Stripping Away our Illusion of Control
What leadership asks of us in uncertain times.
Uncertain times can leave us feeling both overwhelmed and powerless. Adrift in the sea of future scenarios playing out in our minds, often imagining many more outcomes in which we suffer than ones where we succeed. In a recent interview with the Harvard Business Review, David Kessler refers to this as anticipatory grief.
Anticipatory grief is that feeling we get about what the future holds when we’re uncertain. […] With a virus, this kind of grief is so confusing for people. Our primitive mind knows something bad is happening, but you can’t see it. This breaks our sense of safety.
Arguably, keeping that feeling of safety is the chief motivator of our lives, and our primary means of doing so is through cultivating systems of control. The “primitive mind,” Kessler refers too might apply this to our basic needs telling ourselves, “If I have food for today and shelter for the night, then I can feel safe.”
But as we live our lives in modern times, we develop systems to help our day-to-day become ever more efficient and effective. We create a routine around how we get ready in the morning, we listen to an audiobook on our commute to work, we sacrifice our grievances on the altar of CrossFit, we rise for church on Sunday, or maybe that meditation class on Thursdays. Regardless of what it may look like for you, we all have our rituals, which help to give us a sense of certainty over our lives.
But situations, like the one we find ourselves in now, show us just how fragile that illusion of control can be. No more reason to get ready in the morning. No trip to work. No gym. No church. Fate leaves us with two equally unappealing options: Desperately cling to what vestiges of power we have left, or realize the control was always an illusion, and embrace the uncertainty.
As unnatural as that might feel, this is precisely the way that nature operates. It’s nature’s way to be uncertain and always has been. It’s a kind of human malfunction which creates an artificial need for certainty. So how does nature manage all of that uncertainty? By existing and operating within ecosystems. When we look to nature, we realize that our addiction to certainty and control is only made necessary by our overdependence on ourselves.
The value of this concept is not lost on business. In a recent article published by McKinsey & Co. addressing leadership through a crisis they suggested,
A small group of executives at an organization’s highest level cannot collect information or make decisions quickly enough to respond effectively. Leaders can better mobilize their organizations by setting clear priorities for the response and empowering others to discover and implement solutions that serve those priorities.
If we like a level of certainty over our lives, this is especially true of our businesses. We want everything to fit into nice, tight, predictable little boxes. But in a crisis, this type of thinking will kill a business. The luxuries of an abundance of time and redundant resources go out the window, and necessity asks us to make do with what we’ve got. Maybe even more importantly, with rapid changes in technology, society, and the economy, it’s a fair bet that this looks less like our response to crisis and more like the new normal in a rapidly changing world.
So in the days ahead, emulate nature. Ask yourself which command and control systems can be turned into ecosystems of flexible, rapidly deployable, interdependence. It’s uncertain, but there’s wisdom in it.
This article was developed in collaboration with Barry Brown, adapted from a webinar we developed for Runway Innovation Hub on navigating uncertainty in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. To learn more about our workshops, message me for more information.
Barry Brown is a former community leader, nonprofit organizer and personal coach that works in identity and leadership development for startups and enterprise businesses around the world. He’s a cofounder of human(Ethos), on faculty at Singularity University, and runs be/do labs, a part of Runway Innovation Hub in San Francisco.
Damien Foord is an Air Force veteran and creative entrepreneur that has advised hundreds of brands in Silicon Valley, including LinkedIn, Tesla, Adobe, and many more. He is a cofounder of Prismonde, applying cognitive science to business strategy and brand development and speaks on organizational identity and human-centered innovation.
