Isn't There Something Tough About Leading?

Yes. Learning to tolerate uncertainty. Once you have, you're home free.

We're finally beginning to understand complexity and it turns out to be simpler than expected. In virtually all complex situations a small set of principles makes you most successful... with one caveat: you can't predict the exact outcome or when it will occur. In all complex situations there are no guarantees. Some solutions will fail and some will succeed beyond anything imaginable when you begin.

The good news is that when working with people, we know the small set of principles and we know that successful outcomes outnumber failures by a vast margin - in the order of 99 to 1... if you stick to the principles that work most often. I've covered those before on my web site... here. http://www.crispstrategies.com/index.php?src=news&category=Articles+about+the+Five+Skills

The challenge is that you need to apply the five skills consistently for as long as it takes to succeed. You can't know for sure how long that is. You can't be absolutely certain it will work (although 99% of the time it will. This is astronomically better than the odds you get when gambling which are usually far more than 99% tilted toward losing. But the results of gambling are usually instant, which makes it the most appealing behavior on Earth, the most addictive and difficult to walk away from. This is the opposite. It can be very challenging for anyone to stick with a long, slow, uncertain process.

If nothing else, you may just feel stupid hanging in. That's a really bad feeling. I recall how difficult it was doing my first major search for a new job at age 33. I wanted to make a change from being a rank-and-file teacher/guidance counselor with no obvious management experience to a business-managerial role in some totally different industry where I had no experience. I had to sit at lunch ever day for a year with a bunch of other teachers who thought I was attempting something insane and impossible. Though few commented, I could feel the weight of their skepticism adding to my own every day. But I plodded along. As a result I ended up in a dream job that led to a dream career with results so far beyond what I could have achieved in my old role that it's hard to compare them in the same breath. Talk about tripling your results... and then some.

The neat thing is that you don't have to let yourself feel stupid. No one really knows or cares how you feel. It helps to use the five skills constantly in all sorts of situations. That way you soon see them working in one way or another. Confidence develops and you realize you can succeed at virtually anything more than 99% of the time if you just keep at these daily. After a while they become second nature and you do them without any conscious effort. They become habits you always apply automatically, not stressful, not time-consuming, easy to fit in with whatever else you want to do - in a word: EASY!

Comments

[Craig Allen]

Hi Dave,

I just attended a presentation this week about the field of "Behavioral Finance." The field studies uncertain financial outcomes (e.g. stock prices) acknowledging that imperfect human responses affect the supposedly rational decisions made by players in financial markets.

While the field addresses financial decisions, it appears to apply also to broader decisions made under uncertainty. An example of such a decision under uncertainty is a teacher's decision to persist in looking for a business-managerial job, while getting mixed or discouraging feedback.

According to Behavioral Finance, it is very difficult for humans to arrive at an unbiased assessment of what their "results" to date mean in terms of their prospects, where the results were the outcome of an uncertain process. Where the job-seeker is abruptly rejected by a prospective employer, the job-seeker may be discouraged from trying other potential employers - even where the rude rebuff was due to nothing more than the prospective employer having a bad day.

Several tendencies (going under such terms as "anchoring," "framing," "mental accounting," and "regret avoidance") lead people to reach biased conclusions about the prospects for success of an endeavour.

Even if the individual is able to arrive at an unbiased view of their chances for success, there is another obstacle. Humans have difficulty making decisions in the face of uncertainty. Even if successes outnumber failures 99 to 1, the individual must decide to proceed knowing there is a chance of failure.

Perhaps being aware of our human limitations in

1. assessing our prospects, and
2. decision making in light of these prospects

can help in moving forward in the face of uncertainty.

[Dave Crisp]

Definitely similar issues, Craig. I think you're exactly right that the more we realize how we might react in uncertain situations, the more we'd be in a position to think through our reactions and balance them with what we logically want to do rather than be completely swayed by feelings. Building confidence by seeing past instances where you stuck it out through uncertainty and ultimately succeeded helps a lot, too.