Imagine you’ve just been promoted at your job in a large organization. That’s the good news. The bad news is that you’re asked to fly tomorrow to sort out problems in a branch office you’ve had no contact with before now. No one is clear what the core problem is, but you are sent there to sort it out—with the power to hire and fire. You are overwhelmed. How do you begin?
When faced with a challenge, we should ask ourselves two questions: “What’s actually going on?” and “What should I do?” How we follow through on these questions will determine the wisdom and effectiveness of our actions, be it with family, work, or our personal lives.
Of course, we all differ in our approaches. Some of us feel more comfortable thinking about the questions that a challenge raises rather than rushing to act. Others prefer acting quickly rather than pausing to inquire. But in order to act wisely, we need to access both clear insight and decisive action. Insight without action is impotent; action without insight is reckless.
What follows is one model for wise action, for how we can respond with the right approach at the right time. It proposes five steps in the life-cycle of an action—Entering, Exploring, Acting, Completing and Letting Go. Each step calls for a different attitude and different skills, and evokes a different aspect of mindfulness.
Entering
When you get to the branch office, you notice that everyone is nervous. Some employees are too friendly, others are wary, and some seem frozen in panic. They’re waiting for something to happen.
It’s easy to get carried away by the energy of your nervousness or emotions and react before you have the necessary information.
But in any new situation, we need to learn before acting. So the first step is to meet the situation with an attitude of “not-knowing.” In practice, this means that our very first act is to do nothing: We simply pause, so we can let go of our psychological momentum and open our senses and attention to the details of the new situation. By stopping that way, we often experience our internal busyness, nervousness, impulsiveness and assumptions more vividly, reducing our chances of allowing them to distort our experience without our realizing it.
This willingness to look freshly despite feeling shaky is what it means to be genuinely “open.” It’s the fundamental attitude of mindfulness practice, allowing whatever comes up in our experience to be there—including our fears and reactions and desire to flee from the spot.
Pausing at this stage doesn’t mean that we simply persist in doing nothing. It means, rather, allowing ourselves to do what the moment calls for without imposing a preconceived idea or reaction on it. Other ways to talk about this are “doing nothing extra,” “not reacting,” “letting the situation reveal itself,” and “welcoming your experience.”
In challenging situations, we must look openly and honestly at the problem at hand—despite our fear of what we’ll see.
This simple step of entering is the hardest to do—but if we miss it we start off on the wrong foot. We can probably think of a number of times we’ve been reactive and jumped to the wrong conclusion. In organizational life, with the pressures of the bottom line and the need to look competent, we waste a huge amount of time and effort because we rarely find the space to see habitual assumptions at the beginning of initiatives. In military terms, this is the “shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later” or the “ready-fire-aim” syndrome.
When you do nothing at the troubled office but display patient interest, there’s a group exhalation, and the atmosphere calms down.
Exploring
Having entered the situation and opened your eyes and ears and cleared your mind, you now need to get to the root of the problem or figure out a way forward.
The main obstacle to exploring challenging situations is the difficulty in looking openly and honestly for fear of what we’ll see and what it may demand of us.
As with entering, exploring demands openness—we need to allow all relevant information in. The key is to explore with genuine curiosity. That curiosity is natural to us. It is present in mindfulness practice when we feel relaxed. It’s a spontaneous sense of interest and friendliness toward whatever arises in our experience. Without some of that inquisitiveness, our inquiry becomes just ticking off preconceived boxes— we’re going to miss a lot.
There are at least four significant ways to explore a situation—through reductive analysis, systemic analysis, body intuition, and pattern recognition. We each use all four, although often not consciously. Most of us rely on one or two, and may disparage the others. But they are all potent in revealing different aspects of the terrain we need to be aware of when acting wisely.
Reductive Analysis
Reductive analysis splits a situation into its parts and looks closely at each, using tools ranging from pro and con analyses to spreadsheet projections and detailed project plans. It’s what we usually mean by “analyzing.”
Systems-Oriented Analysis
Systems-oriented analyses show the more holistic view of how things connect to larger and often surprising patterns. We need to be aware of the wide variety of influences, some not immediately obvious, on our object of inquiry. Among other things, this kind of investigation clarifies the root causes of a problem as opposed to the symptoms, and can reveal unsuspected places where a small action can have a large effect on what we’re trying to achieve.
Body Intuition
On the intuitive side, we can get useful information through methodical attention to the feelings in our body, which includes “gut instinct”—“there’s something off here,” or “I feel that person would be a good ally.” This is a deep listeni