The Surprising Power of Not Knowing What to Do is like a fitness regimen for your mind. The book explores the counterintuitive idea that being at a loss for what to do is an opportunity, not a problem. You will learn how to develop the mental stamina to deal with your most daunting challenges. You will discover strategies for accessing insights and options when you feel stuck. Most importantly, you will gain renewed faith in the possibility of a more creative and compassionate future.
The Surprising Power of Not Knowing What to Do is like a fitness regimen for your mind. The book explores the counterintuitive idea that being at a loss for what to do is an opportunity, not a problem. You will learn how to develop the mental stamina to deal with your most daunting challenges. You will discover strategies for accessing insights and options when you feel stuck. Most importantly, you will gain renewed faith in the possibility of a more creative and compassionate future.
This is not the book I intended to write. I canât tell you how many versions of this preface have come and gone. A preface should help the reader understand the authorâs relationship to the subject of the book and how the book came to be, so this piece has evolved in parallel with the book. This book started out as a set of ideas for helping organizational leaders navigate complex and uncertain conditions. It has been recast as an antidote to thinking that isolates, divides, limits, and misdirects.
I completed the manuscript during the summer of 2020âa year that reset the bar for what constitutes complex and uncertain conditions. My editor pointed out that what I had written for organizational leaders could not be a timelier message for anyone feeling overwhelmed and disoriented by the interlocking calamities of racial inequality, political turmoil, a pandemic, historic unemployment, and a climate crisis.
Iâm good at thinking my way out of challenging situations. I can remove myself from confusion and anxiety while offering ideas for how to process the various aspects of a problem. Itâs a skill that makes me a successful facilitator, coach, and consultant. Itâs also a coping mechanism that protects me from getting emotionally embroiled in the situations my clients want help with. But when I canât come up with a way to think about something, I not only feel helpless, I start to feel inadequate.
As I contemplated an expanded mission for the book, my desire to make a difference started bumping up against my psychology. My editor was coaxing me onto a larger stage. Suddenly I felt overwhelmed and disoriented. I had just written a book about the upsides of not knowing what to do. Would I be able to take a dose of my own medicine?
ON MAY 25, 2020, a 46-year-old Black man named George Floyd, was murdered by white Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. Lying in the street for 9 minutes and 30 seconds, handcuffed, with his neck pinned under Chauvinâs knee, Floyd begged for air and eventually suffocated to death. Chauvin crushed the life out of George Floyd with callous indifference. The video of George Floydâs murder shocked and enraged the world. Still, we wonder if the recent outcry for racial equity will reach a tipping point that leads to meaningful progress.
As I write in the closing months of 2020, surging numbers of people infected with Covid-19 may soon overwhelm our health care system. Meanwhile, the sitting president of the United States obsesses over his election loss, plots against preface the incoming administration, and undermines a smooth and peaceful transfer of power. Trust in democratic institutions is on the decline; conspiracy theories are on the rise.
Weâve lost the ability to think together because we canât agree on what constitutes factual information. We look at the same situation and draw opposing conclusions. Depending on the sources of information you trust, a person wearing a face covering might represent a responsible citizen or a brainwashed conformist. We have problems to solve, yet working together feels risky.
Iâm in the business of helping people get unstuck. Iâve been hiding in organizations, busying myself with teaching leaders to notice and avoid thinking traps. Itâs work that helps me feel useful. Meanwhile, though, the world has been coming apart at the seams. Dare I turn my attention to more significant problems?
Itâs as if the universe has thrown down a gauntlet: You want to help people get unstuck? Letâs see how you do with threats of a lethal pandemic, a climate crisis, deeply entrenched social injustice, and massive unemployment.
To be clear, I donât know what to do about the crises that have started to define the coming decade. Iâve spent my adult life ducking experiences that leave me vulnerable to feelings of helplessness and incompetence. Iâve focused on challenges inside organizations because itâs an environment I understand well enough to be of use. I needed someone else, a wise and insistent editor, to point out the obvious. I had written that in chaotic times, one should be skeptical of expertise rooted in the past. I claimed that not knowing what to do could be liberating rather than paralyzing. Yet I felt stymied by an invitation to help people trying to make progress on our most consequential problems because I lacked expertise and didnât know how to help.
Even if I wanted to ignore the worldâs problems and remain focused on organizations, the twin viruses of racism and Covid-19 do not respect arbitrary distinctions between personal life and work life. Boomers and Gen-Xers were raised to believe that bringing our full, unfiltered selves to the workplace was inappropriate and counterproductive. Donât discuss religion or politics at work was the unwritten law. But over the last few years, the workplace has been undergoing a transformation. A socially engaged and interconnected generation of workers have refused to sublimate their values and ideals to corporate goals.
Since the beginning of the 21st century, terrorism, wars, mass shootings, natural disasters, cyberattacks, and other horrors have darkened our mood and tested our idealism. Until recently, Iâve managed to separate my exasperation about the state of the world from my responsibilities to my clients. Now, external world issues have become internal organizational priorities. During the 2016 presidential campaign Hillary Clinton introduced the term implicit bias to the general public. Two years later, two Black men in a Philadelphia Starbucks were inappropriately handcuffed and arrested for trespassing. In response to the outcry that followed, Starbucks shut down thousands of stores and put all their employees through racial bias training. Hillary Clintonâs raising concerns about implicit bias may not have roused my clients, but Starbucks closing its stores got corporate Americaâs attention. Walling ourselves off from our shameful history could no longer keep uncomfortable truths and disturbing events on the periphery. The dam was set to burst when Derek Chauvin brazenly crushed the life out of George Floyd.
Not surprisingly, at Unstuck Minds my business partner, Lisa Weaver, and I have been getting requests to help organizations and their leaders learn how to acknowledge and respond to unconscious bias and racism in our society. Iâve read the books, listened to the podcasts, and watched the videos. As a white male I have not, however, lived the oppression. I donât experience the unrelenting dissonance between the promise of liberty and justice for all and the reality of being devalued because of my race. When clients ask for help combating racism and other adverse effects of implicit bias, I am neither neutral nor an expert. Itâs not just issues of race exposing my vulnerabilities these days. In the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, our firm has been getting requests to help leaders learn how to manage distributed workers who may never again return to daily office jobs. When it comes to a world where convening is dangerous, no one is unaffected. And when it comes to reinventing work for that world, no one has expertise.
I remember feeling similarly incapacitated as I watched the election returns of 2016. At first, I wasnât focused on what a Donald Trump presidency would usher in. I was too busy struggling to understand how I could have been so out of touch with American voters. I consider myself well-informed and broad-minded. It made me wonder what other erroneous assumptions Iâve been harboring. I can recover from the sting of being wrong if I get to learn something from it, but the 2016 presidential election pulled the rug out from under me. I wasnât just mistaken; my thinking was flawed. Iâve heard all the theories and still canât make them add up.
I am not by nature a pessimist. In fact, Iâve gotten pretty good at spinning our global dilemmas as necessary corrections that will eventually lead to an era of collaborative and humanistic social structures. I am not writing this book to explain whatâs going on, nor am I offering solutions. My purpose is to suggest practices that help us adapt to chaos and instability and allow us to meet the uncertainty of the moment with compassion and creativity. When I was challenged to expand the scope of my work and the audience for this book, I first hesitated, and then rediscovered the surprising power of not knowing what to do. Iâm now even more convinced that my reflex to turn away from a problem because I donât know what to do takes a toll on my creativity. And if I only work with people who think like I do, my compassion atrophies like an unused muscle.
Do you know how a vaccine works? A vaccine doesnât eliminate the disease or cure those who have been infected. A vaccine trains the immune system to make us less susceptible to a disease. Recent events have infected us with a malaise against which we need inoculation. It feels as though the foundations of civil society that anchor our identities and our aspirations have come unmoored. When our bedrock assumptions are threatened, we become susceptible to arrogant leaders, conspiracy theorists, and purveyors of snake oil. Adrift, we are grateful for any port in a storm. We look outside ourselves for answersâany answersâwhen what we need is a way to fortify our ability to access creativity and compassion amid the turbulence.
This book is not a prescription for what ails us but more like a fitness routine for thinking and feeling. Youâll read about techniques that protect you and those you serve from becoming paralyzed by limited and misguided thinking.
Just because I decided to write a book about responding to political and social turmoil doesnât mean Iâm sharing my reactions to current events. Whether youâre put off or drawn in by partisan commentary, donât expect to read about my take on current events. Instead, many of the examples and stories in this book are drawn from decades of experience helping leaders and their organizations overcome challenges and pursue opportunities. But leaders arenât the only people who become stuck.
The book opens with insights into how and why we get stuck. Part Two makes the counterintuitive claim that in uncertain times, focusing on what to do limits creativity and compassion. Part Three describes four thinking disciplines that, when consistently practiced, help us form insights and discover options even in turbulent and chaotic times.
I wrote this book for people who are feeling disoriented and stuck. I invite you to embrace the surprising power of not knowing what to doâto become not like a beginner but to become a true beginner, one who can see abundant possibilities because you are no longer a captive of assumptions the world has left behind.
If we have a problem that we canât solve no matter how hard we try, we are âstuck.â But why canât we find a solution (or come âunstuckâ)? According to The Surprising Power of Not knowing What to Do: Discovering Creativity and Compassion in a Time of Chaos by Jay Gordon Cone, PhD, itâs because we donât ask the right questions. And why donât we ask the right questions? Itâs because unbeknown to us, our minds routinely ignore some facts (a.k.a. âblind spotsâ) while sizing up a problem situation. Uncovering our blind spots and rethinking the problem with a beginnerâs mind helps us find ways out.Â
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 We may not have realized it yet, but we are all trapped by flaws in our thinking that cause us to gather incomplete information about our problem situations. We arrive at wrong conclusions, because of the facts weâve unconsciously ignored. Needless to say, from that point on, we are âstuck,â so that regardless of what solutions we might attempt, they never work. Finally, unable to make any headway, we give up, blaming our failure on others, our resources, constraints, and so on.Â
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Besides individuals, leaders, managers, and entire organizations are prone to get stuck. This book teaches how to discover our thinking traps and techniques to avoid them.
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Getting stuck assumes vital importance in businesses and organizations where people work in teams. Stuck team members, sequestered by self-imposed conclusions, are bitter, isolated, and donât see eye-to-eye with their colleagues. They do not cooperate with others on the team, leading to precious work getting held up. Hence the extreme importance of this subject to working teams. Getting stuck is also a problem for experts. The environment is continually changing, but experts are often so deeply entrenched in work that they underestimate emerging radical trends that are soon to sweep the marketplace. When they continue to pit outdated products/technologies against whatâs ruling/soon to rule the market, they fail miserably and get left behind.Â
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In this pithy book, the author discusses the science that has evolved to solve the problem of getting stuck and how we can solve stuck problems using the techniques described in it.Â
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More than ever before, the world is being impacted by changes of various kindsâchanges triggered by climate, pandemics, technology advances, and so on. Leaders need to be agile and change-sensitive, able to predict problems and quickly choose the most advantageous pathways to lead those who follow them in. This book is for leaders and managers everywhere. It will equip them with the skills necessary to detect and intervene in situations where people working under them are on the way to getting stuck and resolve causative issues in time so that work progresses smoothly, without suffering disruption.