The three main interventions

Neils Bohr said, “An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.” I’ve come to the notion that being an expert merely comes down to three things: knowledge, experience, and discernment. If you want to become an expert at something learn all you can about it, then spend some time practicing the craft or participating in the field. Together, these yield discernment—the ability to intuitively and knowledgeably understand what’s what and what to do about it.

One of my favorite stories is of the engineer who had an exceptional gift for fixing all things mechanical. After serving his company loyally for over 30 years, he happily retired. Several years later, the company contacted him regarding a seemingly impossible problem they were having with one of their multi-million dollar machines. They had tried everything and everyone to get the machine fixed, but to no avail. In desperation, they called on the retired engineer who had solved so many of their problems in the past.

The engineer reluctantly took the challenge. He spent a day studying the huge machine. At the end of the day, he marked a small “x” in chalk on a particular component of the machine and stated, “This is where your problem is.”

The part was replaced and the machine worked perfectly again. The company received a bill for $50,000 from the engineer for his services. The new CEO at the company was outraged at the bill. He demanded an itemized accounting of the charges.

The engineer responded:

One chalk mark . . . . . . . . . . . . . $1
Knowing where to put it . . . . . . . $49,999.

After you spend time in your field you begin to recognize patterns and cycles. You get comfortable with the idea that there are only a limited number of variables for any given thing. You gain the perspective that fads and movements come and go, and that some come around again. If you’re a writer experiencing writer’s block, it’s helpful to remember that there’s a limited number of specific story plots available to any writer. If you’re a manager, it helps to know that when faced with a particular problem there’s a finite number of solutions from which to choose. If you’re a therapist at one point you get pretty good at diagnozing what the problem is before the clients or patients finish their description of what ails them. There’s no need to spend a lot of time re-inventing the wheel—it’s just a matter of choosing the best solution for the circumstance.

I have a hunch that the same may be true for issues related to stuckness in relationships. Whatever the context for the stuckness—a corporation, an institution, a family, or in a congregation, there are only three therapeutic interventions for getting unstuck. Those are:

• Go back and study your genogram and pursue any family of origin work you need to given attention to
• Work on your differentiation (getting clear about your goals, values and principles while staying connected)
• Work at detriangulation (refusing to take responsility for what does not rightly belong to you and repositioning yourself in the triangles).

One always hates to take the mystery out of things, but perhaps the difference between a novice and an expert may simply be that the expert knows enough about the limitations of possibility and respects the limitation of means—and these allow him to make a sound decision, intuitively and quickly, and conserve energy and effort. While the novice, on the other hand, gets lost in an unexplored territory of seemingly endless possibilities resulting in trial-and-error and lost time and energy. (The other thing about the expert is that he or she will allow the clock to run its full consultation hour before offering the three obvious solutions that become apparent to him within the first five minutes!).