February 8, 2025
Great Inventions Are Not Found in Doing More of the Same
How do you know what's true?
How do you know what works?
How do you know what's possible?
In our everyday way of being in the world, we tend to operate on a set of core assumptions about what is real and what is unreal, possible and impossible, and what our role entails—and what it doesn't.
As a leader, you have a way of thinking about your role that leaves you with a certain set of possible actions and ways of being in any given situation.
Your view of what's possible becomes the limit to what's possible for the organization and the people working with you. You are a great influence on the agenda people have and the vision they are working toward.
The higher you go in an organization, the more your limits on reality influence the overall possibilities for the business and the people working in it.
Let’s return to the initial questions:
How do YOU know what's true?
If you’re like many leaders, you might consciously or unconsciously subscribe to the scientific method, which holds that whatever is true is verifiable.
Or perhaps you only trust what you yourself have experienced, or what an authority figure (a former mentor, teacher, or parent) has told you is true.
Or maybe you're an uncommon leader who believes your intuition is the highest form of knowing what’s true or what works.
The degree to which you are attached to any form of knowing or certainty is the degree to which you will allow for innovation—or not.
Innovation requires something that most people never find in their way of looking at the world once they’ve finalized their training by society: The ability to step beyond what is known—beyond conventional thinking and being.
The chances that what you think today is true will hold the test of time are very slim. Just look at history. We now look at the beliefs of those who came before us and wonder how they could have believed what they did—things we now "know" to be fantasy.
What makes you so certain that the plan of action you created isn’t limited by such outdated beliefs?
Exceptional leadership doesn’t happen by throwing away what one knows, nor by clinging to it. It happens through a rigorous commitment to openness and inquiry—both personally and organizationally—to uncover the untruths that eat away at the possibilities within the organization.
Only by allowing that something could be possible will you even attempt to verify it.
You won’t reach out to important players if you’re sure they won’t respond.
You won’t create that creative marketing campaign if you're sure that spending money on it is a waste of time, based on market conditions (which you’re also sure about).
Whatever lives as certain in your world, as things that are just so, will stay so until you are already against the wall or you take yourself to question it.
The people we admire are those who step out of these paradigms of certainty and allow for a being with not knowing—a quality that's often missing from corporate leadership today.
We have a script for everything and SOPs for even the tiniest things, but innovation doesn't happen there; transformation doesn't happen there.
Discovering your own limits on reality is an endeavor without a value cap.
It won’t just transform your organization; it will transform the quality of your entire life. Who you are is the biggest point of leverage and whatever you believe to be a limit to that will limit the possibility of your life, relationships, and business.
So, how do you know what's true?
What's possible, and what should be done?
This kind of inquiry requires thinking, energy, and commitment. That’s why most people keep running around doing what’s worked before, only to realize that they’ve missed the bigger picture by focusing solely on running even though, by now, we have airplanes.