Have you ever been faced with a tangled knot? I recently had to untangle a mass of jewelry and quickly became frustrated. Pulling and tugging random strands only seems to make parts of the knotted tangle tighter and released nothing from its grip. Cursing may have been involved, until I had to face the fact that this is a job that cannot be rushed. You have to take it slow, concentrate on one item at a time, gently unweaving it through other things. You must flatten and make space in the tangle until you can see the gaps and how things twist in and around each other. This week I was brought some problems and challenges. In each case the conclusion was made that we first must understand the current state, decide the desired state, and then work to figure out how to make the leap from here to there. Like the jewelry, this cannot be rushed, there must be some time, space, study, and care to make sure that we are seeing things clearly, seeing how things are twisting and getting tangled up. One thing at a time can be extracted from a tangled problem until we have all the moving parts separated out and can take a good look. At this point we can often see that the root cause of the tangled mess was not what we thought it to be when we started the extraction efforts. Problems, like tangles are rarely simple or unencumbered by a multitude of things. Each contributing factor needs to be spread out on the table so we can properly decide where to start, what to do next and how to get to that desired state of our blinged out goal.
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