Analysis Is the Denial of Action

Escaping the trap of analysis paralysis

Photo by William Iven on Unsplash

When faced with a problem, do you analyze it or do something about it? My natural inclination is to jump headfirst into a deep analysis. When I’m dealing with a design problem I’ll attempt to look at it from different angles, present it in new forms, or zoom in and out to examine it from varying scales. I start to believe that if I focus on a problem hard enough some insight will pop out at me. Reframing problems in this way can be helpful to see new perspectives, but analysis will only take you so far into a problem. With all this effort, the path forward still feels opaque, what we all know as analysis paralysis.

It was hard for me to describe why I would feel this paralysis until I read a series of lectures by Jiddu Krishnamurti in a book called “The Awakening of Intelligence”. Krishnamurti’s lectures are a dialectical process to examine his philosophy with various audiences. In one lecture Krishnamurti speaks of analyzing the Self. He asserted that “analysis is the denial of action.” Krishnamurti challenges the audience not to spend time simply analyzing oneself, but to live in action because “analysis implies the postponement of action. When I am analyzing myself, I am not acting; I am waiting until my analysis is over, then perhaps I shall act rightly…”