Finding a clear path – can you handle being confused? How effective leaders handle change

Confusion is the price we pay for charting a new way.

That is true whether you break from the traditions your family has lived for generations, as it is if you start a transformation project in a company, or if you immigrate to a new country to further your professional interests, or if you start a new company from scratch to solve an issue you feel strongly about.

Of course, the confusion is temporary, even if that temporary period can feel like it lasts forever. But confusion is uncomfortable and most people don’t like to feel uncomfortable.

That feeling of not having a blueprint, a playbook to follow, is incredibly exciting for some; as exciting as it is terrifying for everyone else.

Where do you fall on the 1 Terrified – 10 Excited scale when it comes to doing something you are confused about? Perhaps somewhere in the middle. Maybe you feel excited enough not to freak out but not excited enough to actively put yourself in those confusing, uncomfortable positions. Perhaps you can happily do something that deviates from the normal path but wouldn’t choose it on purpose.  

Or maybe you are like some of us; immigrants, founders, people who challenge the status quo and want to chart our own path in the world. People who actively push themselves forward towards the unknown, happily coping with and even embracing the confusion that is the natural part of the process.

Wherever you fall on this spectrum, what would interest me is this: What kind of people do you surround yourself with?

It seems to me that the ones driven to the unknown and the ones who like to follow a blueprint often don’t see eye to eye and are even terribly impatient with each other. You can see it within families (especially dysfunctional ones) but also in organisations, within and between teams. The restless ones who like to be confused in fact feel uncomfortable in the confines of set rules and paths they are expected to follow. Equally, the ones who uphold set structures and precedents feel very uncomfortable being forced to improvise and adapt to what they don’t understand. Neither is good or bad per se.

The middle ground is probably the happiest place, but I wouldn’t know. I am the restless one and have numerous friends at the other end of the scale. I also led organisations that desperately needed change but were mortally clinging to what they knew.

And that is really why this is important to talk about, beyond it being a curious condition of humans.

If an organisation needs change but the culture and the people are ossified in their ways and clinging to old processes and behaviours, even the slightest push into the “unknown” can cause an existential crisis. The confusion that comes with the process of change is intolerable in an ossified organisation. Even if the goal, the necessity, and the process are outlined properly, even if in theory everyone agrees it needs to happen – the confusion paralyses.

I still often wonder if simple communication in this instance is enough. My considerable first-hand experience, and the invisible scars on my back, say it is not.

I have only come to believe more strongly that some people are not suited to be in a changing organisation, especially if that change is fast and fundamental. It is just too brutal for them because the confusion this brings is intolerable. This is not an indictment, it is not to say they are bad or anything – it is purely an acknowledgement that companies are made up of people and different stages of an organisation’s life require not just different skills but different types of people.

Just look at startups. Anyone who founds, funds, or joins an early-stage startup will have to have a huge tolerance for confusion. The only way to build something from scratch is to try things, constantly, every day, and if that does not make your head spin I don’t know what would. Every single day of a good early-stage startup is completely different, with a potential for a complete pivot of activities, and the only people who survive and thrive in this environment are the restless ones who don’t mind being confused and are capable of just getting on with things even when they don’t know what the next step will look like.

An established, especially a long-established, organisation will be the exact opposite. There are well-honed processes and acceptable behaviours. Often