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Modern Physics has long done away with the notion that we can know anything with certainty yet most management theories and practice seem to be based on a Newtonian view of 'knowability'. True leadership recognises that we never know what to do but this very uncertainty demands that we must act decisively.

As I write this The Age reports that overnight the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell below 9000 points for the first time since 2003. Maybe by the time you read this it will have fallen below 8000. Maybe it will have recovered to be over 10,000. As I heard Craig James say at a business breakfast this morning, “No one knows.”

In all my experience as a consultant, the question I am most often asked is “How do we know what we should do?” This question comes in many forms. Sometimes my client acts as though I know exactly the solution to their problem – after all that’s what they pay me for isn’t it. Sometimes I feel like telling them not only do I have no idea of the solution, I’m not even sure what the problem is. Unfortunately I more often fall into the trap of believing the client’s trust in my omniscience is well placed. I believe that I should know the answer or at least, if I don’t. I should act as though I do. I justify this by convincing myself that if I work hard enough, study the client’s situation in enough detail and read enough of what ‘the experts’ say, both THE PROBLEM and THE ANSWER will become clear to me.

It is at times like this that I forget the greatest service I can give to my client is to not know. My client knows their business and their organisation better than I ever can. When I feel like I have to know, or have to look like I know I can’t ask the dumb questions that everyone wants to ask but no one dares. With grateful acknowledgment to a dear colleague, I call this the Colombo model of consulting.

The same is true for leadership. It takes courage to admit you don’t know what to do yet perhaps the greatest failures of leadership throughout history have been made by those who acted out of this fear. In the current economic situation, doing nothing is not an option. Global treasury officials and financial chiefs must act in the full knowledge that there is no higher authority to which they can turn who can provide them with just the right settings to avert a catastrophe, History will judge them harshly if they get it wrong.

This belief arises from the triumph of the industrial age where we have come to think of organisations as machines.

As Danah Zohar puts it:

Classical physics transmuted the living cosmos of Greek and medieval times, a cosmos filled with purpose and intelligence and driven by the love of God for the benefit of humans, into a dead, clockwork machine ... Things moved because they were fixed and determined; cold silence pervaded the once-teeming heavens. Human beings and their struggles, the whole of consciousness, and life itself were irrelevant to the workings of the vast universal machine” The Quantum Self: Human Nature and Consciousness Defined by the New Physics, 1990

Welcome to the first edition of The Spiral Path – the companion newsletter to my Spiral Path blog.

In this newsletter, I refer to the concepts of Quantum Leadership® and The Spiral Path™. You can find out more about these concepts on my website.

Over the last half a year I have given a lot of thought to what I might write about in this the premiere edition of The Spiral Path. I’ve written myself notes and possible titles have come and gone in my mind. In the end though, I have come back to my very first thought – the concept of our Blind Spot. I am heavily indebted to C. Otto Scharmer* for the central insight of this article as well as many of his words that I will quote directly.

When we think about our blind spot, we think about something that is in front of us but we can’t see it. A colleague I was discussing this with recently observed “it’s something we don’t want to see.” There are certainly many of those, but I want to talk about a different view of the blind spot. Something that is within the range of our perception but is, in fact, invisible.

Julian Lippi's PhD thesis has been a rich source of reflection for me over the last few days.

Today, I was caused to think about mistakes I've made both in my professional career and in my personal relationships.

I was reading Jenny's story where she said:

... every professional mistake I've ever made in my life ... has been a failure to listen. I cannot think of any time ... I've got myself into hot water that couldn't be traced to a failure to engage with the other person's data for long enough, or at a deep enough level. Can't think of a time where it wasn't about listening. (p161)

This would be quite true for me as well, although I would add an important factor that comes into play for me. It might be the same as what Jenny is speeking about or it might be something different.

For me, I always relate my mistakes to my failure to engage with myselft. When I think about it afterwards, I realise that at some level I always knew what was going on. I knew what was going on, or at least I knew that something was wrong, but I suppressed that knowledge. More important than supressing the knowledge, I supressed what my feelings about or sense of what was happening. When I became uneasy, I would allow my natural optimism to overide the unease and used it as an excuse to not even allow my conscious mind to be aware of my unease.

In this way, my optimism is a defence against the conflict I fear would, and often would have, arisen if I had acted.

I regard myself, and most people who know me well regard me, as an insightful person. One colleague (who I would regard as a person with great insight herself) I worked with on a year long project remarked to me "You see things that others don't." In my heart of hearts, I fully believe this to be true. I don't like claiming it for myself because it sounds like I am boasting.

However, because of my fear of conflict, I have sometimes been stingy or mean with my with my insight. I have kept it to myself. In this way, I lose out on being acknowledged for what I bring to the situation and the other (or others) miss out on insight about themselves and how they might do things differently.

It has taken me a lot of personal work to know this about myself and to know when it is happening. It is still my greatest challenge. Each day and before each interaction, I need to prepare myself to be aware not only of what is going on around me but, more importantly, to be aware of what I am observing.