The brains of our ancestors evolved to notice change because, for them, change might mean sex, food, or death.
And when the whole world is changing so fast, this means that it is easy for our change-focused brains to become overwhelmed.
One response to this might be to ignore some of the information that is coming at us. But when so much is changing so fast, this is risky: things that didn’t matter yesterday might become important tomorrow.
So a better alternative is to learn to make sense of more information more quickly.
Computers might seem a good way to do this. But computers bring their own problems. First, as this article in the Harvard Business Review points out, the data used by computers can often be flawed, leading us into a false sense of security: garbage in equals garbage out. Second, even when the data is perfect, the information provided by computers depends on the assumptions programmed into them by flawed human beings. And as the Boeing 737-Max crashes showed, those programmers’ assumptions can be wrong. And third, using a computer to process more information about more things ultimately brings us back to the same bottleneck: our own inability to process information. Except that now we will need to process a computer’s summary of even more information about even more things.
What all this means is that if we truly want to use this time of change to become stronger and more inspired then we have to address the bottleneck: we have to increase our own ability to process information.
The good news is that our brains are still 30 times more powerful than the fastest supercomputers. Neuroscientists estimate that we are only conscious of about five percent of our cognitive activity. This means that we can increase our capacity to process information if we learn to harness the power of the other 95 percent of our minds: our unconscious minds.
This is what top sportspeople do when they leap and stretch in an instant to put the ball exactly where they want it to go — it’s not their conscious, thinking minds that are working out what to do: “Oh, look, the ball is there, so if I put my left foot here and my right arm here and then…”. It is their unconscious intuition that enables them to respond in an instant, even with limited information.
If we want to achieve the same, we can’t simply manage our way through change. Management is about taking decisions when information is abundant and clear. Management uses our rational brain.
When information is messy, missing, or overwhelming, we have to know intuitively what to do. This is the role of leadership. Leaders know what to do when the situation is unclear and the outcome is difficult to predict. Leaders have nobody else to tell them what to do. Instead, they follow their own inner guide.
Like top sportspeople, we can achieve great things when we stop thinking. And like them, we can train ourselves to get better with practice.
We can’t just manage our way through change. We have to lead ourselves through change. This is the second step to becoming antifragile.
Have you ever struggled to make a decision because you had too little information or too much? Have you ever had an intuition that turned out to be correct? Would it be useful to practice tools and techniques that develop your intuition?
Adapted from The Churning, Inner Leadership: a framework and a set of tools for building inspiration in a time of change.
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