Digging deeper or wider

There’s a familiar way of describing how we think—what we often call left-brain and right-brain thinking. It’s not strict science, but it’s a helpful frame. One mode is linear, analytical, and solution-driven. It asks, What’s the lever? What will work? The other is relational, intuitive, and attentive to context. It asks, What’s really going on here? How is this being experienced?

Both are needed. But most of us lean one way—and when things don’t work, we rarely change lenses. We simply push further down the same mineshaft.

You can see this play out on the world stage. The US often operates with a more analytical instinct: apply pressure, increase leverage, shift behaviour. Sanctions become tighter sanctions. The logic is coherent—if the mechanism is right, the outcome will follow. But that assumes the other party shares the same frame.

Iran, for instance, reads the world through a different story. A Shi’a history of persecution shapes a national imagination where suffering is not merely endured but dignified. Pressure can confirm identity. Resistance becomes faithfulness. The same action lands differently. One sees leverage; the other sees calling. And so both sides persist, sincerely, further down their separate shafts.

When something isn’t working, we often assume the answer is more clarity, tighter systems, stronger persuasion. We can be slow to ask whether progress might come from seeing things from another perspective. Analytical thinking gives a sense of comprehension and control, but it can narrow the field of view. A more relational, contextual way of seeing widens it. It asks about story, meaning, and perception—the things that often drive behaviour beneath the surface.

The New Testament holds this tension. In Philippians, Paul opposes some outright, yet rejoices that Christ is preached even when motives are mixed. In Romans 14, difference is expected, and fellowship is maintained. And in 1 Corinthians 9, Paul describes a kind of adaptive posture: becoming “all things to all people,” not by losing conviction, but by entering the world of others in order to reach them.

There is a kind of wisdom here. Not less conviction, but more perspective. Not abandoning clarity, but recognising it is not the whole picture.

Sometimes the way forward is not deeper, but wider.