The brains of our ancestors evolved to notice change because change might mean one of three things: food, sex, or death.
But when the whole world is changing, this means it is easy for our change-sensitive brains to become overwhelmed.
One way to respond to this might be to ignore some of the information coming at us. But when so much is changing so fast, this is risky: things that didn’t matter yesterday might easily become important tomorrow.
So the better alternative is to learn to make sense of more information more quickly.
One way to do this might seem to be to use computers. 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. Relying on it leads us into a false sense of security. (And as AI has shown, putting garbage in means getting 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. (As the Boeing 737-Max crashes showed, those assumptions can be wrong.) And third, using a computer to process more information about more things will ultimately bring us back to the same bottleneck: our own inability to process information. Except that now we will need to process (the computer’s interpretation of) more information about more things.
What all this means is that if we truly want to use this time of change to become stronger, we have to address the bottleneck: we have to increase our own ability to process more information faster.
The good news is that our brains are still 30 times more powerful than the fastest supercomputers. Neuroscientists estimate that we are conscious of only about five percent of our cognitive activity. This means we that can increase our capacity to process information if we learn to harness the power of the other 95 percent: the power of our unconscious minds.
That is what top sportspeople do when they leap in an instant and stretch to put the ball exactly where they want it to go — it’s not their conscious, thinking minds that work out what to do, it’s their unconscious intuition.
And achieving this is not about better management. Management is about taking decisions when information is abundant and clear. Management uses our rational brain.
Leadership is about taking decisions even when information is messy, overwhelming, or missing. Leadership is about taking good decisions simply because we know intuitively what is the right thing to do.
Like top sportspeople, we can achieve great things when we stop thinking. Like them, we can train ourselves to get better with practice. And just like a sportsperson, responding in the middle of a busy match, in a time of change, this is a skill we all need.
We can’t just manage our way through change, making minor adjustments. We have to step up and lead ourselves through change.
This is the second step to becoming antifragile.
Have you ever struggled to make a decision because of too little or too much information? Have you ever had an intuition that turned out to be correct? Would you find it useful to have tools that develop your intuition and help you solve problems more quickly, more easily, more confidently, and more reliably?
Adapted from Inner Leadership: a framework and tools for building inspiration in times of change.
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