Proactive

For the acne medication, see Proactiv.

For the Java Grid middleware, see ProActive.

The use of the word proactive, sometimes also written pro-active was limited to the domain of experimental psychology in the 1930s. Oxford English Dictionary (OED) credits Paul Whiteley and Gerald Blankfort, citing their 1933 paper discussing proactive inhibition as the "impairment or retardation of learning or of the remembering of what is learned by effects that remain active from conditions prior to the learning". The 1946 book Man's Search for Meaning brought the word to the wider public domain. The author, Austrian existential neuropsychiatrist Dr. Viktor Emil Frankl, used the word proactive to describe a person who took responsibility for his or her life, rather than looking for causes in outside circumstances or other people. Frankl stressed the importance of courage, perseverance, individual responsibility and awareness of the existence of choices, regardless of the situation or context.

Much of this theory was formed in Nazi concentration camps where Frankl lost his wife, mother, father and family, but decided that even under the worst circumstances, people can make and find meaning.

Alain Paul Martin observed that Frankl's original idea was gradually reduced to a binary opposition between the reactive (wrong and bad) and the proactive (right and good) options. Restricting choice solely to the reactive and proactive options can impede the freedom of choice and risk to severely hamper innovation and creativity.

See also

• Responsible Decision Making
• Proactive Cyber Defence

External links

• Be proactive - A wiki how to guide