The brains of our ancestors evolved to notice change because, for them, change might mean one of three things: food, sex, or death.
And when the whole world is changing, this means that our change-focused brains can easily become overwhelmed.
One response to this might be to ignore some of the information that is coming at us. But in a changing world, this brings risk: 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.
One way to achieve 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, leading us into a false sense of security. Second, even when the data is perfect, the information provided by computers will always depend on the assumptions programmed into them by flawed human beings. And as the Boeing 737-Max disasters showed, the assumptions made by programmers can easily be wrong. Third, using a computer to process more information about more things ultimately brings us back to the same bottleneck — except that now we will have to process a computer’s interpretation of more information about more things.
If we want to use this time of change to become stronger and more inspired 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. So we can increase our capacity to process information if we learn to harness the power of the other 95 percent: our unconscious minds.
This is the role of leadership.
Management is about taking decisions when information is abundant and clear. Management uses our rational brain.
Leadership is about knowing what to do when information is messy, missing, or overwhelming. This involves knowing your own purpose and values and following them. And it means copying what top sportspeople do when they leap and stretch in an instant to put the ball exactly where they want it to go, even when they have little information. They don’t use their conscious, thinking minds to do this, they use their unconscious intuition. And we can do the same.
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 much information, or too little? Would you like to find it easier next time?
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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