SOMETIMES YOU’LL FIND YOURSELF IN baffling situations. No matter how you twist your mind around, you won’t be able to understand what’s going on. It might be something in your family. Maybe your usually kind uncle will attack you out of the blue. Or it could be in your workplace, when management suddenly puts out a policy that runs counter to the company’s mission. Or on the national scale, it could happen when voting results defy all the polls and surprise everyone.
At times like these, the information you have is typically so limited that without more of it, you’ll never understand what’s going on. But often in these situations people don’t even know they aren’t seeing the whole picture, so they don’t seek more information. They simply settle for being confused, or they become angry and blaming. They may scapegoat. In Germany during WWII, Jews were held responsible for many challenges the country was facing.
But if you are wise, when you can’t put a puzzle together, you will understand that it may be because you’re missing some of the pieces. And to find them, you need to step back and look at the situation from a wider and more distant perspective. It’s helpful to think in terms of relationships. Back to your kind-but-attacking uncle. If you do some sleuthing, you may find that he’s battling a serious illness and his medicine is affecting his mind. Or maybe he’s facing some threatening financial pressures. What you discover will expand the situation from one involving just your uncle and you. Other members of your family, people outside the family, your uncle’s past, or his health or finances, etc.—these may play a role.
In the workplace, management often fails to fully share information about company challenges. Again, if you know you don’t have all the puzzle pieces, you can become a detective, taking care not to believe the rumors that will start flying as people make up reasons for management’s actions and share them as truth. You can be a real asset to your workplace if you ask the right people for more information and show them that not sharing critical information is causing a lot of trouble.
On the national level, the 2016 presidential elections showed that the Democrats had not understood how many white working-class people, especially men, were feeling left behind, trapped, depressed and angry. This blind spot is still not fully understood. In order to appreciate the full picture, it’s necessary to keep on exploring until we find all the pieces. It may be tempting to believe we understand what was going on when only a couple factors have been identified. However, if we stop there, the puzzle will still be incomplete, leading to inaccurate conclusions. Yes, jobs lost to automation and cheaper labor overseas was part of it. And yes, having had a black president for eight years and then having the Democrats nominate a woman were part of it, at a time when uncertainty was breeding distrust of “the other.” But there is so much more to this puzzle that we don’t fully grasp yet.
So if you don’t understand it, expand it. Look at the concentric circles of context around the situation. Think about how each player in it is related to others, both inside the group and outside it. Think about pressures pushing in on the whole group. In doing these things, you’ll keep uncovering more puzzle pieces. And eventually, you’ll understand it.
