What is the answer? I know the answer! You got four out of five answers correct! Answer me! Did you answer the question?
Many chapters in my life have been about learning, knowing and bestowing answers. I often feel like I am searching for certain answers while imparting others on employees, students or my children.
Travel has taught me that I have been looking for and sharing answers, when solutions are so much more universal. Every culture produces different solutions to similar problems. There are no “straight answers” and very little agreement or disagreement, just a diversity of solutions.
- Answers communicate certainty, solutions communicate a desire for understanding.
- Answers tell, solutions collaborate.
- Answers are finite, solutions are evolutionary.
- Answers are something we search for outside of ourselves. Solutions require a part of us – they are participatory.
- Answers are black and white, right and wrong. Solutions are a situational shade of luminous grey.
- Answers want to be looked for while solutions beg for discovery.
Finding a solution means that I have accurately identified a problem that needs to be solved and by that point I am 99% of the way! Asking for answers or demanding them as I sometimes do, means I don’t yet know what I am looking to solve because I am still outside of myself.
Solution seekers are the wave of the future because they have clarity about the problem, courage to participate, and the unyielding knowledge that there are many truths.
