How should we approach complex challenges and problems?

Question from the Internet:

“What are some effective strategies for making decisions when confronted with complex and multifaceted challenges?”

First of all, we cannot approach complex and multi-faceted challenges and problems alone. As we can see from multiple examples in the world, individual human beings and even smaller groups that have a singular interest, are totally incapable and unprepared to face complex and multi-faceted — most of the time global — challenges and problems.

Our inherently egocentric, self-serving, self-justifying, and subjective viewpoint and “personal computing: are simply incapable to approach, compute and comprehend anything that is beyond the narrow sphere of self-interest. And even when we are talking about teams, governments, and alliances that follow and serve a certain self-serving interest, it is the same picture.

In order to approach, successfully comprehend and solve complex and multi-faceted challenges and problems, we need a much broader and much more diverse “team”, which is comprised of vastly different, contrasting, and seemingly incompatible viewpoints and opinions.

Only when members of such a diverse and seemingly incompatible team learn and practice how to rise above their own opinions and accept — even wash themselves over by — the opinions of others, while retaining and providing their own opinions for the others to work with, can they form a unique “collective intellect” that can give birth to a collective opinion that did not previously exist in any of them and contains parts of all of their opinions.

This is something we need to learn since in order to make such “collective computing and decision making” successful we have to acquire an attitude and behavior that we are not born with, none of us.

On the other hand, in a global world, where we have all become individual cells of the same, closed, and integrated living organism and we all depend on one another, there is no other way of understanding and solving complex challenges and problems.