Jason A. Belt

“It is impossible for certainty and curiosity to exist in the same moment” 

This statement made as part of the meditation lesson via Headspace one morning last week made me pause. 

Do I stress out trying to manage toward a level of certainty and as a result, close my mind to learning new things? 

Part of why I practice meditation is to learn new things about my brain. As I have “matured” over the years I clearly recognize I have mental strengths and those strengths are paired with definite weaknesses. Meditation has helped me be open to my weaknesses and through mindfulness learn and practice better managing those on a daily basis. 

I love routines, habits, and predictability, which when considering the statement above I am attempting to walk a path toward some sort of certainty. Perhaps I have this skewed? Am I using my habits ina n attempt to gain more certainty each day? Do I form habits with the aim to settle on a repeatable routine and stick to it? 

Patrick Lencioni is a believer and teacher of the principle of clarity over certainty. In his view, leaders need to strive for clarity and make decisions vs striving for certainty, or being “right” and then making a decision that in their mind is certain to succeed. The latter in his mind is impossible and will lead to paralysis. People and organizations learn more from clarity-based decisions and the only cost for the leaders operating this way is pride, but in the end, clear information at hand was used to make the best decision possible and the lessons learned can be used to iterate and improve. 

So, connecting the desire for certainty, to pride is a powerful one. Perhaps my ego, constant desire to be right, or limit failure, actually limits my learning? I do know this to be true and have actively worked at limiting my ego over time. Fear and ego connected to pride, are powerful forces that can paralyze us and I can see the connection between certainly and the fear/ego trap. 

So, as a leader, my lesson learned here is basic but hard to practice given my lower instincts as a human. As I meditate and learn, I will work to focus on the pursuit of clear information to make the best decisions possible with my team. This pursuit of clear information will fuel curiosity and as we find more information in this pursuit of clarity, then make decisions, and learn more, then the more curious we will get. That is a positive feedback loop and one I am excited to continue. 

I try to practice this each day with my teams, but candidly, the fear and ego feedback loop when things go wrong is a powerful one. 

‘How can we ensure something like this never happens again?’ 

I hear that pinging in my head and the honest response would be: ‘We can’t’ 

The pressure in business is to offer assurances that lessons learned would make it so what transpired will ‘never’ happen again. The truth is, that in a day when we have tech stacks consisting of dozens of separate, but integrated solutions, designed by people, managed by people, updated by other people, and then tracked with software designed by other humans, breaks and mistakes leading to problems are going to always happen. 

So, as a leader dealing with an issue, I can either look to provide certainty to a client and my team or I can lead the charge for curiosity and gain clarity with my team to make a better solution for the client. 

I am going to work each day to pursue clarity and coach my team to be curious in our continuous pursuit to be better. 

What are you going to do?  Are you going to try to be certain before deciding/leading, or are you going to be curious and look for clarity, make a decision, and then embrace the lessons learned?