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Introduction

There are different modalities of thinking. Most people don’t use all of them. My job as a coach is to witness how people think and help them think better. We, coaches, are infamous for asking questions. But what really matters is not a question, but what people do with them in their heads. And almost daily, I see how people think about questions in ways that lead them nowhere. Consider Martin. We are having our second session and after a bit of small talk, I’m asking him, ‘What would you like to work on today?’ His eyes defocused for a split second, then back to me ‘I don’t know.’ Martin thought about my question and the result of that thinking was ‘I don’t know.’ In this blog, I’m going to show how Martin’s thinking led to this answer and more importantly, how it’s possible for him and anyone to think differently to come up with a more useful answer.

Our thinking impacts our lives profoundly. It influences what goals we set for ourselves. It affects our decision-making and problem-solving. It affects how we communicate. But we are rarely taught how to think. We pick up some ways of thinking intuitively and then use them habitually. When our habitual modality of thinking doesn’t work, we stop thinking. As a result, many of us stop thinking about the most impactful, yet fuzzy matters in our lives. On the other hand, if we can use different modalities, once we get stuck, we can deliberately switch to one that will serve us better.

As an analogy, you are aware that you can crawl, walk, run, jump and you can choose based on the situation. With thinking, most of us lack distinctions among which we can choose. It’s as if someone is so accustomed to walking that they don’t realize it’s possible to run.

When Martin said ‘I don’t know,’ it didn’t mean that he knew nothing. There were things he knew, but he didn’t have the skills to think about them. Once he became aware of different modalities, he was able to generate better answers. Once you can facilitate the shift between thinking modalities, you’ll get insights where otherwise you were stuck.

I hope that this blog will be useful to those who help people think: managers, coaches, facilitators, but also to anyone who wants to develop more self-awareness about their own thinking. Once you have more awareness of your mental processes, you will be able to think more effectively. Read further to understand how.

The Distinctions

When I ask you ‘In which year did you finish school?’ and when I ask you ‘How many years ago did you finish school?’ most likely, you will be doing different things in your mind to answer them. When I ask you ‘What do you want to eat?’ and ‘What is the square of a circle with the radius of 10cm?’ the difference between the modalities of thinking is even more stark.

We use the verb ‘to think’ to refer to a group of different cognitive and affective processes. If modalities of thinking are our tools to solve tasks with our minds, knowing distinctions between these processes is critical. Without discerning the tools, we end up hammering the nails with a frying pan. Had I not observed hammering the nails with a frying pan thousands of times done by hundreds of people, I would have assumed that the distinctions I’m about to introduce are blatantly obvious to everyone. But they are not.

Below, I will describe what I call reporting, calculating, discovering, and wanting. I picked the names deliberately so that it’s more obvious which situation they fit best. You don’t need to discover a solution to a quadratic equation. You can calculate it. And you cannot calculate your path to happiness. You would need to discover it.

Surely the lines I draw between them and the names I’ll use are somewhat arbitrary. Also, they often happen in parallel, or one switches between them back and forth. My intention is not to be surgically exact, but to highlight the distinction, as Gregory Bateson put it, the difference that makes a difference.

Reporting

If I ask you ‘What’s two plus two?’ you will say ‘four.’ You don’t need to solve this tiny mathematical problem to answer. You already knew the result. It’s committed to your memory. And you simply fetch it from there. Similarly, if you had a meeting with your team, and I asked you how it went. You can recount the whole situation by getting the details from your memory and reporting them.

These examples are fairly obvious. But there are situations when it’s less obvious. For example, if I ask you what’s important for you in your professional development, one way to answer is to recall feedback you recently got and report some of it. Or maybe you read a business book, remembered an idea from there and used it as an answer. In both situations, if you internalized them uncritically, it means that you remembered someone else’s thoughts, they are not yours. In psychology, a word to describe that is introjection, an internalization of ideas or values of other people. Asking why questions typically can uncover whether something is an introjected idea.

Quoting, story-telling, explaining, describing, making excuses are all forms of this modality. A very common thing in coaching is to ask people what they want and then hear a long explanation of what is not possible. This kind of mismatch between the question and the answer is a good clue that it’s time to shift to a different modality.

What are the other cues that people are reporting? The first one is the time between the question and the answer. People typically don’t need much time to report. They search their memory for a short while and then start answering. The flow of speech tends to be even, without big breaks or pauses, because the search for the answer is already completed. Other cues are short answers and matter-of-factual, sometimes monotonous delivery.

Reporting may be useful as a preparation for further thinking. For example, through recounting details, you will find an opening to switch to a different modality of thinking. Perhaps while you were reporting on a meeting with your team, you realized that your colleague was nodding when you were proposing a decision, but then strongly disagreed with you. Your mind captured this detail but you never paid attention to it before. And when you started pondering what exactly this seeming contradiction meant, you switched to a different mode of thinking.

Other than preparing for other types of thinking, spending too much time reporting won’t move you forward because we are essentially recounting what we already know. The possibility of having new ideas and insights is very limited. It can increase other people’s understanding of the situation, but not ours. If we notice ourselves merely telling what we know, we can start asking ourselves questions to ignite some novel thinking. How do we know it’s true? Is it a fact or an opinion? What does it mean to us? What do we not know?

When you are facilitating a meeting, you need to be mindful of how much time is spent in reporting mode, unless the sole intention of the meeting is to gather information.

Calculating

This modality of thinking is invited with questions like ‘What is 75 times 20?’ or ‘What resources do you need to finish this project?’ Unless you know the answer and it’s readily available in your memory, you would need to follow some mental strategy to derive an answer.

This is a rational and analytical way of thinking. We break things apart mentally. We use algorithms and sequential steps. Most of the mental models engage this thinking modality.

To use this modality, you need to have an appropriate mental strategy. If you never studied multiplication, there is no way you can calculate 75 times 20. You would need to discover multiplication first. If you have an appropriate mental strategy, you follow the steps, use the formulas, or structure the inputs in some way to derive an answer or solution.

This way of thinking is linear. What does it mean? It means that if the situation is clear, repeatable, has best practices to deal with, includes predictable agents, most likely calculating will give you great results and save a lot of time and trouble. Also, there might be experts who can either provide you with sound advice or help you learn how to find your own.

But when the situation is unclear, quickly changing, has agents with unpredictable behavior, calculating is not likely going to be very helpful. It’s possible to calculate the flight of a spaceship. It’s not possible to calculate the cure for cancer. It requires discovery thinking.

What’s distinctive of this modality is that people typically spend some time inside of themselves doing some mental steps. They also might be writing, making lists, or diagramming as they are calculating. The time to engage the question is longer compared to reporting.

When people are about to go into calculating thinking but they realize that they don’t have an appropriate mental strategy to tackle the task, that’s when they say ‘I don’t know’. I-don’t-know typically stands for ‘I don’t have an answer ready in my memory and I don’t know the steps to calculate it.’ That’s what was happening with my client Martin, and that’s where a lot of people stop thinking.

Discovery

This modality of thinking is brought about by bigger and more fuzzy questions for which no right answers exist, nor is there a clear formula for deriving them. For example: ‘How to live a good life?’ or ‘What’s happiness?’.

Questions like this typically stir up confusion. And people respond to confusion in different ways. Some with curiosity: ‘Hm, that’s an interesting question.’ Some may feel pressured to produce the right answer. Some feel shame about not knowing the answer. Or it could be a disengaged ‘I don’t know’ that implies ‘And I don’t care to know.’

Discovery thinking is not only about big-scale questions and paradoxical challenges. In the example above, pondering why your colleague was nodding but then disagreeing means using discovery thinking to answer.

In discovery, we don’t have a linear strategy to figure out the answer. Sometimes we need let the data sink in and allow incubation. Sometimes it’s about making guesses and forming hypotheses. To use discovery thinking, we need to cultivate a certain way of engaging–or even grappling–with the question over time while not knowing the answer. The apt metaphor Ben Kuhn used in his blog is ‘staring into the abyss‘–it can feel unproductive to just be there and stare but more often than not, that’s the only thing to do.

This is the thinking that we need to use to deal with complexity and paradoxes. Using calculating with paradoxes only makes us stuck.

Successful application of discovery thinking involves leaning into not-knowing rather than trying to diffuse it. For that, we require certain emotional stamina–often it’s not easy to stay with the uncertainty of not knowing the answer. Our minds strive for clarity and closure and we need to let go of that to ignite discovery thinking (I talk more about that in my two-blog series about complexity Complexity Anti-Patterns and Carl Rogers and Complexity)

The flow of discovery thinking is distinctly different. People will make long pauses. Their speech will be halting. They will grasp for words. They will sound hesitant and uncertain. There will be questioning intonation. Also, there might be emotional reactions towards the feeling of uncertainty or towards the person introducing the question or problem (the entire spectrum of psychological defences can happen: regression, denial, displacement and so on. For more see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defence_mechanism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transference). Discovery thinking is anything but smooth.

Interlude

Now as I discussed calculating and discovery, I want to point out two important but not very obvious differences between them.

Calculating means processing symbols. Discovery is mostly pre-symbolic and pre-conceptual. It often means doing something beyond symbols and concepts. And only then wrapping that up into the symbolic representation of words.

Because many people tend to equate thinking to talking, out loud or in their heads, for them being silent means they are not thinking. That’s a crucial fallacy. Thinking can happen with words and without words. Reaching with your thought into places in your mental landscape where there are no words and staying there can make you a much more creative thinker.

Though it may sound cryptic, everyone knows how to do it. Remember having a word on the tip of your tongue. You know what this word is, but you cannot name it–yet. You spend time with the feeling of the word. You grasp for the fuzzy feeling. That’s the skill you already have. Use it more. Eugene Gendlin called that feeling ‘felt sense’ and the process of this kind of thinking ‘focusing.’ I’ll say more about it at the end of the blog.

Edward De Bono emphasized another important difference. In calculating (his term is vertical thinking), you are making the right steps all the time and eventually derive the right answer. In discovery (his term is lateral thinking), you may take steps that are moving you nowhere, ‘wrong’ steps, but eventually you get to the solution or answer that works.

Rightness is what matters in vertical thinking. Richness is what matters in lateral thinking. Vertical thinking selects a pathway by excluding other pathways. Lateral thinking does not select but seeks to open up other pathways. With vertical thinking one selects the most promising approach to a problem, the best way of looking at a situation. With lateral thinking one generates as many alternative approaches as one can. With vertical thinking one may look for different approaches until one finds a promising one. With lateral thinking one goes on generating as many approaches as one can even __after __one has found a promising one. With vertical thinking one is trying to select the __best __approach but with lateral thinking one is generating different approaches for the sake of generating them.

The implication is that sometimes an intentionally ‘wrong’ step is exactly the thing that would move you forward. Discarding the intention to move forward in correct steps can, surprisingly, help us move forward much quicker.

Now to the last modality.

**Wanting **

Wanting stands quite apart. It is much less of a cognitive process than what I described above. And it is more about sensing and feeling. Perhaps you’d say it’s unfair to consider it as one of the modalities of thinking. The reason I want to talk about it in this blog is that many people are desperately trying to address their wanting challenges with calculating, which leads them nowhere. Therefore, it’s important to be aware of both of them. If nothing else, consider wanting as a kind of spice you will use to spice up your other modalities of thinking.

This modality is engaged when we are asked ‘What do you really want in your life?’ or on a less grander scale, ‘What do you want to eat?’

In my coaching practice, I notice that wanting is especially challenging for thoughtful, rational, technical people. It seems that the more one relies on calculating in one’s life, the more wanting modality atrophies. A prominent existential psychotherapist Rollo May wrote in the middle of the last century

knowing what one wants. This point may look very simple at first glance—who does not know what he wants? But.. the amazing thing is how few people actually do. If one looks honestly into himself, does he not find that most of what he thinks he wants is just routine–like fish on Friday; or that what he wants is what he thinks he should want–like being a success in his work; or wants to want–like loving his neighbor? One can often see clearly the expression of direct and honest wants in children before they have been taught to falsify their desires.

What May’s quote demonstrates is that people substitute wanting with calculating. When asked ‘What do you want?’ in our heads, we often rephrase it to ‘What should I want?’ or ‘What is good for me to want?’ or ‘What is rational/possible/safe/ambitious/etc. for me to want?’ All these questions are useful at some times, but they are harmful when they disconnect us from what we do want. When we continuously ignore and don’t acknowledge what we really want, our resentment accumulates, which typically leads to self-sabotage or sometimes even to psychosomatic illness.

Wanting is connected to our energy, vitality, and motivation. When it’s removed from our lives, we slide into demotivation, languishing, apathy, cynicism, or nihilism. Life becomes dull and colorless

There are several common challenges that hinder wanting. — First is using calculating instead of wanting. We use calculating thinking so much that it becomes a habit. When we do that, we treat ourselves as objects of calculation and less and less as subjects of our lives. The way existential psychotherapist James Bugental put it: ‘He must speculate about why he does things, set traps or tests for himself to figure out what he is up to, reason what it is he must want.’ To address that, we just need to squarely focus on what we want. Think of it as a training plan where you can start your training with the lightest dumbbell and gradually increase the weight. It can mean starting with paying attention to the most obvious wants, like your appetite or what would make your body feel comfortable right now. — Second is not giving oneself permission to want. We may deny it for different reasons. A typical one is the fear of where our wishes may lead us. One idea that can help get past this obstacle is to allow oneself to want without needing to pursue what we want, treating it as a thought experiment. Another common reason for denying wanting is that we don’t see the possibility of achieving that–‘What’s the point of wanting it then?..’ Again, you can just want something without any concrete plans about how to bring that to life. Leave working out the plans for later. — And thirdly, we may want many things at once. If that’s the case, we spot one thing and then ignore, suppress, or merely stop looking for others. If I want to lose weight, I may stop acknowledging my wanting for the calories-dense food, even though it’s there. When some of the needs and wants are ignored, we don’t fully use our wanting capacities. And that typically leads to self-sabotage. Ask yourself from time to time, ‘And what else do I want?’

Wanting thinking looks somewhat similar to discovery in that it’s not linear and it’s not quick, but whereas discovery is more cognitive, wanting is affective and somatic–it’s about how we are sensing and feeling the answer. It may require paying more attention to our bodies. When people fully connect to their wanting, it is also reflected in their speech. It becomes more alive and less monotonous.

An example

In a recent coaching session, a client mentioned in passing that he is considering going to a gym. Later in the session, he mentioned that he doesn’t want to look stupid. And he added that he would feel stupid if he went to the gym.

I asked him ‘Do you want to go to the gym?’ He deliberated for a while and said, ‘Yes.’ Once he admitted it, we were able to explore that idea and what he can do about his apprehension of looking stupid.

This is a very typical situation when wanting is denied because of some possible undesirable consequence. Denying often happens so quickly that we don’t have a chance to consider how realistic it is. When we can hold our wanting longer in our awareness, we can leverage other modalities of thinking to address these potential consequences. For example, quite linear problem-solving can lead us to calculating thinking with a question of whether there is a time of the day when there are almost no people at the gym. Or it could be discovery thinking about what would happen if he looks stupid in the gym.

If we dismiss our wanting right away, and similarly if we act compulsively on all our wants, we are not using our thinking capacities fully. As Abraham Maslow put it, ‘every full human is both poet and engineer.’

What To Do About All That

Often progress in coaching, therapy, decision-making, problem-solving, or strategizing can be achieved merely by shifting people to think in a different modality. In practice, more often than not, it means interrupting reporting and calculating and inviting more discovery and wanting. Sometimes it means helping people design experiments and experiences that will facilitate discovery and wanting thinking.

We can also pay attention to the mismatch between the questions and answers we are giving. A common mismatch is when, instead of future-, result-oriented answers, we provide a description.

If you are helping someone else to think, you can observe the cues that I described above and then invite people to shift to discovery by doing one of the following: — When you notice that someone answers a question by reporting or calculating, invite them to: 1) answer it without words 2) listen to the question and observe how they receive it and how they prepare to answer it 3) talk only about the things they don’t know — Invite people to talk significantly slower. For example, if they speak at a rate of a word per second, it’s going to be almost impossible to continue in calculating or reporting mode. It will almost push people into preverbal processing. — Observe emotions, especially those that are not connected to the content of what they are thinking about. For example, if they say ‘I don’t know,’ is there any frustration, annoyance, sadness, or shame. Invite them to reflect on what these emotions mean in that moment.

An important consideration is the thinker’s state. The more stressed, rushed, tense the person is, and the harder they try, the less they are capable of using fuzzy and creative discovery and the more they will be confined to linear reporting and calculating. A thinking shift, then, can be facilitated by a shift in the state. Perhaps a walk, a shower, a favorite movie can help one relax their mind and let things come. Here’s a beautiful metaphor from Ann Weiser Cornell and Barbara McGavin:

Sometimes when you are with something that is tangled, it can feel like you are facing a big wall. Our natural inclination is to bring in the bulldozers or the battering rams. Here’s another suggestion for you: pitch your tent by the wall. Make a campfire and brew yourself a hot drink. Get to know this wall. We like using the phrase ‘dwelling with something’ to point to this way of slowing down. When we slow down to what feels like a complete stop and keep something company in this way, it often miraculously shifts.

Sometimes the only thing you need to do is just slow down, lean into what you don’t know, and stop trying to calculate the solution to your challenge. As Guy Claxton put it

To tap into the leisurely ways of knowing, one must dare to wait. Knowing emerges from, and is a response to, not-knowing. Learning – the process of coming to know – emerges from uncertainty. Ambivalently, learning seeks to reduce uncertainty, by transmuting the strange into the familiar, but it also needs to tolerate uncertainty, as the seedbed in which ideas germinate and responses form.

If you like structured exercises, you can explore Robert Dilts’s Disney Strategy and Edward De Bono’s Six Hats.

Finally, I want to mention some books and thinkers that inspired this blog. If you want to learn more, you can explore their work. — Guy Claxton’s incredible ‘Hair Brain, Tortoise’ mind’ influenced me a lot and helped me structure observations from my coaching practice. Iain McGilchrist and his ‘Master and its emissary’ helped me deepen my understanding of thinking processes, especially from neurological and philosophical perspectives. — Eugene Gendlin’s work is especially illuminating because his clinical focus was exactly on how to facilitate clients’ work in therapy to step over the boundary of what they do know (i.e. not something they just can report on). His book ‘Focusing’ is a good start. And a very brief introduction to Gendlin’s philosophy could be found here. — Edward De Bono’s work on creative thinking provides a lot of ideas and activities to help one think differently. His ‘Lateral Thinking: Creativity Step by Step’ is a good place to start. — Existential psychotherapists James Bugental and Rollo May helped me articulate my ideas related to wanting and their work persuaded me that I need to add wanting to the modalities presented here. — The work of Ronald Heifetz and Dave Snowden showcases how different situations require qualitatively different approaches to meaning-making and problem-solving.

Summary

Modality	Description	How it looks	When it’s useful	When it’s not useful
Reporting	Retrieving information from memory	Quick answer, even flow, matter-of-fact tone	Diagnosis, preparing for problem-solving	When you need new ideas
Calculating	Processing, analyzing	Slower, sequential, there might be pauses before a next step	Well-defined problems, time-tested algorithms and mental models exists, manageable level of variables and uncertainty	Highly uncertain setting, value-based rather than fact-based problem
Discovery	Creative thinking	Long pauses, unfocused gaze, doubt in voice	Simple, predictable, well-defined problems	Fuzzy, uncertain, value-based challenges
Wanting	Sensing intentions and desires behind the challenge	Slow, non-verbal	To clarify the why behind the challenge	Technical, cognitive challenges

And Finally, A Few Guidelines

— Lean into ‘I don’t know’, lean into what’s not clear–even if it’s only a sensation — Pay attention to your state when you think, not only the verbal content of your thoughts — Spend more time with a question or problem statement. Don’t rush to answer and problem-solve right away. — Connect with your wanting. Allow yourself to want without immediately planning how to achieve it.