Dr. Wayne B. Jonas is the President and Chief Executive Officer of the Samueli Institute as well as a Professor of Family Medicine, Georgetown University Medical Center and an Associate Professor of Family Medicine, Uniformed Services University of the
Health Sciences

Can people learn to become systems thinkers to help solve worldwide problems created by false assumptions and dysfunctional behavioral patterns? Rebecca Costa says we can, using intuition, collective problem solving and by following a personal wellness regimen.

Ms. Costa lays out many current world issues created by our traditional approach to problem solving with penetrating insight. Through example she reveals how our current behaviors and actions actually prohibit problem solving: how oppositional behavior stops solutions at the start; how personalizing conversations escalate barriers to solutions; how we are hard-wired to make false assumptions about reality from correlations; how specialized, siloed language and thinking prevents us from seeing the whole picture; how we confuse cost and profit with value.

Her recommendations include cultivating intuition and optimism, eating right and getting more sleep, working in small groups who trust each other and creating working and thinking spaces that let creative and innovative solutions emerge. She also recommends that we do not jump to fix things quickly until sufficient thought and mulling have occurred. She clearly describes how these recommendations emerge from research on the neuroscience of sociology that show how approaches such as parallelism, incrementalism, brain fitness and collective problem solving can allow us to come up with better solutions.

These recommendations are a great start. She not only provides keen insight on our social behavior, she describes effective models of those changes. However, we will need more than this. We will also need the explicit cultivation of empathy and compassion and learn how to use what the ancients called “collective” (or non-local) consciousness to break the false “supermemes” (collective assumptions) that grip us. Costa’s book lays a great foundation. Let’s follow her lead. Our very survival may depend on it.