest decision has the widest consequences.  A pithy conclusion is no absolute, eternal truth, but the strongest answer to the most daunting challenge you can find right here and now. The core issue is in a classic sense the crux, the essence, the focus. In biblical terms: the narrow gate. Not the wide one that leads astray.

When we solve a problem we prepare the ground for the next problem. First you are poor. That create problems. Then you grow rich. That creates other problems. First you can’t give money to your children. Then you can. Different problems. First you are alone: problem. Then you are together: other problem. Every response to a challenge leads to a new challenge. To what does that ultimately lead: to the ultimate challenge: dying gloriously. The first personal challenge is to be born well. That is now water under the bridge.

By the way, when I introduced core issue analysis to a group of Dutch management consultants ten years ago we spent two evenings to find the political core issue of the Netherlands as a society. We found it: Immigrants and Immigration. Ten years later, it seems to have been a pretty powerful diagnosis.

Compassion as an aspect of civilization

The gentleman’s idea of humanity recognizes that many people are not yet civilized. Many people are weak, narrow-minded, selfish, lazy, mean, unreliable, criminal or cruel. Each civilized society knows barbarians. The word ‘barbarian’ stems from the Greek, meaning ‘non-Greek’, not participating in the enlightenment and refinement of Greek culture. This sort of differentiation between ‘us’ and ‘them’ was common. Similarly, the Hebrew commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’ forbade only the killing of fellow Israelites.

So called ‘barbarians’ exist most conspicuously outside of the geographical borders of civilized society, but they are also present inside. It is very easy to view such people as less human, or even inhuman. Those who maintain such a view may find it very difficult, and even dangerous, to act civilized toward barbarians. Confronted with barbarism or with inhumanity, we have to respond. The easiest response is to consider those wretched beings as less human or inhuman, and exclude them from civilized and humane intercourse and treatment. The Roman idea of humanitas might encompass considerate treatment of slaves, but it would also encompass such treatment of domestic animals, not implying in any sense that slaves or cattle would themselves be partaking in humanitas.

It is not too farfetched to define progress in civilization as progress in viewing other human beings as human beings. This definition would mean that the main steps from barbarism to civilization are steps in empathy, in recognizing other people as fellow human beings. The ultimate test for social empathy is that of compassion, the ability to grieve for other people’s suffering and rejoice in their prosperity. The great forces of barbarism, forces that are also present in the midst of a fairly civilized society (ours, for example), therefore are the emotions that destroy compassion. These destructive emotions are fear, anger, hate, contempt and envy.

Only a few centuries ago, people went to see hangings, burnings, beheadings, and quarterings, and took the children with them on these family outings. With the rise of tolerance and humanity at the end of the 17th century, gradually the Inquisition and witchcraft trials stopped and torture diminished - at least within civilized society. But this move toward tolerance did not generally encompass slaves or the aborigines in the colonies.

The abolition of slavery became essentially a transition away from seeing slaves as hardly human, as lacking human dignity and true human passions. The revised view allowed them to be seen as to equal or at least similar to whites in those respects. An important message of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which must make the book unreadable for blacks, was that Negroes had noble feelings too, even true Christian feelings. Apparently this was an eye-opening notion for many people of that time. It remains amazing to what length people can go in keeping their eyes closed.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin offers an example of something we take for granted today, but something that was once a very important social invention - the novel. The novel has been and still serves as a major stepping stone toward more empathy, and thus toward civilization. It has been a social invention even more powerful than the concept of utopia.

In 1740 Samuel Richardson published Pamela. This book was revolutionary in that it described the feelings of the heroine. While reading, people could identify with the inner feelings of someone else. How strange, how utterly confounding, how delightful! Many people must have found this change as perverse as other people a century later found the steam locomotive. Another example of one of the earliest novels was Das Leiden des jungen Werthers, which made Goethe famous through Europe.

We are discussing here the evolution of the Romantic period, the younger sister of the Enlightenment. We tend to look at the Romantic period as a period of sentimentalism. This view is mainly a distortion. Just as the Enlightenment overstretched itself during the 19th century in positivistic system-building (think of Auguste Comte and of course of Karl Marx), Romanticism overstretched itself in Biedermeier and Victorian sentimentality.

Our present age is one that is strongly opposed to discrimination. Empathy and understanding of fellow human beings are expected to extend to murderers, rapists, drug addicts and other depraved people. Often, victims receive less interest and attention than do the offenders, although this tendency now appears to be in decline. The accepting attitude of many people toward slavery, an attitude common just over a century ago, has become incomprehensible to most of us. We look upon slave owners, especially the more brutal ones, as we would look upon Nazis. They are demons, which means that they are inhuman.

It seems that when we stretch our empathy in some directions, we run short of it in other directions. The paradox is that we lack empathy and understanding for people who apparently do not share our humane values, and therefore we consider these people to be barbarians. But by considering other people as barbarians we may reveal a streak of barbarism in ourselves. When King William entered his English palaces, being a sensitive Dutch, he ordered that dogs would no longer be permitted to defecate freely in the palace rooms. We can hardly imagine that the great Louis XIV held audience while relieving himself.

Maybe we would appreciate our cultural myopia better if we would stop to consider which of our own activities future generations might find unbelievable. Maybe two centuries from now our practice of wholesale breeding and slaughtering of mammals will be the shocking story told in classrooms. The fact that people used to prepare and eat animal corpses may be as appalling to these future students as stories of cannibalism or slave torture are to us today. Letting our dogs defecate freely on the streets may become as incomprehensible to future generations as it is to us that the same was done on palace floors in the past. The attitudes toward wearing fur, or beating seals to death, or killing off dolphins and whales, are already quite different from those held a century ago.

We are still extending our empathy. Our former attitude toward slaves is similar to our present attitude toward our evolutionary cousins, the mammals. Apart from slaughtering and eating them (something even the Nazis did not do with their human victims), many people even doubt that mammals have feelings (although few will suppose they have Christian feelings). Humanity in this case would not mean seeing mammals as human, but recognizing enough relationship to warrant consideration, and making the habit of eating them barbaric. There are, however, science fiction stories that pose cannibalism as part of a very refined, fraternal culture (9), so butcher shops may stay in business after all.

Still, a tremendous difference exists between people who are cruel and mindless to animals, and those who care. As in the time of slavery, those who care are often viewed as sentimental. For example, an Englishman traveling in France and Italy around 1900 wondered why people there were so harsh to animals. He concluded that it was not out of cruelty, but from lack of empathy (10).

The growth of empathy is the major civilizing influence of the Romantic period. Growth in empathy means growth in humanity. It is a less Confucian, more emotional, experiential way of becoming more gentle.

Although we should be glad that civilization has grown tremendously during the last centuries (no more infants sold, only to mutilate them and send them begging; no more family parties to watch crooks or slaves or heretics get tortured to death), we should not indulge in the ‘reverse ecological fallacy’ (11). That is, we should not equate the relative barbaric customs of former times and other cultures, with individuals who have barbaric minds. Such a practice would mean in a sense a ‘reverse barbarism’. A true gentleman, though discouraging or fighting barbarisms, does not blame others for behaving barbarically, because he recognizes barbaric tendencies in himself. As many ladies have learned, possibly both to their distress and their enjoyment: ‘a gentleman is a wolf who can wait’.

Civilization is a characteristic both of societies and of individuals. Thus we will find in each society, with whatever degree of civilization, less civilized and more civilized people. Just as a civilized society has many people who are rather barbaric, either below the surface or outright, barbaric societies also have civilized individuals, either below the surface or outright. Arnold Toynbee has painted these facts in stark tones (12):

‘But if there have been a few transfigured men and women, there has never been such a thing as a civilized society. Civilization, as we know it, is a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbour. No known civilization has ever reached the goal of civilization yet … In the least uncivilized society at its least uncivilized moment, the vast majority of its members have remained very near indeed to the primitive human level.’

This view does not need to make us pessimists, because it also means that in any society there will be civilized individuals who will fight and transform barbarism, though often at great cost to themselves. In terms of Toynbee, there is no advance without creative individuals willing and able to suffer. Civilization may be the main producer of civilized minds, but civilized minds are the only producers of civilization.

Cultures differ in their level of humanitas, civilization. There are many ways to be considerate, and our own ways are not better than those of others, but each culture has many practices that are humane or inhumane. We may understand clitoridectomy (cutting out the clitoris) from its historical roots and appreciate that this practice is part of a culture. But we may still try to eradicate it. Being considerate means only that we should not ascribe personal barbaric qualities to the practitioners. We could do that only to people in our culture who would practice it. ‘Reversed ecological fallacy’, ascribing to individuals traits that are really collective traits, is so common that we seldom recognize it.

What does all this mean for the Atlas syndrome? First, it influences our idea of civilization, and thus the kind of responsibilities we may feel. Secondly, progression in empathy, and thus in humanity and civilization, increases our field of worthwhile action, worthwhile improvement, because it encompasses more people. We can feel sorry and to a certain extent responsible for people at the other end of the globe. Our idea of civilized society is enlarged, and so our task becomes larger. The Atlas syndrome is as much a child of Romanticism as of the Enlightenment.

From: The Atlas Syndrome, the first chapter of my book People Make the World http://www.lulu.com/shop/hans-tendam/how-people-make-the-world/paperback/product-11712018.html