The Science of Real Problem Solving

I'm Richard Lloyd Jones and welcome to another episode of Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. Read the literature about complex problem solving and you're in for a challenging read. System structure and dynamics, facets of intelligence, positive and negative dependencies. It's mind-numbing stuff that seeks to concretize often abstract what if scenarios so popular in corporate planning departments or government games theory laboratories.

The nub of the thing is this: you've got a goal you want to reach, and a lot of variables in the way of achieving it. What do you need to put in place to transform the state of your current reality into the desired reality?

It's analytical, logical and quantifiable for flow charts and computer programmers. And its focus on solutions proves that complex problem solving is the territory of those pragmatic Americans, raised as they are on the can-do philosophy of Dale Carnegie and Norman Vincent Peale.

But from the perspective of the leading edge thinking emerging from Norberto Keppe's International Society of Analytical Trilogy, it misses a huge point: to go forward, we first have to look backward.

The science of real problem solving, today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head.

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Going Beyond the Dogmas of Science

Dogma. A principle or set of principles laid down by an authority as incontrovertibly true. Meaning incapable of being questioned or doubted. In the 15 and 1600s, there was the beginning of a movement against dogma that burst forth from the scientific studies of such giants as Copernicus and Keppler, Newton and Galileo. Names we know well, even if we understand little of their proposals.

But this much we can understand: the scientists of the time were engaged in replacing untestable dogmas with scientific scrutiny and experimentation.

The dogmas they were opposing, or course, were from the religious institutions of the time. Large and powerful churches not opposed to burning or drowning those who disagreed with them. Scientific experimentation, then, was a good thing that helped move us from superstition and irrationality.

But there is a danger as well when experimental science is elaborated independently from the knowledge that was available in the past. It creates another intransigent dogma.

We'll go beyond the dogmas of modern science, today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head.

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