Embracing uncertainty

One of the great things about my work is that I genuinely learn from my clients. And I love learning about things.

Yesterday I was talking to a client - we'll call him Jim - who was talking about whether or not he had 'mastered' or 'got on top of' his new more senior role. I think it's fair to say that in his mind he had an idea of a 'bedding in' period during which it was ok not to know all the answers. He feels that time has now passed.

The upshot of this was that we started talking about uncertainty and how more senior positions carry with them greater levels of uncertainty. Maybe Jim's now in a role that just doesn't get mastered - there's just too much of it to know what's going on all the time. His boss certainly is, and so on up.

Faced with this situation, we noticed that people's strategies fall into one of two types: coping, or accommodating.

The obvious coping strategy is to work harder. It might not get rid of the uncertainty, but at least you can't be blamed. It's an excellent coping strategy in that it has all the appearance of being constructive, it has positive cultural implications, and it helps to avoid the problem.

The problem is uncertainty, though, and working harder only works so far because it is embedded in the wrong paradigm: the player/captain paradigm where activity is primary.

Working harder can remove some uncertainty but at some point - and it's different for different people in different jobs - at some point you're going to need to accommodate this escalating uncertainty; to step off the hamster wheel and think about what the executive paradigm really means. I think it means direction and systems, which require a view of the whole that's not going to come from slogging away at diversionary activity. In practical terms it might mean sometimes being well-briefed rather than all-knowing, putting people forward as well as fronting up.

I drew a model as we talked and Jim said that it really explained it for him. I liked it too, but I actually thought I'd been drawing his model.