Leader Edition: Gaining Clarity in Uncertainty (Part 2: Understand)

In Part 2 of this series, we focus on understanding your environment – sharing strategies and practical tips that help leaders gain clarity in challenging, uncertain times

Strategy: Understand, Comprehend, Know

If you can’t explain it simply you don’t understand it well enough. ~ paraphrased by Albert Einstein, physicist or Richard Fenyman, also a physicist

In the first post in this series, I shared the importance of strategically devoting time to the practice of gaining clarity. In times of uncertainty, complexity is your enemy and time is your friend. Proactively setting time aside for yourself (leader time) and your team (team time), gives you the “space” you need to understand the complexity of your environment which is critical for providing clarity. In this post, we share two easy tools to help you do so.

Go Deeper – The Goal Is to Understand

Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.” ~ Marie Curie, Physicist and Chemist

In our society, we often assume that initial level awareness is understanding. We go to school for years conditioned to think that memorizing dates, formulas, places, things, etc. is the same as understanding. But that kind of learning only scratches the surface of what true understanding and knowledge is and can be.

I love this quote from author Samantha Harvey: “I think we often live at a surface level, and that ends up with us in a lot of difficulty because we just function on assumptions and secondhand knowledge.”

She’s absolutely right. In our society we often just settle for surface-level knowledge and in so doing, cause difficulties for ourselves when what we know, doesn’t stand up to the test of change or time and easily becomes overrun by confusion. To avoid this and become a leader that can provide clarity in times of uncertainty, we need to deviate from common surface-level practices and dig deeper. In other words, rather than rely on second-hand knowledge, we need to do our own analysis, with ourselves first and then with our team to gain our own, deeper level of understanding. Doing this work for ourselves, strengthens our understanding of the environment we’re operating in, the problem at hand and allows us to be a powerful beacon for clarity when most needed.

Wrestling with Overwhelming Complexity

Using the scenario I shared in my our Part I post as an example, I was tasked to support a major project as part of a new system modernization. It was an incredibly large effort spanning over 20+ years (still ongoing), impacting thousands of employees and stakeholders. No one quite knew how to get this massive effort off the ground – too much information, too much complexity, too much confusion, too many questions etc.

I was given almost, a truckload of information (at least that’s what it felt like!) and was told to sift through it all, provide a path and a plan ahead in 3 months time! In other words – organize the garage, learn French, and achieve world peace before summer vacation! lol

Example of the truckload of information I had to decipher:

Luckily, I had 3 things working for me (other than sheer willpower fueled by caffeine – and I don’t even drink coffee!):

1. experience with navigating challenging projects,

2. experience with other system modernization and transformation initiatives,

3. I already had some tools in my toolkit that could help me gain the clarity I needed to move forward smartly.

Those tools? Mind-mapping and information visualizations.

I know they seem fairly simple, but before you underestimate the power of these tools, remember, as I shared in Part I of this series, don’t be fooled by the simplicity. Leonardo Da Vinci said it best: “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” In complexity, simplicity is the point!

Key Tip/Tool 1: Mind-Mapping – Understanding What You’re Working With

I’ve been a doodler since I was a little one and even today, at work, and on the road, I always carry a sketchbook of some sort with me for doodling art, ideas, concepts, connections, etc. People used to make fun of me for it but not anymore :). Today, the kind of doodling that is focused on visually organizing information, showing relationships and connections between concepts, ideas, tasks, words, is called mind-mapping. Which is exactly the easy-to-use tool I needed to help make sense of the mountains upon mountains of convoluted information I was dealing with.

I used the free, no-frills edition of SimpleMind (previously open-source mind-mapping software – not an affiliate) and good old sketches in my trusty sketchbooks to unpack and unravel the complexity like a true detective (lol).

〉 Using Mind-Mapping to Organize Information and See Connections

Something to remember is that in complex, uncertain environments, look to the opposite for the solution. In the case of complexity when you have too much burdensome, complicated information, simplicity is the answer. So to keep it simple, my first step was to understand what I had by simply organizing it and structuring it in an easy to comprehend manner for myself and others.

I used the SimpleMind software to quickly organize information I had. And some mindmaps emerged naturally. I had one titled “Organizational Structures” which mapped out impacted organizations and visualized levels and connections between them. I had another mindmap titled “Core Organizational Functions” that mapped out functions by key organization.

Sample SimpleMind Map here:

Once I started to freely associate words, terms and brainstormed connections on the blank canvas, the more I started to see a bigger pattern emerge. At a certain point, it started to become clear that we were dealing with multiple reference points and multiple environments not just one.

Lightbulb ! That’s the reason we were so confused and overwhelmed by all the information we had and struggled to move forward. We didn’t yet understand that our new system modernization initiative wasn’t just operating or impacting one environment, it was operating in 3 environments! And each environment had its own specific requirements and approach.  Once my team and I came to that understanding, suddenly we now had the clarity we needed to move forward smartly.

The structure that emerged is what today academics call the Change Management Transition Model back then I just called it the As-Is and To-Be model.

Example Structure: As-Is (Today), Transitional (Today & Tomorrow), To-Be (Tomorrow)

The next few weeks, we spent time defining each environment clearly, creating more models to support our analysis and then we organized all the information we had into our new structures. With our new approach, we quickly gained momentum and found a way to provide clarity to others that was simple and easy to understand. What had seemed impossibly complex just weeks before was now manageable and clear. Full speed ahead after that!

Thank you, mind-mapping!

Key Tip/Tool 2: Information Visualizations and Presentations

From that understanding on, my team and I then focused on communicating our new frames of reference and providing clarity to our partners and executives using another easy tool: information visualizations and presentations.

Studies have shown that visuals improve learning by up to 400 percent. And the human brain processes visuals around 60,000 times faster than text, due to our ability to quickly interpret illustrative elements simultaneously with words.

I absolutely vouch for this. Early in our clarity journey, we discovered that visuals were far more effective than words alone. When we tried explaining our approach with just text, people struggled to understand. But once we started using graphics, whiteboards, or simple sketches, everyone jumped onboard much faster.

Of note, visualizations don’t work for all environments but for us, it was a natural fit. Check your environment for what works best – since ours was highly complex and fast-paced, visuals became our most efficient communication tool. And because of this, we started to incorporate visuals into our conversations and meetings and placed whiteboards in every room to aid in discussions. As always, I would have my sketchpad handy and would use it often to explain complex concepts quickly. To my delight, I started to see my team, co-workers and even senior leaders walk around with their own sketchpads for their own visualizations – win!!

Changing our communications approach to one primarily visuals-based was a game-changer. Using the 3 environments we identified in mind-mapping as our visual structure, everything we presented was in the context of “as-is, transitional, and/or to-be” or “today, transition, tomorrow”. This conceptual and visual structure was essential to driving fast understanding and quick, informed decision-making.

Our partners and executives often shared positive feedback on our communications approach and we were told many times, that our products helped to quickly clarify direction, guide decision-making, gain consensus, etc. Even now, many years later, some of our visuals are still posted on whiteboards in conference rooms and on our program website – proof that simple tools can have lasting impact!

In other words, it works!

Final Notes

It’s important to remember that one major cause of confusion and uncertainty, can be, a lack of understanding of the environment you’re working in, like in my example. That’s why, regardless of whether your scenario is like mine, it’s important to adopt and nurture a learning mindset that always seeks to understand.

Leaders who develop a learning mindset absorb information faster and adapt to their surroundings (and change) better. This allows them to stay ahead of change, complexity, uncertainty rather than behind it. But to nurture a learners mindset, you need to be able to smartly use your time and your tools.

I’ll always advocate for using time with intention, proactively for your own internal analysis (leader time) and for your team analysis (team time).

I’ll also always advocate for the use of easily available tools like mind-mapping and visuals, that help you gain understanding and clarity quickly and simply, for yourself and facilitate the same for others.

And I’ll always advocate for open-mindedness and patience. Once you’ve solved the lack of clarity for yourself, you’ll need to stand firm in your own understanding as you help facilitate the same clarity for others. You’ll need to tap into your patience for this, so be flexible but confident in the work you’ve done!

Ultimately, you’ll find that the more effort you put in to solve your own confusion, to gain your own clarity, to understand the environment and problem at the hand, the more you’re able to lead smartly, efficiently and effectively. And you’ll find that folks will naturally gravitate towards you for guidance and direction which you will be more than prepared to provide. “A great leader leads people from within” (~M.D Arnold) and when you and others are on the same page of understanding, there’s no stopping forward movement!

Wishing you the best of luck out there leaders!

Stay tuned for other posts in this series including other information models you can use, building consensus and a personal favorite – diving into a woefully underused ability we all have, that also powerfully drives clarity – our intuition.

Feel free to share your observations, lessons learned, tips via our social media spaces either @carmen_igls or @thecreatvrs on Instagram. Looking forward to continuing the conversation!

And stay tuned for more tips for leaders in upcoming posts! ~Carmen