Unhelpful Assumptions (for Leading Through Uncertainty) #1 | “We Know Best”

We strongly believe that we know what’s best, even when the evidence is against us. There’s a more helpful assumption for leading though uncertainty, and it’s not what you’d think.

Here is a quote that I use to kick off many of my workshops. It’s relevant to the theme of trust and psychological safety, and equally to the theme of uncertainty. It’s by Chris Argyris and Peter Senge, two giants of organizational and leadership development.

“Teams and organizations trap themselves in defensive routines that insulate their mental models from examination. … We [become] highly skilful at protecting ourselves from the pain and threat posed by learning situations. … Because we fail to learn, we remain incompetent at producing the results we really want.”

I present this and then take people through a practical journey where they get to see that statement in action. They get to see how that plays out within each person and in the team as a whole. Most people experience it as a most enlightening journey and the awareness they gain disempowers the essence of the statement.

The key to the quote, they discover, is that every situation provides a learning opportunity. Therefore, mistakes are not something to be afraid of, and not every deviation from the plan is something to “fix”; instead, it contains potential for learning. However, when we get back to our desks, we tend not to treat it that way. Why not? Often it’s because we hold an even deeper assumption that is best explained by another quote, this time from the psychoanalyst Carl Jung:

“All modern people assume that there is nothing that exists that they have not made up. We think that we have invented everything physical [and] that nothing would happen if we did not do it. That is our basic idea, and it is an extraordinary assumption.”

If I put these two quotes together, I would sum them up with the phrase, “We know best.” Or, more particularly, “I know best.” In other words, I’ve been in this situation before, I know how this movie plays out, so don’t question me, just listen. Here’s the plan.

If we gather all the evidence from our experience—instead of selecting only the evidence that supports our belief, which we tend to do—we inevitably find instances where things turned out OK, or even better, despite not having gone according to our plan. In other words, they succeeded despite us, not because of us. Or we’ll find times when things did crash and burn, and we rose stronger from the ashes.

Life appears to be set up the wrong way around. At the end of the journey, we have all the information we needed at the beginning.

How many times have you heard—or said—about a situation, “I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy, but boy, I learned so much from it. It made me who I am today.” Yet, the next time stuff happens that way, we don’t apply that lesson. We try to control. We believe, each time, that we know best.

So, what should we really be learning? We should be learning that life is a journey of learning. We should recognise that it’s set up—or appears to be set up—the wrong way around. At the end of the journey, we have all the information we needed at the beginning. Of course, if we had set it up, we would have set it up the other way around. We’d have set life up so that you came in with all the knowledge. What we’d do with all our prescience, God only knows. Perhaps that’s why, as the saying goes, God laughs when we share our plans. There are reasons beyond our understanding.

So, if we were to recognise and accept that about life—if we align with the way life is set up instead of resisting it, instead of denying the evidence—we would emerge into a space where we suddenly understood this next quote, again by Peter Senge:

“People high in personal mastery see reality as an ally not as an enemy.”

In other words, when things start to happen that are beyond their control, people who have developed their levels of self-awareness to the point where they no longer see themselves as being at the centre of the universe will recognise that life happens for them and not to them. They will know that something new is always emerging and that they are always learning. Instead of, “We know best,” they will assume, “We’re about to learn something new.” They might even add a little hooray. Or, as Benjamin and Rosamund Zander put it in The Art of Possibility, “How fascinating!”

This proposed shift seems naïve in a corporate environment where everything is about predicting and directing, asserting and instructing. There’s certainly a place for that and, at the same time, there’s always a place for learning. In fact, if we’re objective, we’d say that learning is happening, whether we like it—or admit it—or not. And if that’s true, then it’s a more realistic assumption to make.

So, can you make that assumption the next time, not afterwards in retrospect, but sooner, even while the uncertain situation is unfolding? Instead of trying to control things, start right away to look for the learning. That would surely make you more adaptable and responsive, which seems a better way to deal with uncertainty, no?