*** CLICK HERE: The accompanying BOOK! *** Feelings play an important, if not decisive, role in coping with complex problems, both in everyday life and in organisations, because sometimes feelings mobilise and steer events in a positive direction, but sometimes they also stand in the way of a successful solution. If a problem is complex and the solution may be risky and have serious consequences, the decision-maker may be unsettled and in some cases paralysed by fear. From a psychological point of view, however, a high level of self-confidence is a good prerequisite for appropriate processing and decision-making, whereby four aspects of successful problem-solving in complex situations take centre stage:
- Self-confidence and a sense of competence increase stamina and the power to persevere with the problem.
- Emotional attachment to the problem makes it possible to experience the significance of the current situation for the satisfaction of one’s own motives, i.e. good problem solvers are able to adapt emotionally.
- Functional thinking means that in complex systems it is less promising to know as much as possible about a situation and to grasp actual states as completely as possible, but rather to act in the awareness that you cannot know everything, to gather information about the change in states. Functional thinking also involves analysing a situation in terms of its effect variables, with the relationships between the variables of the system at the centre of the considerations.
- Experience in dealing with complex requirements does not necessarily lie in the availability of many different strategies, but rather in being able to adapt a personally successful, general strategy to the situational requirements and to develop a successful composition of a sequence of measures on this basis.
Ultimately, success in solving complex problems triggers positive development, i.e. self-confidence is increased for future cases. The tendency towards emotional attachment is also increased, and there is a greater availability of forms of thinking that have proven successful from experience. A process of competence development for complex problem solving is initiated and subsequently reinforces itself.
Literature
Starker, Ulrike (2013). Emotionale Adaptivität – Ein integratives Problemlösemodell. Beiträge zur Arbeitspsychologie, Band 4. Pabst.