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We know that uncertainty drives confusion and low morale which can be demoralizing and catastrophic for organizations and even leaders themselves. To avoid this, leaders must be able to provide and facilitate clarity for themselves, their teams and their organization.
In Part 2 of this series, we share the importance of truly understanding your environment and the complexity surrounding it in order to gain clarity.
Strategy 2: 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.
Some easy tools that can help you here are mind-mapping and information visualizations. Of note, don’t be fooled by the simplicity of these tools, Leonardo Da Vinci said it best: “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”!
Key Tip/Tool 1: Mind-Mapping – Understanding What You’re Working With
Using the scenario I shared in my previous 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 complexity, too much confusion, too many questions etc. My job was to get my assigned area off the ground with my small team. Major complexity – very overwhelming! But I had tools in my backpack that helped me gain the clarity I needed to move forward smartly.
During the leader time I set aside for myself and discussed in the first post, I struggled mightily to figure out how to best attack the complexity I was dealing with but eventually I did. How? Using one incredibly easy, free and often overlooked tool: mind-mapping.
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.
In my scenario, because there was so much overwhelming, overlapping and complicated information and my team and I didn’t quite know how it all fit together, I needed an easy-to-use tool to help us make sense of what the heck was going on.
Mind-mapping was the easy tool I chose. I used the free edition of the mind-mapping software SimpleMind (not an affiliate) and good ‘ol sketches on sketchbooks to unravel the complexity.
〉 Using Mind-Mapping to Organize and Structure Information
One of the first things I did to attack the information complexity I had in my scenario, was to figure out how I could organize all the information I had in terms of people, functions, technology, goals etc. in an easy way we could comprehend.
Never underestimate the power of organization and structure especially when dealing with complexity. In fact, as I shared in the previous post, in complex, uncertain environments, the opposite can be the solution. In my case, there was too much information and none of it really had any organization, connection to each other, etc. which was driving major confusion. So my first step was to understand what I had by organizing it and structuring it in an easy to comprehend manner for myself and others.
Example Structure: As-Is (Today), Transitional (Today & Tomorrow), To-Be (Tomorrow)
With SimpleMind, I analyzed everything I was given and started to freely associate words and terms and brainstormed connections on the blank canvas. The more I kept brainstorming and word associating, the more I started to see a natural pattern emerge. At a certain point, it started to become clear that we were dealing with multiple frames of reference/multiple environments and an easy to understand 3-part structure emerged:
1. the current environment without change (the status quo), the as-is environment or “today”
2. the old and the new environment in the middle of change, the “transitional” environment
3. the future environment after change, the to-be environment or “tomorrow/future”
Lightbulb 
! Why were we so confused and overwhelmed by all the information we had and struggled to move forward? Because we didn’t yet understand that our new system implementation would require us to conceptually operate in 3 environments and each environment had specific requirements and tasks. Once my team and I came to that understanding, we spent time defining each environment clearly and then organized all the information we had into our new structure. With that approach, we quickly gained a way to provide clarity to others that was easy to understand. 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 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. 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.
We found early on, that visuals were much more effective in increasing understanding and driving clarity than just words alone. Time and time again, we found it took longer for our folks to understand if we were explaining just using words or documents vs when we were primarily using visual presentations or simply drawing some quick graphics on a whiteboard or sketchpad.
Visualizations don’t work for all environments but for us, it was a natural fit. Since our environment was highly complex and super fast-paced, visuals became the most efficient way to communicate. 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, happy to report that many years later, some of our visuals/presentations are still in use today, posted on whiteboards, in office areas, conference rooms, on our program website, etc. – team win!
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 all 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 our last post in this series 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 (Tik Tok coming soon). Looking forward to continuing the conversation!
And stay tuned for more tips for leaders in upcoming posts! ~Carmen
