Originally published on Medium on May 13, 2020.
One of the most important skills to cultivate if you want to be an effective leader across groups with multiple goals and perspectives (i.e. any human group) is to learn to separate observations from the narrative you build around those observations. That doesn’t mean forgoing your own narrative; you will have one. Rather, it means understanding that your narrative is just one of many that can be assembled from the observations at hand. (And that’s before you start to account for the fact that your observations generally account for a subset of all relevant observations.)
The separation is important for many reasons. One, it allows you to better listen to the concerns and narratives of those around you. Second, it gives you more flexibility and creativity to try on different narratives and see where they do and do not have better predictive and explanatory power. Finally, when you are not attached to your narrative you are better able to change it when it is no longer consistent with the observations.