The Hideous Conundrum™
At the heart of every Keyhole Methodological Application lies what I have termed the Hideous Conundrum™ - a state of paradoxical simultaneity wherein the solution both exists and eludes us, like Schrödinger’s cat but with a clipboard.
A Hideous Conundrum™ is never solved — it is navigated. The practitioner must enter a recursive feedback loop of sensemaking (see my paper, Actualising Potentialities Through Iterative Ontology, Crumb, unpublished draft, 2004) in which the following principles apply:
- Premature Actualisation Hazard - The danger of thinking you know the answer before I’ve sold you my seminar.
- Ratio Misalignment - If the A:R ratio is not harmonised, the conundrum metastasises into a Gordian Knot of inefficiency.
- Perceptual Keyhole Framing - One must squint conceptually through the narrow aperture of insight, resisting the temptation to simply look around it.
When encountering a Hideous Conundrum™, always remember:
The harder the problem appears, the more likely it is to be simple.
The simpler the problem appears, the more likely it is to be Hideous.
If you think you’ve solved it, you probably haven’t.
Visualisation Protocol
To actualise the Hideous Conundrum™ fully, draw a triangle, label each corner “Yes,” “No,” and “Maybe,” then spin the paper until meaning emerges. This process cannot fail, unless it does.
