Photo by Tom Fisk.
By Melissa Nightingale
At home, my little kid is learning to walk. For anyone who’s watched this process, it manages to be remarkably slow and fast all at the same time. I suppose the same could be said of all parenting milestones, but learning to walk is particularly interesting because once mastered, few of us can recall what it felt like to learn.
I find myself stuck on this idea of how we go from tentative half steps to moving with confidence. How we transition from this place of nervous energy, where we’re looking around to see if there’s anything to grab onto. And get to a point where we make bigger, more audacious moves. Where we let go of the first hold before we’re attached to the next.
This one keeps showing up in some form or another. The question, gnawing at me, echoing at home and then popping back up throughout the day.
How might we move with confidence?
I’m watching my little person tackle this uncertainty. She scoots along the edge of the coffee table. She lets go and wavers back and forth like a little drunk person. She grabs for the table, catches her balance, and then half steps toward me, falling face first into my arms.
It is not graceful. It is not smooth. It is choppy and uncertain and unstable. But she has reached her destination. And she did it by being brave.
We cheer.
How is it that this happens and most of us don’t remember it?
And how remarkable, still, that this turns out to be the framework for lessons we will learn many times across the course of a lifetime.
Instability. Fear. Failure.
Followed by more trying. Deliberate practice. Slow at first. And then bit by bit. Slowly. Slowly.
Until finally. Movement.
Uncertain. Ungraceful. Unstable.
But no longer an impossibility.
Back at the Office
Back at the office, I’m in classic start-up form. I’m asking a team of people to think differently, to stretch themselves, and to do work that’s never been done before.
They like this in theory. It’s what they signed on for. If they wanted predictable and well worn paths, they wouldn’t have picked start up. So there’s some self-selection forces already at work. It’s a good team and they are eager.
But I’m not asking for theory. I’m asking them to move without all the information. I’m asking them to make their best effort based on incomplete information. To assert without all the facts. To take semi-informed risks. And to adjust as new information becomes available.
In practice, it’s a lot like watching my kid scoot along the edge of the coffee table. Not because my coworkers are kids. But because the fundamental question is the same.
How might we move with confidence?
But We Don’t Know Anything
Walk into any modern company today and you’ll find people paralyzed by what they don’t know. These people struggle to get started because the universe of options seems so vast, so daunting, so overwhelmingly infinite.
But when you ask a few questions, what you find is that most folks actually have a pretty good idea of where they want to end up. They can even articulate a bunch of the stuff that needs to happen along the way.
In my corporate communications days, I’d did an ungodly amount of messaging work. The starting point was always the same.
An blank canvas. A clean whiteboard. A blinking cursor in a shared gdoc. A wall full of those giant sticky notes that some genius at 3M came up with.
People freeze. They want to make the first words perfect. They get so stuck that they can’t write anything down.
Instability. Fear. Failure.
“OK, let’s use all the wrong words. That will help us get to the right words.”
Followed by more trying. Deliberate practice. Slow at first. And then bit by bit. Slowly. Slowly.
Bit by bit, we write some things up on the board, we clarify, refine, we find the threads.
Until finally. Movement.
We start to make sense of it. We erase, rewrite, and shuffle things around until everything found its place.
Uncertain. Ungraceful. Unstable.
At the end of a session, we’d have used only what was in the room to fill the board. We’d go out into the world and test those assumptions — with press, on web copy, on blog posts, with potential investors. And we’d integrate changes back into the master messaging doc.
But no longer an impossibility.
We have this idea that we don’t know anything. And it gets in the way of us moving. It can paralyze a team. And from a place of stuckness, it can be really hard to get unstuck. But if you can articulate the 20% where you are confident, you’re already part of the way there.
With that 20% under your belt, you can better assess the relevant bits, you can make strategic bets, you can accept, assess, and take informed risks. You can share your working assumptions, you can invite discussion and feedback.
You can align your team around the vision and from there, you can finally start to get some wind behind your sails.
You can not only move. You can go fast.
Making the Impossible Possible
At first, it’s pulling up. Maybe it happens once. Maybe it’s a fluke. Maybe you’re on the phone with a grandparent at the time and you shriek with delight that the little kid just pulled up. And maybe the grandparent doesn’t entirely get why this is so monumental.
It’s ok. Sometimes it takes awhile for true genius to be appreciated.
This is what it looks like in the early stages.
Unrecognized by some.
Celebrated by others.
Simply ignored more often than not.
Trying, falling, trying again, maybe not for some time, but then again. And again. And again. Mastering at first on steady, reachable things. With shaky knees and unstable footing.
Followed by pulling up on any solid surface above or below until standing. On solid ground.
Finding stability, only to lean, reach, stretch, and then finally, finally, finally,
…to let go.
