Problem-Solving

At this point, we are ready to make use of the analyses already engaged regarding the domains of intentions, information and ideas. While we enter these domains frequently when we are navigating our daily life, they come to the fore in particular when we are confronting a problem that is not easily solved. It is at these challenging moments that we are most likely to be attracted to readily accessible information and intentions that have been manufactured by other people. Misinformation and lies are abundantly available to lead us in the wrong direction. Given our vulnerability to misinformation and lies at these problem-solving points in our life, we will focus on processes that can be effectively deployed when facing a problem.

Intentions [Desired State]

This is the terminating point. What are the goals, aims, ends, purposes, objectives, desired outcomes to be achieved. A description or portrayal is offered of how the outcome will look and work. A critical review should be engaged that not only helps us determine what we really care about regarding outcomes, but also helps us discern what we don’t really care about and that helps us surface the motives behind the lies and misinformation that swirl around our head and heart. The main point to be made here is that this discernment is not about finding the one thing we care about. It is about finding the multiple things we care about and identifying the relationships between these various outcomes. We will be true to ourselves when we recognize that we care about more than one thing.

We can frame this important point by turning to an often-used metaphor. We can think of our outcomes as being like the target we focus on when shooting arrows or darts. The important point to make is that a target is not the bullseye. While a bullseye represents the center point of the intentional domain, the target represents the broader setting in which a number of different intentions can be identified. Some of these intentions reside very close to the bullseye – and might in fact reside inside the bullseye itself – being at the very heart of the matter.

Other intentions reside at some distance from the bullseye and are close to other intentions (complementing one another) or at opposites sides of the target (serving as opposing or even incompatible intentions). One of the falsehoods associated with many lies and sources of misinformation is that there is one intention and only one intention when exploring any problem or engaging in the formulation of any policy or plotting out any plan. It would be a strange (and quite challenging) target indeed if it was very small and consisted only of the bullseye.

As we have already noted, Daniel Kahneman and his two colleagues, Olivier Sibony and Cass Sustein (2021) write about the distinction between bias and noise. Let’s go a bit further than we did before into understanding this distinction. They begin with a story about assessing the success of someone shooting arrows into a target. One desirable outcome would be for all the arrows to hit the target in the same area. When this occurs, we can applaud the consistency of the archer. Another outcome would be for the arrows to arrive all over the target. Typically, we devalue this outcome. The archer has not been consistent in directing arrows toward the target.

Kahneman, Sibony and Sustein (2021) suggest that these assessments of success must be questioned. The first outcome indicates only that there is consistency—not that the arrows have arrived at or near the bullseye. The arrows could cluster at some point at quite a distance from the bullseye. This placement would reveal a BIAS. Conversely, arrows arriving at many places on the target reveal NOISE. Our authors suggest that these are quite different flaws in the performance of the archer—and that both Noise and Bias are to be found frequently in the judgements made by most of us.