Leading Under Uncertainty You Can't Reduce

Or, how to stop paying good money to be told that the future is still in the future Somewhere right now, a leadership team is entering month nine of a decision that deserved a fortnight. There have been three offsites. There is a data room. There is a workstream studying the findings of the earlier workstream, which studied the market, which was itself commissioned because the first study was judged inconclusive. The team is not lazy. These are diligent, expensive people doing the most defensible thing available to them, which is thinking visibly. They have converted a hard question into a project plan, and a project plan into the sensation of progress. And they will keep doing this until either the window closes or a competitor makes the decision for them, at which point the research will be retitled as a lessons-learned exercise. Their problem is not a shortage of information. Their problem is a shortage of an answer. Those are different deficits, and only one of them has a…