Leadership is a Thinking Problem

Leadership is not a position problem. It is a thinking problem. Similarly, decision quality is not a position problem. It is also a thinking problem. Making consequential decisions in conditions of complexity can be incredibly difficult. Many people entrusted with leadership are woefully underprepared to do so, not from lack of desire, intelligence or will to tackle the problems they are faced with, but rather from a system which has de-prioritized leadership training (and training in general for that matter).

Universities teach us how to think, but very few organizations continue that education once leadership responsibilities begin to grow. In our work lives the problem is amplified. Leadership is often treated as a promotion rather than a discipline. We promote people. We give them authority. We give them responsibility. We don’t systematically teach them how to think when complexity explodes. That is a problem worth solving.

Throughout my career I’ve watched extraordinarily capable people promoted into leadership positions because they were excellent engineers, accountants, lawyers, foresters, operators or project managers. Their technical expertise earned the promotion. Their next challenge wasn’t technical. It was judgment.

I’ve come to believe that this gap, not technical capability, but decision capability, is one of the great, underappreciated leadership challenges of our time. That’s the gap that I want to help close. Not by giving people templates or easy answers, but by helping them develop the habits of thinking that allow them to solve difficult problems for themselves. My goal is not to provide answers. It is to help people develop the capability to discover better answers.

What Comes Next?

I’m building an intellectual platform dedicated to improving the quality of consequential decisions. Good decisions are rarely accidental. They are the product of disciplined thinking, thoughtful deliberation, diverse perspectives, and leaders who have learned how to navigate complexity.

This body of work should be available to all and at a level that is both approachable to the new leader and valuable to the more seasoned professional. It aims to house a myriad of different types of information, from infographics to scholarly works and everything in between.

Whether you’re serving on a nonprofit board, leading a startup, managing a family business, serving in government or the military, or helping guide a municipal council, the common denominator isn’t leadership.

It’s people making consequential decisions together.

The best decisions begin long before the moment a decision must be made.