Hyndman.world
Vernon
Hyndman
Writer · Engineer · Entrepreneur · Mentor · Pastoral Interventionist · Creative Midwife
It’s more blessed to understand than to fix.
Objectify problems, not people.
Opening
I have spent a lifetime working with things that are complicated.
Sometimes they have been technical systems — engineering, biomedical research, computer networks, emerging technologies, and businesses.
Sometimes they have been human systems — marriages, families, addiction, recovery, leadership, faith, conflict, and change.
And sometimes they have been creative systems — books trying to find their shape, stories that have not yet found their language, photographs, films, video, and ideas that need help becoming something real.
At first glance, those may look like very different kinds of work.
To me, they have always begun in much the same place:
Pay attention.
Understand what is actually happening.
Notice what others may have missed.
Separate the person from the problem.
Find the pattern underneath the event.
Then decide what might help.
What each discipline taught
Engineering taught me to look for systems.
Biomedical work taught me to respect complexity.
Network engineering taught me that the visible failure may not be where the actual problem began.
Entrepreneurship taught me to experiment when there is no map.
Writing taught me to find language for things that are difficult to name.
Photography taught me to notice what is already in the frame.
Pastoral work taught me that understanding a human being is more important than reducing them to something that needs to be fixed.
Mentoring taught me that sometimes the most useful person in your life is simply someone who can see a little farther around the bend.
And creative work has taught me that not everything difficult is broken.
Sometimes something new is trying to be born.
So whether I am sitting with a couple, working through a recovery problem, mentoring a leader, developing a book, thinking about technology, helping shape a film, or listening to someone tell a story they have never quite known how to tell, I tend to begin with the same question:
What is actually happening here?
Because the quality of the intervention usually depends upon the quality of the understanding that came before it.
Begin with understanding
We are often too quick to fix.
Fix the marriage.
Fix the addiction.
Fix the organization.
Fix the child.
Fix the leader.
Fix ourselves.
Sometimes fixing is exactly what is required. But fixing too quickly can keep us from understanding the thing we are trying to change.
A behavior can be destructive and still be serving a function.
An argument may have very little to do with the subject of the argument.
A person who appears resistant may be protecting something important.
An addiction may be managing pain long before it becomes the source of additional pain.
A leadership failure may be partly an organizational design failure.
A stalled book may actually be three good books attempting to occupy the same manuscript.
A symptom is information.
An error message is information.
Conflict is information.
Resistance is information.
Even failure is information.
Understanding allows us to ask a better question before reaching for an answer.
The chapters
I
Systems
Engineering, biomedical work, networks, entrepreneurship, and what comes next.
II
Language
Writing, story, photography, film, and the meaning around the thing.
III
People
Recovery, pastoral intervention, faith, mentoring, and creative midwifery.
IV
The Thread
Different ways of paying attention — and what is trying to emerge.