Are You Looking Where the Light Is—or Where the Answer Is?

I was seated a mile above home and office when I wrote this article in an airplane on my way to my hometown of Chicago. This was the only moment I could find to step back and reflect in a more meaningful way. It’s hard to find time in the middle of an “ordinary” workday, with meetings, calls and emails to respond to. 

Does this sound familiar? 

Yet, these blocks of time for deep-thinking are essential. We need space to think, disentangle, and create the new – things that remain forever unfinished when you try to fit them between your 30-minute meeting slots.

Even more important is to ask the right questions. Between google searches and ChatGPT responses, we have a tsunami of information and answers that are all around us. The key becomes making sure we are asking the right questions.

There’s a Zen tale of walking along the street at night and seeing a man searching for something under the light of a streetlamp.  When you approach him and ask what he’s looking for, he says he’s lost his car keys. “You think you dropped them right around here?” you ask him. “No,” he replies. “I heard them drop over there in the dark, but this is where the light is.” 

We’re all very similar to the “lost-keys-man.” We often search and search for answers while trying to steer clear of the dark, the places that feel uncomfortable or untraveled. But these days, we find ourselves being pulled more and more into uncharted territory.

Upheaval, turbulence, and confusion abound: within our global governments, allies are breaking up and finding new replacements; our healthcare system has new rules, less research funding, and is dealing with a front-and-center skepticism of scientific data; and in many of our leadership worlds, we are seeing the pledges of 2020 about the importance of diversity, inclusion and providing opportunities within our workplace being renounced. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. . . 

During extraordinary times, looking for what’s tried and true, the answers that have helped in the past, are usually not sufficient anymore for the circumstances you find yourself in.

Embracing the dark, instead of only searching in the light, often means we need to step away from the siren call of our to-do lists. While I might have literally embraced getting up 30,000 ft to get away from it all and write, I’m frequently urging my clients to set aside meaningful strategic time to take a birds-eye view of what’s really needed of them, of their team, and in their org. When you are stressed, your view of the world literally narrows to what’s most important in front of you. This is called “tunneling” and has been extensively studied. Tunneling is perfect for completing a report by the deadline but is a disaster for innovation and making new connections.

Unfortunately, your Teams or google calendar is masterful at getting you tunneled on what’s next in your day, not what truly needs your attention most. If you are responsible for any strategic planning, strategic decisions, or creative endeavors, you need to figure out regular ways to escape the tyranny of your calendar, your to-do lists and your tunneling brain.

Three Ways to Look Beyond the Light

Get Away From Your Desk – Years ago, management experts coined the term Gemba walks for managers who should be checking out with their own two eyes what’s really happening as opposed to managing by reports and spreadsheets. With the increasing frequency of global and remote teams, management by Gemba might be less impactful but that doesn’t erase the power of seeing things from a new perspective. Whether it’s working from a café (especially without WIFI), taking a 15-min break and walking around the block or disconnecting with a book break, the power of stepping back and letting your mind work in new ways, allows your mind to think new thoughts as well. And we need new thoughts. We need new energy and life to light up the darker, unfamiliar places and give us some new paths to try that we didn’t have the time to dream up before.

Ask “Stupid” Questions – In his most recent book, “Reset,” Dan Heath tells the story of a new employee who asked why they turned off the machines during the lunch hour, besides the fact it had always been done. It turned out it was due to a decades old practice of managing the frequent power surges that used to occur. So, it no longer served any meaningful purpose but had been commonly accepted by all as standard practice. Too often I find when leaders attend meetings, they don’t want to seem like they don’t understand, so they refrain from asking too many curious questions. If you’ve embraced forgoing questions to avoid looking ignorant, you too will avoid looking around in the dark. Because in the dark, no one has the answers, all you have are more and more questions. Instead, try to make it a personal practice to always ask when you don’t understand something. Trust me, you’re not the only one who’s confused – you will just be the one brave enough to inquire. And you know what a great question is to bat around with your team? “What if we. . . ?”

Talk To Your Friends In “Other” Places – If you’ve been in Biotech for 20 years, you know a lot about how things get done in Biotech, but you might be less familiar with the finance or retail industries. Make sure that you’re having in-depth conversations with your peers in other industries at least once a month. That means going through your contacts and intentionally reaching out to people you’ve met at conferences, school open-houses and through friends – then have some of those old-school business lunches, or new-school zoom coffees, to hear what’s up in their industry, what changes are they noticing and what’s on their horizon that they’re keeping an eye on. Innovative ideas are often taken from one industry’s standard practice and applied in new ways to other industries. That’s how the software industry adopted agile from the manufacturing sector and how barcodes, developed for the retail sector have transformed healthcare and reduced medical errors. If you want to hear the same things you already know, by all means, just keep talking to those in your industry. Yet if you realize that being on the cutting-edge is key to honing your role as an innovative leader, make sure you’re expanding your worldview regularly by expanding who you come into contact with.

It’s true that sometimes you just need to put your head down, focus, and use the value of tunneling to get a big project over the finish line. In this era of constant change though, much of your value comes from looking for opportunities where others haven’t yet. To truly step into those unknown places however, you need to develop regular practices of strategic exploration and stepping away from what you do know, to make room for something new.