June 2008
Leading in Uncertainty
By Rick Kiel
"If you're not confused, you're not paying attention." -- Tom Peters
No Guarantees
There are no guarantees, no certainties, no sure bets for business owners, corporate leaders, and even most middle managers. Uncertainty is a fact of life in this dynamic world, for our organizations and for us as leaders. In a changing environment, most of the problems and potential solutions we face as leaders are ambiguous: There is no ready precedent, no formula to follow, no easy answer. We often must make decisions without all the information we would like to have.
Making Decisions Anyway
Whether your leadership culture is to collaborate and decide by consensus or to lead your company, division, or branch more traditionally, decisions must be made; and action, taken. One key to business success is being able to consistently make more good decisions than bad, even with incomplete information. How can we improve our leadership effectiveness in an uncertain environment?
Opportunities for Leadership Development
Our challenge is to make better decisions, in less time, to lead our organizations forward through continuous uncertainty. The follow suggestions should help:
1. Define the Problem
"Only the inquiring mind solves problems." -- Edward Hodnett
Business leaders solve problems -- it's in our DNA. In our urgency to find a solution, though, we often rush past the problem and don't focus enough time on fully understanding the problem first. Research shows that thorough definition of a problem produces better decisions and leads to better results. The leadership development challenge, then, is to learn to stay with a problem. Ask more questions -- particularly, why? Dig deeper to find the root cause, brainstorm multiple causes, and look for patterns -- group possible causes in categories. Work with your team using dialogue to gain new insights into the situation. The key is to give the problem some additional attention -- it will pay off when you take action.
2. Take Small Steps
"The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing." -- John Powell
Even after we have defined a problem as well as possible, a certain amount of uncertainty will still remain. Although we could get bogged down in indecision about how to proceed, this situation actually presents us with another opportunity to thrive with uncertainty: Act incrementally. Take a small action, evaluate the result, make course corrections, take another small step, get more feedback, and keep moving ahead. Studies show that we understand much more about a problem after we have made attempts to solve it. However, don't try to go all the way at once. There will usually be plenty of opportunity to keep at it. To use a baseball analogy, don't just swing for home runs; get up to bat, look at some pitches, and go for base hits -- they will ultimately lead to scoring runs.
3. Get Better at Mistakes
"Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up." -- Thomas Edison
OK, you have now defined the problem; and you are taking incremental actions to address it. What's next? Get used to mistakes -- they come with the territory of uncertainty. The more uncertain a situation is, the more likely mistakes will be made, especially in the beginning. However, by starting with small steps you can reduce the downside of errors, while increasing the chances of success in the end. The leadership challenge is to get used to making mistakes, handling the fallout, and keeping your organization moving forward. An essential quality of successful leaders is their ability to handle the stress or criticism that comes with making mistakes. Like any challenge, practice and experience helps. Keep at it.
In conclusion, although we can never entirely eliminate uncertainty in our work, we can get better at working with it. If we do better at defining the problems we face, taking action in small steps, and increasing our ability to "fail forward," we will be more prepared to not only survive but also thrive with uncertainty; we will be much more effective leaders for our organizations.