New Years can bring out two kinds of thinking: “out with the old, in with the new” (#NewYearNewMe) or “same old, same old” (#NewYearSameMe). Following A Surprising, Inspiring, Mind-Blowing Kinda Year, I am reflecting on what makes my work so enjoyable. While I expect to learn and apply new skills in 2022 (#NewYearNewFrameworks), I also want to recognize and deepen what has served me well to this point (#NewYearTrustedTools).

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the way obvious information is undervalued. Reflecting on what we do at Friday, I see how my team instinctively unpacks information that is obvious and necessary for clients. How leaders use this information has shown me the power of what’s-right-in-front-of-you to move an organization forward. Effective leaders recognize, question, and reinforce the obvious. In striving to become a better leader and strategist, I came up with a few takeaways that keep me connected to what’s in plain sight.

Effective leaders understand that what is obvious to some may not be obvious to everyone

As a leader, navigating strategic decisions can be daunting. Moving forward with assumptions based on what you think others know can leave you vulnerable to ineffective decision making. Without establishing and communicating what is “obvious”, you allow bias to limit options. Proceeding with what is only obvious to you can discourage input from team members. It can also prevent you from seeing other ideas that are right under your nose. Effective leaders must share what is obvious to them and invite what is obvious to others, creating space to align around what is obvious to “us.”

During a recent strategic planning engagement with a school founder and their team, the leader was reluctant to share their assumptions. They seemed to believe that what was obvious to them should be obvious to everyone else. By insulating their thinking from others, they were preventing the team from starting from the same set of information, ideas, and assumptions. The result was that everyone on the team was working with a different view of the challenge and its root causes.

Seeing problems differently is a good thing, but the more information we have about a problem — the more we share what is obvious to us and perhaps less obvious to others — the better our understanding of what we’re up against. In this particular case, the leader was moving an initiative forward with the false assumption that everyone was on the same page. This limited the team’s ability to consider truly innovative solutions rooted in a common understanding of the problem.

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This post was originally published on Medium in February 2022.

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