Mindset
Problem Solving in Complex Systems:
Why Knowing “What’s Wrong?” Isn’t Enough
“You’re not stuck because you’re broken. You’re stuck because your brain is protecting you.“
– Matt Bush
In human performance and rehabilitation, our clients come to us because something isn’t right, or because they can’t achieve what they want to achieve and they’ve hit a roadblock.
At its core, we’re in the business of problem solving.
The history of medicine and para-medicine has built an elegant and effective pathway for addressing problems that are relatively clear. Acute injury. Acute illness. Acute performance limitations. In these situations, linear thinking works well, identify the problem, apply the solution, reassess.
Where we tend to struggle is when things become murkier.
When pain becomes chronic.
When injuries keep returning.
When performance plateaus despite doing “all the right things.”
These are no longer simple, linear problems. They are complex, adaptive ones.
Most rehabilitation professionals were trained to manage injury through a diagnostic lens:
What’s the chief complaint?
What’s the history of onset?
How does the pain behave?
What movements provoke symptoms?
Similarly, the performance industry often begins by clarifying desired outcomes, identifying the demands being placed on the system, and organizing programming to drive those outputs.
Both approaches work well — when it’s clear what’s driving the issue.
But complexity introduces noise.
To illustrate where this breaks down, consider a simple analogy.
You’re driving down the highway and notice that at higher speeds your steering wheel begins to vibrate. As you accelerate, the vibration increases. After a few drives like this, you take the car to a mechanic.
The mechanic puts the car up on the rack, inspects it, and finds that the right front tire is significantly worn on its outer edge. He comes back and tells you the tire needs to be replaced.
But most of us wouldn’t stop there.
We’d ask, Why?
Why is the tire worn out in the first place?
The vibration is a symptom.
The worn tire is an outcome (the diagnosis)
Neither explains the cause.
In rehab and performance, this is where the process often stalls.
Pain behaves like the vibrating steering wheel.
Tissue irritation — a patellar tendon, a disc protrusion — behaves like the worn tire.
These are outputs and outcomes.
Thanks to decades of high-quality pain science research, we now understand that pain is not an input coming from the periphery. Pain is an output — an interpretation of nociceptive information that the brain decides should be expressed as pain.
If pain is an output, and tissue damage is an outcome, the more important question becomes:
What is driving the system toward these outcomes?
Just like the tire, something upstream is influencing wear patterns over time.
To solve causative problems, we need more information — not just about the site of symptoms, but about the system as a whole. Complex problems rarely have a single cause. They are usually the result of multiple factors interacting, accumulating, and eventually crossing a threshold.
This is the intent behind the rubric we’ve developed in Neuro Reconditioning.
Rather than rushing to a diagnosis, we work through a structured series of questions designed to inform a working hypothesis. Just like in research, we establish an initial hypothesis of care, intervene, observe how the system responds, and adjust accordingly.
We never stop seeking.
We never assume certainty.
The first and most important question we ask is:
“What state is this person in?”
Most people seek help because something needs solving. But not all problems exist in the same state.
A crisis is the classic presentation: acute, debilitating pain or dysfunction that is limiting activities of daily living or things the person values. The system has exceeded its capacity to manage threat.
A reactive state is more subtle. The person may not feel significant symptoms on the day you see them, but they feel fragile. Their issue is chronic, recurrent, or cyclical — flaring up, settling down, but never fully resolving.
The back that “goes out.”
The hamstring that keeps pulling.
The knee that flares up every time they hike.
Or the performance barrier they simply can’t move past.
Different presentations, same underlying reality: the system is struggling to adapt.
In both cases, we take a thorough history — not just of the chief complaint, but of the whole person. Prior concussions, car accidents, surgeries, illness, life stress, lifestyle factors — all of these can influence how the system interprets threat.
Crisis is rarely just about the moment of onset. There is almost always a buildup that sets the table for the threshold to be exceeded.
You can think of the neurological system like a bucket that manages all forms of threat. Threat is the brain’s interpretation of incoming inputs as potentially dangerous. The limbic system acts as the navigator, with one primary goal: safety.
When threat is acute or cumulative, the bucket overflows. When it does, the brain sends signals — pain, stiffness, inhibition, fatigue — to get you to stop.
Problem solving, then, becomes the process of identifying what is filling the bucket.
Someone in crisis needs immediate effort placed on reducing threat. Finding neuro-inhibitory inputs that help the system release accumulated threat is the priority. Without this, no amount of strengthening or conditioning will stick.
Once the person is out of crisis — or if they were reactive to begin with — the next question becomes critical:
“What do they do, or want to do, with their body?”
What someone does drives your investigation toward what they need — and more importantly, what they don’t have.
Most often, undue stress and threat arise not from what a person is doing, but from what’s missing in the movement equation required to do it well.
As I’ve written before, the body won’t use what it doesn’t know — or what it doesn’t have.
Our assessment shifts toward understanding how the individual self-organizes to solve movement problems, and why certain components are absent, underutilized, or unavailable.
The injury is not the focus.
The human being is.
The injury is an outcome.
We want to understand what’s responsible.
In future blogs, I’ll outline how we continue progressing through this rubric — from threat reduction to capacity building to performance expression.
For now, start here:
When you first see a client, identify the state they’re in.
Then clarify what they truly need to do with their body to succeed.
Better questions lead to better solutions — especially in complex systems.
