I recall hearing an anecdote about MBA students who, when asked why they wanted to become leaders, responded, ‘so I can tell people what to do.’ While this may be an exaggeration, it highlights a common misconception about leadership roles.

In order to truly lead, one must be able to admit “I don’t know.” Admitting “I don’t know,” unfortunately, goes against the very survival strategy that has gotten most new leaders to the position that they are in today.

Toyota’s NUMMI Team Member handbook from 1984 states:

If you accept an explanation without question, you may have lost the chance to understand. You must learn to say “I don’t understand.” In effect, this means breaking away from common assumptions.

In 1989, Panasonic’s founder Konosuke Matsushita boldly proclaimed that:

“[Japanese companies] will win and [American companies] will lose. You cannot do anything about it, because your failure is an internal disease…

You firmly believe that sound management means executives on one side and workers on the other, on one side men who think, and on the other side men who can only work. For you, management is the art of smoothly transferring the executives’ ideas to the workers’ hands…

We know that the intelligence of a few technocrats — even very bright ones — has become totally inadequate to face these challenges. Only the intellects of all the employees can permit a company to live with the ups and downs and the requirements of the new environment.”

To put this in perspective, one of Panasonic’s newest products in 1989 was a VHS camcorder. Intel’s 80486 processor came out onto the market the same year with just over a million transistors. In 2021, my iPhone 12 Pro Max’s A14 processor has 11.8 billion transistors and fits in my pocket. Quite simply, technology was already very complex in 1989, and thirty years later it has become only more so. There are many tools that have simplified creating solutions, but that has only enabled and emboldened us to go after more complex problems.

Matsushita correctly identified that the problems were far too complex for even the brightest leaders at Panasonic to think through on their own, even in 1989. He describes a degree of humility in Panasonic’s leadership that permits them to thrive in an increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous environment. Matsushita’s revelation is neither new nor original and our world has only become even more complex. So why is it that so many leaders feel that they must come up with the ideas and smoothly transfer them to the hands of workers to execute their plan without questioning? Why is it that workers accept responsibility for the failure of a plan they had little input into, rather than propose the possibility that the plan did not—and never could—proactively account for every critical yet unexpected condition?

The Cynefin Framework

Dave Snowden’s “Cynefin” sense-making framework does a brilliant job of helping us see what is happening here. If you’re familiar with the Cynefin framework, you can skip this section.

Put succinctly, there are five decision-making contexts or “domains” that help people understand the situation they are in and their habitual behaviour:

• Clear: the situation is a bit like the game “tic-tac-toe” (AKA “noughts and crosses” or “Xs and Os”). There is a best practice you can follow and win, there is virtually no uncertainty, and the relationship between cause and effect is obvious. The decision-making strategy is sense-categorize-respond: sense what is happening, categorize it into a well-known bucket (requires no expertise), and respond with a winning solution.
• Complicated: Cause and effect can still be related, but it requires expertise to do so. This is a bit like the game “Chess;” you can win the game by correctly considering more sequences of moves than your opponent. The decision-making strategy is sense-analyze-respond: sense what is happening, analyze it using significant hard-won expertise, and respond.
• Complex: Cause and effect can only be determined in hindsight and there are no right answers. There is a notable inflection point that Matsushita identified at play here: it is no longer possible for people—especially one person—to “think through” a complex domain and come up with an ideal—let alone “best”—solution. Examples of Complex problems include “battlefields, markets, ecosystems and corporate cultures… that are ‘impervious to a reductionist, take-it-apart-and-see-how-it-works approach, because your very actions change the situation in unpredictable ways.” (Wikipedia)
• Chaos: Cause and effect cannot be determined, even in hindsight. Immediate action towards establishing order and safety is essential. Only after do we take some action do we start sensemaking: “a leader’s immediate job is not to discover patterns but to staunch the bleeding.” (Snowden and Boone from Wikipedia)
• Disorder: This domain represents uncertainty or disagreement about which of the other domains applies. The primary action is first to understand which domain you’re actually in before responding.

This is a very simplified explanation of the Cynefin framework, and if the reader is not already more familiar with it I strongly encourage them to read the Wikipedia article and watch Dave Snowden’s brief overview and humorous example.

The Leader’s Journey

Let’s consider the typical leader as they progress from childhood to leadership.

They began in early schooling solving Clear problems. There is a single “best practice” that is credibly better than the alternatives for most of the problems young students solve. The decision-making strategy of sense-categorize-respond applies because the problems are intentionally kept clear enough for a non-expert to solve. The young student is incentivized for applying the correct formula with gold stars, good grades, and eventually the opportunity to solve more challenging problems as they go to the next schooling level.

As the student prepares for and enters university, their problems evolve from Clear to Complicated. Here the student still senses what lies in front of them, but now they must analyze the situation and make a proposal as to a good solution. In the vast majority of cases, the student will be presented with problems at the boundary of their experience and intelligence and will resolve them through perseverance and mentoring from their teachers. The university student is incentivized for their growing expertise with academic recognition and the opportunity to solve even more challenging problems, either by entering the workforce or continued academic study (e.g., going for a Masters or PhD).

(As a side note, most of the folks I have spoken with have agreed that Complex problems do occasionally appear in universities, but they are rare. Examples of genuinely Complex academic work could include a team of several MBA students working on their thesis as advisors to an overseas company wishing to enter their local market or a team of engineering students developing a robot together. A good rubric might be: can the student succeed in this venture alone if they are bright? Usually, the answer is “yes,” and therefore the problem is merely Complicated.)

Even when the student enters the workforce, their problems remain largely Complicated. Individual contributors can still make meaningful progress on a problem within their span of responsibility. Now more than ever, the individual’s expertise has become their very survival strategy: they are able to come up with a “good” (if not the “right”) solution for the problem they are tasked to solve with limited outside support, creating value for their employer. This value is rewarded with a paycheck, which the employee exchanges for food, shelter, and the other necessities and niceties of survival.

To this individual, the suggestion that they might not be able to come up with the “best” or even a “good” solution will likely feel fundamentally threatening to their survival strategy. Given the common management mindset that ‘being a leader means telling people what to do,’ or that ‘management is the art of smoothly transferring executives’ ideas to workers,’ it’s understandable why someone might feel uncomfortable saying “I don’t know what to do, what do you [subordinate] think we should do?” It is their track record of knowing what to do that has gotten them to this position; they certainly cannot admit ignorance so late in this game!

This self-perception can persist for some time, even unintentionally, before the limitations become clear. (Not forever, though: we are increasingly discovering that many technical problems are also too complex for individual contributors to solve on their own; a team really is greater than the sum of its parts.) Once people become people managers, though, they hold their teams back by insisting that the teams implement the manager’s solutions as provided. This is a shame, but it makes sense why the manager is flexing their (now relatively limited) expertise at their team’s expense: nobody has told them that their fundamental strategy needed to change! Instead of being the “expert,” they need to be a humble mentor, visionary, and space-holder.

How to Find Freedom

Remember Matsushita’s warning: “Only the intellects of all the employees can permit a company to live with the ups and downs and the requirements of the new environment.” The intellects of all of the employees cannot be sought—let alone leveraged—by a manager clinging to their outdated “expert” self-image.

We must learn to observe when the environment we are in has shifted to a new domain, regardless if it is because we have been moved (e.g., an individual contributor has been promoted to manager) or because the world around us has moved (we founded a company and things went from Complicated to Complex in six months). We then must apply the correct decision-making strategy for the domain we are in at the moment, not the one that has been habitual for us in the past. Because the problems we solve typically increase in Complexity throughout our careers, we must recognize that we will likely fall back on decision-making strategies that served us well in our Clear and Complicated pasts but do not serve us in our Complex present.

It makes sense that leaders would object to giving up their “expert” position: it has served them well for many years. It can be quite disillusioning and a blow to the ego to say “I don’t know.” Yet with the expert’s approach also comes “impostor syndrome,” a nearly existential sense of fear that someone will be discovered as someone who doesn’t belong somewhere because they don’t know enough. It also forces leaders to remain continuously engaged: instead of having dinner with their family, going on a vacation, or defining the strategic direction of their company, they are stuck in an “expert” role that they’ve programmed their team to rely upon to reinforce their perceived role security. Their real job security—what really matters—is invisibly at threat because they cannot see how limiting the solution space to those that can be discovered by one person compromises the organization’s agility.

The solution is both simple and hard: to the extent that it’s safe, push decision-making responsibility down the power hierarchy. Develop your team’s capabilities and make the vision and roadmap unambiguously clear so that you can trust your team to make better decisions than you do. You will quickly discover how good your team was at being experts and how great it feels to let them solve most of the problems on their own. As Toyota said in 1984:

Give full play to your creative inventiveness. Progress is made only through great effort; leading people by the hand does not make them creative.

• How might your previous success as an expert inadvertently limit your openness to your team’s ideas today?
• How comfortable are you saying ‘I don’t know’ in your leadership practice?
• How do you balance demonstrating expertise with showing humility in your leadership role?
• What strategies do you use to encourage diverse perspectives within your team?
• How do you model learning from mistakes to foster a culture of continuous improvement?