Finding the core issue

Imagine you get lucky: you will be granted three wishes. What will you wish? From fairytales we know how easy it is to wish foolishly or to wish for something that appears foolish afterward. The old Greeks said already that when the gods want to punish people, they grant their wishes. So we need wisdom. Maybe the best first wish is for wisdom with the second wish. And what would the third wish be? The surprising answer is that we cannot know. When our best wish is granted, our situation will change, we will change and only after a while, we may find what would be the best wish then.

I developed core issue identification from my experiences with strategic issue management. After proper analysis, we would usually find between 5 and 15 strategic issues for an organization like a company or an institution. Working on an issue list for the Netherlands, we found six real strategic issues out of a first list of about 35 possible national issues. My issue list for the planet came ulimately to ten issues. With police forces, the first lists would be about 15-20 issues, after analysis reduced to 5-7 strategic issues for the next 5 years.
Interestingly, almost always, by further analysis, one issue would dwarf the others in importance. That discovery would lead to an initial shock and then galvanize the team involved into action. Several times that number one issue, that core issue, would be utterly and totally solved within a few months. Because the organization really set its teeth in it.

In a number of cases, there would be two issues vying for first place, but of a completely different nature: one would be an issue within the present mission and capability of the organization, and one would require a new capability and some redefinition of the mission. Guess which of the two was always taken up first.
Later, I began to apply the same core issue identification for more individual situations, in the framework of coaching and personal consultancy. Usually, it was less easy. Although an individual is a much smaller system than a company or a government agency, both mission and capability are much more indefinite. Few people can bring themselves to the rigorous self-reflection that is necessary. Many seem afraid to look into the mirror and confront the momentary key challenge in their lives.

From a completely different angle, I found an other approach: my work on organizational constellations. I started to do what I call core issue constellations. And I found these can be applied very well to individuals also. Though still I would find that it required both personal courage and wisdom of the client to face and understand the issue. Anyway, finding your core issue is galvanizing.

So now I approach core issue identification sometimes from the analytical and sometimes from the intuitive side, sometimes by strategic issue analysis and sometimes by constellation work. I like this work, though it produced one drawback: I have become impatient with clients who don't want to go to the core of things.
I can't tell you the core issues my clients found and I won't tell you my own core issue, but I can tell you the core issue we found for the Netherlands as a country, six years ago: Immigrants and Immigration. Still sounds right to me.

Talents and personal destiny

I will announce a new workshop: 'Discovering your talents.' As so often, once you are into a subject, you meet entries and references at unsuspected places. A fortnight ago I was at the book presentation of 'Coporate Entity,' the posthumous life work of Karel DeVries, who was a colleague and partner in Ansoff Joele Associates, consultants in strategic management. His book is about the corporation as an entity with its own personality and its own life forces. A healthy corporation contributes to its stakeholders, internal and external. Its managers and employees contribute to the corporation. Viable systems within viable systems.

The whole of nested systems is more or less alive, it is vital. Individual vitality and individual contributions rest on the talents of the people involved, having functions in which they can express those talents. It is the responsibility of people to maximize the use of their talents. Their talents determine where they fit. So, in the view of DeVries, Talents are destiny.

This is interesting when we compare it with the well-known dictum: Character is destiny. This is used mainly to explain failures and apparent bad luck as the consequence of character flaws. But also that successes and apparent good-luck are to a large extent the consequence of good character. We have many - also very recent - examples of public figures whose careers crashed by character flaws.

But we can also look at careers from the point of view of talents. Now exactly what are your talents? What can you do better than most people? What can you do better than almost anybody? What can you possibly do better than anybody in the world? Or, more to the point: what can you do while being perfectly in flow? Reflecting on this is more useful, as it avoids clumsy comparisons and avoids ego inflation, a condition less common, but more irritating to others than ego deflation. Less than a century ago, Alfred Adler coined the terns inferiority complex and superiority complex. When you are in flow, you hardly care about how good you are and you don't care s.... (you know what) about how good others are.

Your talents are not necessarily what people say they are or what you think they are. They are in where you are in flow. One of my favorite quotes is from Tom Peters: Real success comes from the soul and the market place simultaneously. How about that as a definition what in flow really means? In flow with yourself and with the world at the same time. Of course. Realizing that this is what it is, is a blinding flash of the obvious.

Anyway, discovering and freeing your talents is the surprising twin to market intelligence.