DISRUPTION IS THE WORK

Not knowing what to do isn’t really the issue, and it hasn’t been for a very long time.

But it is a convenient way for you to get stopped.

Figuring out what there is to do is a safe process.

For leaders whose stock-in-trade is competency, excellence, and results, acquiring more answers is familiar and optimized. You’ve optimized not just answering questions, but determining which questions matter.

When a system for solving issues becomes optimized, all problems point back into that system.

If you can see yourself in this kind of leadership, you’ve already started to feel that it generates diminishing returns.

What doesn’t fit the model gets deprioritized, delegated or disappears.

When AI first arrives on the scene, it looks like a godsend. There are now faster, more precise answers. While those kinds of answers will provide an initial boost, they’re really just more of the same results you already see diminishing returns from.

If not knowing what to do were the issue, better answers would solve it.

But this isn’t the issue — the issue is that high-performers are operating from an identity that limits what is possible. It drives the pattern of discerning the question, and then answering it.

This identity — this way of operating — was built over time because it earned you success. Our school puts attention and rewards on knowing the right answer. We test for this, and we reward it.

Not everyone leans in this direction. Some people see the nature of the game, and choose out, finding other ways to play. High-performers see the game in front of them and optimize within its rules.

This approach is highly rewarded in our society. In school it provides one form of reward, but once you leave post-secondary and enter the job force, it makes you highly sought after. You become valuable because you can answer the question better than anyone else can, but also because you can discern the question that no one is yet asking.

Look at lawyers, as an example of a field that draws a lot of high-performing leaders.

Lawyers are highly optimized in:

• Ascertaining what is and is not on the table (what are the rules of the game?)
• Determining what is possible, given those rules
• Optimizing within what is possible
• Acting so as to arrive at that optimal result

However, this approach begins by ascertaining what is allowed by the current rules. Anything outside those rules is filtered out.

The legal profession rewards overwork with high pay. Lawyers tend to optimize getting paid a lot for working very hard, or less work through less pay.

They are simply unaware that they look right past the possibility of working a moderate amount, and getting paid handsomely.

This pattern shows up across other high-performance fields: medicine, politics, entrepreneurship, corporate leadership, accounting, and so on.

This reinforcement creates an identity (hard-working, over-worked but okay with it, well-remunerated, get to have fun and relax during the few times we create space for that), and that identity narrows our range of perception.

The narrowing of your perception isn’t visible. Problems only occur to you in ways that feed into your approach.

This narrowing produces more of the same results, reinforcing the cycle.

Over time, this fully-coherent system even impacts your desire. Anything outside your system falls away. It doesn’t occur like giving up on something. It just stops being something you would bother wanting, since it “clearly” isn’t available.

The desire doesn’t ever leave you, it just goes quiet.

If you can see yourself here, then you’re probably already feeling something predictable and familiar: “Okay, yeah, I can see this, so what do I do about it? How do I solve this?”

And that’s the rub — that’s your system at play right there. The impulse/move/need to resolve this is what keeps the system at play.

If you can really see this and settle into it, you can see how subtle and fully-formed this system is. Nothing is “safe”, so to speak. Even this article gets pulled into it as something to solve.

Addressing this requires disruption.

Disruption is the experience you don’t want. Because your system is practical, the kind of disruption I’m talking about often feels:

• Frustrating
• Unproductive
• Inefficient
• Pointless
• Listless
• Restless
• Boring
• Annoying

You might even feel an urge to set this piece down, and go and read something else. Or, maybe plug this into AI and ask it to synthesize the piece and provide you with a way forward.

Those answers provide diminishing returns, but they offer comfort and familiarity, and those things run counter to disruption.

This kind of disruption threatens what has worked for you the last few decades. It doesn’t look responsible, it doesn’t feel like progress, and so, it gets bypassed.

But, if you want to cross the threshold you find yourself at, this disruption is the work.

It’s not about doing more, knowing more, asking better answers of AI, putting better answers into process.

It’s about seeing what you’ve been operating inside of, and unfolding from that place — and this is only available when the system itself is interrupted.

When you’re held in a container where this kind of work is possible, life starts to transform.

Your results tend to be the last thing that shifts. On the other side of your system being disrupted, you relate to life differently and see new approaches.

You see possibility that was previously unavailable. You have more energy to meet life as it shows up, and stop trying to manage for the unexpected.

Your competency remains the same — but you expand the range in which that competency is applied, and this makes you into a leader that can:

Hold more tension

Create a wider range of results

Develop leadership in a wider-range of people

Create a more empowered experience of your life, regardless of how it looks in the moment

You’re already highly-competent and efficient. Those tendencies still work — you’re just seeing their limitations.

Life will just slowly continue to narrow.

Your range will narrow, your desire will continue to quiet, and life will operate efficiently and cleanly inside of those things.

This thing will keep working for you — the only difference is that you can now see it.

Sometimes people tell me, “I have to change this”.

But you don’t, and, further, you won’t, absent a choice.

Nothing forces this to change. The pattern persists, even as your circumstances may shift.

What changes this, is a moment.

That moment is the point where you get clear that staying inside this pattern is also a decision, and decide something different.