Three posts ago, I started what I thought were three separate reflections. They weren't. They were building to this.
Post one was about SEEing parts Panoramically - staying connected to the Whole from a wider angle.
Post two was about SEEing from the Beginning.
Post three was about SEEing the Whole, not just parts.
Here's the claim I want to make explicit: good, useful solutions only show up after a problem has been SEEN properly - using at least these three ways of SEEing. Not before. Three Aha stories make the case. Let's start with a promise I made and haven't kept yet.
Keeping a promise: the ants
In my last post, ants had appeared overnight, en masse, on our kitchen island. My wife can't stand ants. We tried a few things - ant baits, placed at the tracks, then traced back to their points of entry. We waited. New tracks appeared. Nothing worked.
Until my wife had the Solve@Source Aha - not me, her. She started a new kitchen rule: no food items allowed to sit on the island after each meal. The island stayed clean and empty. The ants disappeared.
She didn't manage the symptom. She removed the source. That's the whole story, and it's a small one - which is exactly why it's useful. The next two stories show the same discipline at a much larger scale.
Stephen Covey's subway Aha
Stephen Covey opens The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People with a scene on a New York subway.[^1] It was a quiet Sunday morning - people reading, resting, eyes closed - until a man and his children got on. The children were loud, disruptive, grabbing at other passengers' newspapers. The father sat beside Covey, eyes closed, seemingly oblivious.
Covey grew irritated. Eventually he said something to the man - suggesting he might control his children a little more. The man looked up, as if seeing the situation for the first time, and said softly, "We just came from the hospital where their mother died" about an hour earlier. He didn't know what to think, and neither did his children.
Covey describes what happened next as instantaneous. His irritation vanished. His whole posture toward the man changed - not because he tried to manage his attitude, but because he suddenly SAW the situation differently.
Here's the analytical layer worth adding: Covey calls this a "paradigm shift," but look at what kind of shift it was.
He SAW the Whole, not just a part. He'd been judging a fragment - a father's apparent negligence - as if it were the entire picture, when it was one frame in a much larger, harder story.
He SAW panoramically. The moment he learned about the hospital, the father, the children, and Covey himself all reorganized into one connected scene instead of separate, unrelated irritations.
He SAW from the Beginning. The real starting point of that subway car wasn't the moment the children got loud. It was an hour earlier, in a hospital room. Everything downstream - the noise, the inattention - only makes sense once you trace it back to where it actually began.
Covey didn't get a new solution to a rude-passenger problem. He got a correctly SEEN situation - and the "solution" (compassion, an offer to help) fell out of that almost automatically. That's the pattern: SEEing properly doesn't just make solutions easier to find. It often makes the right response obvious.
A production floor, four walls, and a Solve@Source moment
The third story is mine, from early in my engineering career. Corporate HQ had tasked me to architect a world-class solution for a 7-plant $3B business unit. My first instinct was to design entirely within each production floor's four walls - better scheduling logic, tighter controls, faster response to disruptions.
That design stayed inside those walls for a while. Then I happened onto a set of conversations that changed everything: how Sales took customer orders. Sales was promising customers delivery dates without first checking with production. The floor wasn't failing because its internal scheduling was weak - it was failing because it was being handed commitments it had no way of keeping, made by people who couldn't see the floor's actual capacity.
The real source of the problem wasn't on the production floor at all. It was upstream, in a sales process that had never been connected to the system it was making promises on behalf of.
Once I saw that, I broke the wall. I built a different, end-to-end solution that connected the order-promising process to real production capacity - not just a better internal system. The CEO later personally requested a demo.
Run the same three lenses over this story:
The Whole: The scheduling problem was never just a production-floor problem; it was one part of an order-to-delivery system.
Panoramic: SEEing Sales, production, and the customer commitment together - not production in isolation - is what surfaced the actual issue.
The Beginning: The true starting point of a late delivery wasn't a scheduling failure on the floor. It was a promise made upstream, before production ever saw the order.
The pattern across all three
A missing point of entry (Solve@Source), a missing hour of context (Covey), a missing upstream process (production floor). Three very different scales - a kitchen, a subway car, a factory - and the same underlying failure each time: someone tried to solve a problem before SEEing it properly.
That's the claim this whole run of posts has been building toward. Not "here's a nice story," but: you cannot reliably solve a complex problem you haven't first SEEN as a Whole, from a Panoramic angle, and from its true Beginning. Skip any of the three, and the best you'll get is a solution to the wrong problem - or a fix for a symptom, managed rather than resolved.
I've started calling this discipline Problem-SEE - because a good Problem-Solve is only ever as good as the Problem-SEE that came before it.
What comes next
Starting with the next post, I'm turning this same discipline toward a much bigger, much harder problem: the gap between faith and work - the way so many of us carry a divided life, treating "Sunday" and "Monday" as though they belong to two different stories.
I don't claim to have solved it. It's a real and complex problem, and I don't think it can be looked at responsibly until it's SEEN properly - from several different angles. What I can offer is the result of some deep due diligence: applying this same SEEing discipline to the problem, and sharing one robust, rigorously worked-through way forward - not the only possible answer, but one built to hold up in practice, not just in theory. So join me as I start working through it in subsequent posts.
More detailed articles are on my website, Restful Work Again Lab.
Get a new "Read to SEE" Psalm and weekly Lab Note, always free at restfulworkagain.com - and download the interactive Psalm 1 to try it for yourself.
SEE the Whole. FIND your Place. ALIGN your Will. MOVE fit-for-Purpose.
Work OUT from Rest.
[^1]: Adapted from Stephen R. Covey, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (New York: Fireside, 1989), pp. 30-31.