202104291527 Live in the ambiguity

Great people can tolerate ambiguity; they can both believe and disbelieve at the same time.¹

Living in ambiguity is a skill that every leader should master. It becomes increasingly important as the scope of your responsibilities involves higher level decisions and information. 202104291525 It's not a leader's job to be the best at everything.

Ambiguity is abundant in the world of broad directional decision making. There's no such thing as certainty. 202104291528 Leaders have to accept a slower feedback loop. We need to be able to build reasonable mental models, act on them, and accumulate more information to continue steering the ship. Ambiguity is no excuse for not being able to 202108191029 Measure what you do.

In order to 202104291526 Make the hard decisions, we need to be comfortable knowing that these decisions are hard because of the ambiguity of our position. We have competing information, context, and goals vying to win out. There are only shades of grey working here. Don't fall into the trap of letting this ambiguity cause 202109090909 Decision paralysis.

Just as biology is a field about 202104291540 Emergence where the simple, predictive, mechanistic laws of physics create something unpredictable and greater than its pieces, leadership is a field where we can no longer follow cause and effect in a functionalist manner. Emergence is at play in the real world situations we see every day.

We have to understand that sometimes not knowing how things work is part of our job. More poignantly, we need to be comfortable living in the land of not knowing.