Unquestioned Brilliance

Book excerpt: All leaders must walk a fine line between creating focus and questioning conventional wisdom, between confidence in their ability and unrealistic overconfidence, and between the demands of fast action and a clear-eyed assessment of the situation. Unquestioned brilliance gets in the way of this balance. It is a fundamental leadership trap. Unquestioned brilliance sounds like a good thing. After all, how can brilliance be bad? In the context of this book, unquestioned brilliance is not a good thing. Unquestioned brilliance is being so confident in your own intelligence and point of view that, you not only fail to question your conclusions, you may not even you see the potential for other points of view or better solutions. Unquestioned brilliance is not just overconfidence or a problem for egotistical megalomaniacs. It is something that every leader struggles with. This does not mean every leader is an egotistical megalomaniac. It means every leader is human. Each of us struggles with balancing ignorance (what we don't know) with overconfidence (what we want to believe we know). The unquestioned brilliance at the center of this book is not simply arrogance. It is far more subtle and pervasive than that. This particular leadership trap limits innovation and critical thinking and contributes to risk aversion within leadership teams. Because this process tends to happen without thought, leaders need to actively counteract this cognitive dysfunction within their teams. The book outlines ten techniques, built from research and validated through application, designed to counter the fundamental leadership trap. The techniques described in this book will not automatically make you a great leader but they will potentially help you navigate your teams on a path away from this dysfunctional cycle. Some common implications of unquestioned brilliance: -We argue that our profession or industry is too complex for outsiders to understand and yet we immediately form strong "common sense" opinions about things outside our area of expertise. -We set our strategy based on today's world and are slow to acknowledge when fundamental changes in the external environment make this plan no longer a good fit for tomorrow's world. -We spend significant amounts of time attempting to keep stakeholders satisfied. Yet we spend very little time trying to understand why people choose not to engage with our organization or questioning our understanding of stakeholder interests. -We carefully design large-scale change initiatives. Yet we do not look for, or even acknowledge, the blind spots in our plans. The techniques outlined in this book can help leaders and their teams begin building their strategic thinking muscles and help them to better navigate around the unquestioned brilliance trap.