Earlier, in LO 3363, I wrote, " . . . I can tell you that it is darned
difficult to get people to let go of the concept of cause."
In LO 3421, Willard Jule responded:
>You can let the people hold on to their concept of cause if you do a
>reframe. You say "Solution Engineering focuses on some future state
>or set of results and the kinds of conditions that would have to exist in
>order to produce them."
>In other words the conditions that would have to exist are the cause of
>the results. They can have their cause while you have your conditions.
I would like to publicly thank Willard Jule for his very neat solution to
a problem that has plagued me for several years; namely, how to deal with
the concept of cause in the Solution Engineering approach. As is often
the case, I had been staring the solution to my own problem squarely in
the face without recognizing it. I had earlier, in another posting
related to a discussion of working backward, cited Polya's translation of
Pappus (a Greek mathematician c.300 AD). That citation goes like this:
"Let us inquire from what antecedent the desired result could be
derived."
Under a Solution Engineering approach, the "antecedent" is that set of
conditions that would produce the desired result. Applying Willard Jule's
suggestion to "reframe" the notion of cause, these antecedent conditions
are the "causes" of the results. How simple, how obvious. Thank you,
Willard Jule.
-- Fred Nickols nickols@aol.com