Saying that all problems is due to psychological ones seems to me as an excuse for lacking vision of concrete path to improve oneself. Staying in abstraction, opinions and fuziness allow to discuss endlessly about one's problem but doesn't help to find a solution. Deming said that you can make all the effort you want from inside and that it is at the end useless because the knowledge comes from outside of you. So you must acquire knowledge because it can't be found inside you - so that he opposed many psy gurus he also encountered in Management of Industries when he was consultant since he is dead since a few years. He means you must study variation concepts in DETAILS and not content with generalities on noise or psychology although he deals much with psychology too but he advocates concrete paths and knowledge and not only placebo effects like pure psy gurus.
He should use the "5 whys" method http://www.hr.doe.gov/HR6/PIGUIDE/IB.htm "Five whys is a creative technique used to determine the underlying cause of a situation, This technique can also help spur understanding of how different causes might be related." Example given: "Production workers wanted to discover why they kept missing their delivery dates. So they asked "Why?" and here's what they learned: We missed our delivery date. Why? Our subcontractor's delivery date slipped. Why? We made too many changes. Why? The subcontractor misunderstood our project requirements list. Why? The requirements list was unclear, because we had only a week to prepare it. Group members discovered that poor requirements planning was a root cause of their problem. To improve their process, they decided to budget "up-front" time for analyzings requirements. "
Nice post Pete. I too am coviced that most times, the failure to acknowledge or take a loss is more often greed than fear. It's all so true. We're greedy when we should be fearful. and fearful when we should be greedy.
[Edit: RLB] Read C G Jung's "The Undiscovered Self" for what it is worth. I have read it and I particpated at one time in Zurich at JI in a colleagual manner. [Edit: RLB]