“Going meta,” according to Dennett, is a philosopher’s most important tool for thinking and learning.  It is also among the best ways to gain a new perspective, get unstuck, get out of a rut, and move forward when struggling with a difficult problem.  It is not only the best way, there are times when it is the only way!

“Going meta,” Dennett writes, is “thinking about thinking, talking about talking, reasoning about reasoning.” The philosopher W. V. O Quine uses a different term, “semantic ascent.” For Quine it means ascending, or going up from talking about justice or freedom or elephants to talking about talking about justice, freedom or elephants. Going meta means to stop doing what we are doing – thinking reasoning, talking – then move up to the next level and examine how we are thinking, reasoning, talking.

Going meta not only applies to getting better at thinking, talking, and reasoning, but to almost any other activity: making decisions, persuading other people, solving problems, leading a meeting, praising others, discipling children, giving (or getting) feedback, writing an essay or a report, and on and on. Meta-work begins with stopping whatever we are doing,  then examining how we are doing it, then making changes so that things will work better in the future.  Here are some phrases that begin the process of “going meta” in real time:

“This isn’t working for me.  I would like to start over.”

“It seems to me that we’re lost.  Where are we on the agenda?”

“I don’t want to have a fight.  Let’s stop and see where we are.”

Going meta is useful for working on previous problem situations as well. It begins when one person says “You know that argument we had yesterday?  I would like to talk about how we got into it and what we can do to avoid it in the future.”

“Going meta” is especially useful when people are struggling to make something work and having limited success.  What usually happens is everyone tries harder;  often, this only makes things worse.  What “going meta” offers is for people to take a look at what is happening, then “try differently.”  It offers an opportunity to break up unproductive patterns, whatever they are, and make a new start.

“Going meta” is among the most important skills for dealing with problems.

The purpose of  this website, and of the themes and issues addressed in these posts, is “going meta” with problems as problems.

There will be no attempts to “solve” any specific problem.  What we will do is “ascend,”  move up one level and then, looking down,  explore in depth the nature of problems themselves.

There are several reasons for this approach:

First, problems are an important part of everyone’s life.  In many ways, they are at the center of our lives.  As human beings, struggling with problems of one kind or another is surely among our most widely shared experience.  As the poet once noted (in what has been called the shortest poem ever written) “Adam had ’em.”  Though he was referring to microbes, he could just as well have meant problems.  And not only Adam! The rest of us have “had ’em” as well!

Second, even though problems are ubiquitous, many of us hold a number of profound misunderstandings about the nature of problems.  As a result, many of our most important problems, the ones that affect our lives most deeply, rarely get resolved no matter how hard we try.

Third, while we can “solve” some problems we face, there are others that seem to be beyond us.  As I will make clear later, these problems – the Wicked ones – are almost always among the most important.

Fourth:  Our “Quality of Life” – our satisfaction with what we do, our sense of personal worth, our successes in our most important relationships, and at work, our experiences of well-being and happiness – is largely determined by our abilities and skills in managing successfully our difficult,”messy” and complicated problems. While working on them is complicated, successful results with problems is not:  More skill with problems leads to more happiness; less skill, to more unhappiness.

Are problems really important in our lives?  Or can we, as some suggest, safely ignore them, focus on the positive, and get on with it.  This is an important issue I will come back to in the future.  For now, consider Mike Myatt’s, position.  Writing in Forbes Magazine Myatt argues that

…the biggest problems all leaders face is problem solving
itself…Pick any leadership challenge and it boils down to a
problem solving issue – nothing more, nothing less.  Issues
surrounding talent, finance, public policy, operations, strategy,
social purpose, execution, competition, litigations,etc., are simply
problems to be solved.

And then Myatt adds a zinger:  “…most leaders are woefully inept when it comes to problem solving.”

Myatt’s insight applies not only to leaders, but to the rest of us as well. Pick any issue that we care about and struggle with, and it turns out to be a problem to be “solved.”

The biggest problem we all face goes beyond any one problem.  It is figuring out how to deal with the processes of working on problems. And, sad to say, many of us are woefully inept in dealing not only with some problems, but with problem solving itself.

Learning about “problem solving itself” means going meta with problems.  Where to start?  I will come back to this in some detail in a future post.  For now, it is crucial to grasp the importance of “going meta:” stopping the action when things aren’t working, figuring out why, then trying again.  As I suggested earlier, this is among the best ways of making sure of progress while working on any problem.  When people, teams and organizations get off track, “going meta” may be the only way of making things better instead of making them worse.