Do you see the world as a struggle between good and evil? Are there two sides to every story?

If things seem black or white to you, you may be a victim of what Dr. Teri calls Binary Bullshit.

"We lean so heavily," she observes, "into our left brain - the left brain function is capture, contain, and control, and it's anchored in fear - so everything gets reduced to very simple equations."

Of course, there's nothing simpler than A vs. B. But does distilling problems to a choice of two polar opposites actually help us resolve issues or rise to challenges?

"To walk around thinking that we're actually communicating, that we're actually making choices, when we're working in this binary bullshit construct, is the real problem," Dr. Teri explains. "Because we're not solving anything when we go about it that way."
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Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord
But you're gonna have to serve somebody
Bob Dylan, "Gotta Serve Somebody"
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Some questions are binary, offering us the luxury to flip a switch in one of two reasonable directions. Others are multivariate, and still others involve forking paths and contingencies.

But in all cases, it's useful to take a step back to consider: are we addressing the right problem? If it turns out we're not, we may be missing out on the potential to innovate, to reinvent.

"There's an anecdote I heard long ago," recalls Achmad, "involving a building management company that was inundated by complaints about slow elevator service." The problem, he continues, was initially framed as a choice between (a) taking the elevator completely out of service to install a faster hoist technology and (b) adding a costly second elevator to double passenger capacity.

Fortunately, a maverick on the team managed to sell the others on an oblique strategy:  install large mirrors along the lobby walls. Remarkably, this change put an abrupt end to the complaints. Why? Because instead of standing awkwardly in the lobby, people now fixated their own reflections, and watching the elevator lights impatiently gave way to fixing their hair or straightening their lapels.

"If you take away the box," summarizes Dr. Teri, "what else is there? All of those questions add space. Embrace the openness, allowing all the possibilities to come into your mind."

Listen to Episode 14: Rejecting Binary Bullshit now on:
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[Graphic credit: "Person Marking Check on Opened Book." Photograph by Pixabay. Used under Creative Commons CC0. Source: Pexels.com]

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