What to Do When There’s No Button to Press

In times of change, instead of looking for which button to press, look for the seed of what wants to happen. This brief dive into oriental thinking shows the way.

The Occidental—that's a fancy word for Western—style of thinking is not well suited to dealing with uncertainty. It is a linear style of thinking which holds that everything happens in a straight line, from cause to effect. Flowing from that is the assumption that every mishap can be explained and, once explained, never repeated. You know, like when your boss says, "Write me a report!" That kind of explanation. Or, if it was a desirable event, then it can be made to happen perfectly every time. (Boss: "Write it into a process.")

However, life is more complex, and things seldom happen in a straight line. Just look at your average war, or American election, or sports tournament. Therefore, to deal with complexity, we have to adapt our thinking. Typically, we introduce things like systems thinking, which is really linear thinking with many lines crisscrossing each other. Seriously, just google "systems thinking" and select images. You'll get something like the one below, where the image on the right is the same as the one on the left, just with more (or more curved) lines in it.

Don't get me wrong, there's plenty to be said for linear thinking and systems thinking. It's brought us quite a long way. It's given us lightbulbs, and algorithms. However, there's one piece of the puzzle that most linear or systems thinkers tend to miss and it's a valuable one for developing a mindset that can navigate through uncertainty.

The Western mind—the one that requires systems thinking—sees reality as consisting of fixed, explainable "things" with complicated relationships between them. It sees change as something that "happens" to those things when you push a button. The Oriental mind observes reality through a different lens. It sees the relationship between things—those lines in systems thinking—as primary, and the "things" as just temporary markers along the way. It sees reality as an ongoing movement with a  life of its own, which can't be entirely controlled, but needs to be understood and followed.

Western thinking sees the river: its banks, its position on the map; its usefulness. It sees a thing. Oriental thinking sees a movement.

The best analogy is probably the river. Western thinking sees the river: its banks, its position on the map; its usefulness. It sees a thing. Oriental thinking sees a movement of water that flows between the banks—water that is never the same, so it's never the same river. Or take the yin-yang symbol, the taijitu. Western thinking sees two opposites as permanent "things"—light and dark, or day and night—that must coexist in some uneasy balance. It interprets the dot on each side to mean that each side contains something of its opposite—as a static "thing". Oriental thinking sees the dot and recognises that it represents a seed, the potential for each side to turn into its opposite.

Within night is the seed of day and vice versa (and without one, no seed for the other). Within trust is the seed of betrayal. This is important. Without trust, there could be no betrayal. It's not a separate thing, the one flows from the other. Without betrayal, there would be no value in trust. The one flows from the other. The Western mind is therefore surprised when one turns into the other (and looks for a cause), while the oriental mind (in this case, Buddhists) have a saying for it: Time is the only thing that separates friends, enemies and strangers.

This way of thinking has its ultimate expression in the classical Chinese text, the I Ching, or Book of Changes, which is all about the relationship between things, and the movement from one state of being to another.

So how is this relevant? When stuff happens, the Western mind naturally asks the question, "Why?" It wants explanations, so that it can control the things that happen, ideally by finding a button to push. The oriental mind sees the movement and asks, as the I Ching does, "What is turning into what, and what does that tell us about what we should do?" Summer is turning into winter and so we should store food. Success is at its peak so we should beware of complacency.

Perhaps more important are our responses when there's a down cycle, or when things appear to not be going our way. Instead of looking for causes, and people to blame, and things to fix, buttons to push, we can look for the potential movement, the seed of renewal, or what might emerge from this. Because remember, as per the yin-yang symbol, failure necessarily carries the seed of success.

In western business language we might say, "What are the opportunities?" I prefer the question, "What wants to happen?" Or, "What wants to emerge?" This question dissolves our misguided assumption that life is all under our control and that everything is a linear transaction between our pressing a button and some predictable result. The proposed question encourages us to recognise that there might be a bigger picture at play, one we can't see yet.

Here's an example I like to use to illustrate this, and it comes from the world of rugby. Warren Whiteley was an excellent player and inspirational captain of the Lions Super Rugby team at a time when that team was at its peak. He was selected to be the national (Springbok) team captain but got injured. They had a stand-in captain while they waited for him to recover, however, he got injured again. The 2019 World Cup was looming, and they needed a permanent captain to take them to that tournament. Siya Kolisi was appointed and became South Africa's first black Springbok captain. That turned out to be the best thing that could have happened for the team in terms of broadening its support base, which in turn gave it added impetus to win, and win they did.

My invitation to you then is to consciously look for the seed of what wants to happen, rather than the things that are going wrong and need fixing—rather than looking for the button to push. Of course, there will still be things that need fixing, so discernment is required. The point is to add this new line of thinking—and this new question—to your range of responses.