What’s with the ball of string?
“What’s with the ball of string?”
An understandable question.
It represents the perpetual, unanswerable question:
“How long is a piece of string?”
Although, that’s the wrong question to ask. Every question has an answer, and in this case, it’s:
“Twice as long as it is from one end to the middle”.
The answer to the right question is often simpler than we imagine or expect, or sometimes want it to be.
The ball of string represents almost every problem I have ever been presented with by my clients:
It has a beginning, and an end, and what occasionally appears to be a complicated and tangled middle separating the two.
What we see and understand is one piece.
One object. One problem.
On closer inspection, many pieces make up the whole, and the more we remove from that strand of string, its true simplicity becomes easier to see.
Many people attempt to untangle the whole thing at once, or become distracted by the greater problem.
The quickest solution lies in finding a loose thread to untangle the problem, or complex situation. In most cases that loose thread is a question.
My job for 20 years has been to know where the loose thread is - and which question to ask.
I’ve spent the last 20 years uncovering the right questions to help clients untangle problems; to untangle their metaphorical ball of string, for the right question reveals new answers and new ways of thinking.
To fully explain my approach, I have written a behaviour theory, called The String Theory, based on the physics theory of the same name, but focusing on how one small change to the way we think, feel, and behave, can cause extraordinary positive results.
Click here to read it.
“We couldn’t have done it without you, or indeed with anyone else.”
