Attitude Matters
Reframe your Perspective and Change Your Outcomes.
Just finished third Chemo Treatment #3 at the Baker Centre in Calgary.
My dietitian dropped in on me and wow, what a good discussion.
Bottom line, I'm not getting enough calories. But I see a plan to change that. Getting calories is one of those in my control. That makes it my responsibility.
I realized I needed an attitude change. Not that my attitude was bad. It just wasn't good enough. I needed to up my game.
I've approached my cancer treatment as a complicated project management challenge. Something I'm experienced with and pretty good at as a lawyer and public policy consultant. Seemed smart.
In complicated problems, we know there is an answer. It just has to be found or created.
There is a structured set of hierarchical stages, phases, steps and measures. They are all directed towards reaching a predefined preferred goal. Which in my mind is to get the most optimal cure outcomes from my treatments.
That complicated project approach was just fine. But, just like any other rigid project/battle plan, it only works up to the point of actually confronting the enemy.
My eating enemy is human nature, mine to be specific That's adds a very different set challenges. It shows up in all kinds of ways like personal biases, unexamined presumptions, assumptions and associations, and feedback loops. Can't forget feedback loops.
The clean and objective, lean and linear, complex project management approach gets disrupted and essentially abandoned.
The problem “answer” is pursed based on the experience of experts. There are lots of Sufi Fabled experts, each seeing the problem according to their personal part of the elephant, never based on the wholeness of the problem. Expert blindspots arise and they still try and rule.
Without great leadership the blindspots will destroy the greater well-intended good.
The exposed complexity, inherent in the problem, demands a change of plans. But that is not easy because experts have to abandon what has been working, up to now. The unlearning of the past will sabotage the new.
More to come. But here's a tease.
The relationship between Simple and Complicated Problems is linear and direct. The goal is to accept the problem is Complicated and to try to make it into Simple
The relationship between Complicated and Complex problems is to accept that the problem is Complex.
Complex solutions are not to bring the problem back to Complicated. The Complexity solution is found in making the problem more Complex.