News | Monday, 29th January 2024
Doubt, cake, and leadership
Rob McKay is a Senior Lecturer in Business Growth and Programme Manager for Help to Grow: Management. Here, Rob explains why doubt is an essential tool for leadership.
“Doubt is an uncomfortable condition, but certainty is a ridiculous one.” Voltaire
Popular literature on leadership is chock-full of certainty. Glossy covers on books promise unshakeable secrets of proven leaders. LinkedIn articles offer numbered lists of sure-fire leadership traits. Doubt is almost nowhere to be seen.
If doubt is present, it is often only as self-doubt; usually masquerading as that uncomfortable feeling known as imposter syndrome. The arguments about imposter syndrome are ones I’ll leave for another day (but we’re all blagging it a bit, right?), instead I want to think about doubt as a quite sensible response for anyone finding themselves in a leadership position to have. It's all wrapped up in notions of leadership, management, organisations, strategy and change.
Allow me to explain.
You’ve probably heard about VUCA: Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity. It’s become a shorthand for the sometimes-unfathomable mess our world presents to us on a daily basis. Thanks to advancing technology and liberated social connections, the problems we are encountering are increasingly ‘wicked’, which is to say that they have no precedent, no fixed solution, and we don’t know what our solution options might be, let alone which one to pick, and the consequences of our solutions tend to generate new problems down the line. Such times demand Leadership – a shepherding of people, knowledge, skills, resources and the like in attempt to work up some kind of solution. Messy problems, it seems, demand messy solutions.
Implicit in this is that we don’t know what will work, so we’re in a state of experimentation. The philosopher Karl Popper defined the notion of falsifiability as underpinning scientific theories, the idea that at any point a fact might appear which renders what we thought true to be untrue. In business circles this has become popularised as the idea of the Black Swan Event – we all go around believing swans are white, until a black swan appears floating on our pond, and all bets are off. This isn’t a new idea either; the Charvaka school of Hindu philosophy has, as a central tenet, the idea that we must acknowledge doubt in our observations and that our inferred understanding of the world is conditional on those observations remaining valid.
Doubt, therefore, is an absolutely critical tool for leadership. Doubt in the relevance of the resources available. Doubt in the solution itself. Doubts about the outcomes. Because without doubt, we don’t allow for alternatives, and as Voltaire noted, this certainty can lead us into disaster. No dictator was ever renowned for their embrace of uncertainty or willingness to backtrack and change course. And critically, dictators are famously unwilling to be open and sharing with decision making.
This part is really important: Doubt needs to be shared and collectively owned, and be an active part of collaborative decision making. This is tied to the idea that for these messy, wicked problems leaders don’t have the answer, but are expected to corral what’s necessary to generate some kind of answer. And if your problem isn’t messy, and full of VUCA, then it’s probably not leadership you need to address it, but good old-fashioned decent management.
Ultimately this is about decision making. Indecisiveness is often linked to doubt, especially in the context of leadership, but doubt doesn’t demand indecision. Rather, we should be embracing decisions that include a level of doubt, particularly ones in response to uncertainty. But the presence of that doubt should make us more engaged custodians of the outcomes of our decisions.
Enter cake.
If you’re a fan of the Great British Bake-Off, you’ll be familiar with the second phase of each episode, the Technical Challenge. Each contestant is given the same set of ingredients, scant instructions, and an end goal bake. VUCA abounds – volatility from the pressure of a limited time frame, uncertainty about what the end result is supposed to look like, complexity in the methods used, Ambiguity about temperatures, baking and proving times. Footage of every Technical Challenge includes a doubtful contestant opening an oven door to poke a tentative finger into their baking, another holding a timer and asking the camera for validation of their decision, and bewildered bakers asking each other if they’ve made one before and carefully observing the others approach. Everyone in the Bake-Off tent is consumed with doubt, but they are making decisions and working towards a goal anyway.
As it is with Bake Off, so it is with business decision-making. With doubt, we keep checking in on the progress of our experimental solution, and opening our metaphorical oven door. Doubt makes us more alert to progress (or the lack thereof) and so helps us overcome the sunk cost fallacy – that we can’t reverse a decision or halt progress when it clearly isn’t working. Something Bake Off contestants often do by binning a bake and starting again.
Without doubt, to be without doubt is a weaker position than to be certain, for certain. So, to mangle the famous quote from Susan Jeffers, Feel the Doubt and Do It Anyway.
Find out how you can develop your leadership skills on the Help to Grow: Management programme here.
