How to become a mysterious problem solver.
Three things you can do right now.
I ran into a friend the other day. He had participated in a workshop I’d facilitated, and when he saw me, he exclaimed, “Aitabé, your work is so mysterious!”
Mysterious!
What do you do, you might wonder?
It’s quite straightforward, actually: I help people solve their problems.
But, yes, there is a kind of trick to it.
What my friend is seeing - and not seeing - is this: a person tells me about their problem by describing the parts they see, and I use that information to illuminate the parts they don’t.
You could say that I read problems the way others read tea leaves or tarot cards.
But there’s nothing I want more than to de-mystify the process.
I especially want more parents and educators to develop these skills so children and teens can be empowered to understand and change things they don’t like.
Towards that end, here are three things that will help you become a mysterious problem-solver as well.
But wait! Before you read, think about something in your life that you wish were different - anything that matters to you. Use these steps to look at your issue.
Ready? Here’s Step One:
Step #1: Get clear about your “miracle”.
The Miracle Question was developed by Steve de Shazer and Insoo Kim Berg in their practice of Solution-Focused Brief Therapy. If you don’t already know it, I’m excited to share it with you.
The basic idea is this:
Imagine that a miracle has happened and your problem has completely disappeared. How is your life different now?
Frame your response as something positive that you want, not a double negative of not having what you don’t want. For example, if you need a new car, rather than saying, “I won’t have to keep going to the mechanic,” you might say, “I will feel the ease and freedom of driving a car that starts every time and makes me happy!”
Feels good, right?
The miracle question does three things:
First, it helps you get clear about what you really want.
Second, it creates the solution state and makes it more available to you than it was just a moment before. If you’ve named it well, you’ll feel a positive feeling in your body.
Third, now that the solution state has been identified, you have an additional element in your system. It’s not just you and your problem. Now you have you, your problem, and the solution state!
This is how I help people become more empowered problem solvers: I help them create maps of their questions, maps that give them more freedom and agency, and reveal the larger system in which their question is embedded.
Now, answer the miracle question for yourself. And once you’ve got that, you can move on to the next step, where you’ll build out your system even more.
Step #2: Separate the symptoms from the cause.
The parts you see are not the cause of the problem; they’re the result of it.
When my friend uses the word mysterious, I think of a magic trick.
The magician waves their hands, something surprising happens, and then you applaud, look around at the people next to you, and mouth to your neighbor, “How did they do that?!”
But, like the magician, I know that what’s really happening is not that I have magical powers. What’s really happening is that you have been trained to look in the wrong direction.
Rather than looking at the actions that would reveal the trick, you only see the surprising results.
It’s the same thing when it comes to looking at our problems; we see the result, not the cause.
You feel the pain of a headache.
You see someone asking for money at the stoplight.
You worry about a student’s ability to tell truth from fiction on social media.
Your attention is drawn to the parts of the problem you can see.
And if you want to solve the problem?
We live in a society that equates erasing the visible symptoms with solving the problem.
✅ You have a headache, you take a pill.
✅ Your city wants to address homelessness, your city council focuses on housing.
✅ Teachers want to prepare students to navigate the world, so they teach critical thinking.
In systems thinking, this is described as symptom-level or event-level thinking.
You track different symptoms or events, and then your mind creates cause-and-effect relationships between them based on what you believe to be true.
❌ But what happens when the headache keeps coming back?
❌ When mental illness and addiction are not addressed?
❌ When information overload turns “critical thinking” into choosing the silo you most align with?
Many people will say that OBVIOUSLY, I know that just fixing the symptoms won’t address the root cause of a problem.
But we still do it - because we haven’t been taught to do anything else.
So engaging in this next step may feel completely nonsensical, but TRUST THE PROCESS. It will definitely break you out of symptom-level thinking.
Step #2: Separate the symptom from the cause.
In your imagination, or on a piece of paper, create an image of the symptom and its cause as two separate things. Do this as a form of play, or intuition, or complete spontaneous nonsense. Definitely don’t do it as something you have to get right.
When I do this, I can actually feel the two parts, and my drawing reflects the felt-sense I have of them.
Example: Headache. When I sense into my headache, the symptom appears as a small but dense dot of energy in my left temple. And - in an act of complete spontaneous nonsense - when I sense into the cause, it shows up as energy in my throat. That’s a surprise!
Example: Social Media. When I sense into students on social media, the symptom feels like energy in my head, behind my eyes, and at my temples. And I feel the compulsion of scrolling.
And when I sense into the cause? I feel discomfort, almost sadness, in my upper chest. It makes me think of a mix of longing for and fear of connection. That’s very interesting!
Now it’s your turn. Working with your problem, create your own inner image of the symptom and the cause.
What if you get an impression or sensation, but you don’t know what it means? That’s pretty normal. It means the right hemisphere of your brain is giving you information that your left hemisphere hasn’t interpreted yet. Here’s what you do: journal your ideas about it. Sometimes you’ll hit on an interpretation of the experience that feels like a clear YES, that’s it. Other times it will be less clear, but hopefully you’ll have some possibilities or new insights you didn’t have before.
#3. Three kinds of intervention.
This is where you’re gonna get a bit meta. You will also learn a very important idea about real-life problem-solving: it’s not about getting the right answer. It’s about finding the solution that feels satisfactory to you right now.
Most real-life problems do not have “right answers”; they have solutions that move the situation toward greater coherence.
One of my teachers, Jan Jacob Stam, taught me this concept - I think he called it the Orders of Intervention, but I could be making that up. Anyway, it’s really helpful, so I offer it to you. However, I am using terms he didn’t use and describing it according to my own experience. So if the idea doesn’t make sense, blame me, not him.
The purpose of this step is to figure out which interventions best satisfy the problem you have. There are three levels of intervention: Level 1: Mechanical-Efficiency; Level 2: Relational-Coherence; Level 3: Evolutionary-Disruption
Mechanical-Efficiency. A problem in this category is one in which you're satisfied with the system when it functions well, but it has presently become inefficient, constrained, or broken down. Mechanical problems, problems with organization, time management, or other system limitations, fall into this category. The intervention? These problems can be solved with good diagnosis, good advice, and technical knowledge. If your problem is at this level, you can probably find your solution on YouTube, for example.
Relational-Coherence. A problem in this category is more complex and relational. It is a system that is not functioning well, and you don’t know why or how. Your goal is to increase alignment and flow, to improve the health of the system. In other words, greater coherence. The intervention? Insight that results in relational shifts, updated and rearranged roles, and redrawn or clarified boundaries that result in more presence and openness. Most of your problems will probably fall in this category.
Evolutionary-Disruption. A problem in this category is one in which the system itself is at its breaking point. Sorry, but you don’t have any control over the system at this level. In this category, you and your nervous system are the points of intervention. Navigating this one is experienced by most as a personal or spiritual crisis. It requires honest self-reflection to understand how entangled you are with the dying system - and whether you can trust the new one that is emerging.
As I said at the top, this step is not about identifying the correct category for the problem. It’s about choosing the intervention that produces a result that satisfies you. And once you know the level at which you want to work, this step will point you in the direction you need to go to solve your problem.
Example: Headache. Continuing with the inner images I created in the last step, I could put my headache into category 1, Efficiency-Mechanical. In which case, taking aspirin will be satisfactory. But if I want to understand why my throat felt stuck, that’s a category 2, Relational-Coherence question. The solution at this level asks me to gain some insight about what that feeling means.
Example: Social Media. If I look at my inner image of students on social media, a category 1 intervention might be just taking away their phones. But a category 2 intervention would be about designing fun ways for my students to feel more connected to each other.
You did it! And I’ve got more.
If this was helpful, I’ve got more examples and articles coming.
And if you want even greater depth, stay tuned for details about my SenseThinking Facilitator Training in May.
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Aitabé
Family and Systemic Constellations Facilitator
Creator of SenseThinking