Managing in the Gray
28
We overlook this reality because we live in a world that
prizes leaders and views managers as second-class citizens.
Leaders, we hear so often, have visions of how things can
be, they captivate others with their passion and commitment,
and sometimes they change the world. In contrast, managers
keep the trains running on time. The conventional wisdom
says they are plumbers and mechanics. They run meetings,
create agendas, and do budgets. They are “the dull step-
children” of organizations.
18
One of today’s reigning clichés
puts the stereotype succinctly: leaders do the right thing, and
managers do things in the right way.
This cliché is badly misleading. It ignores the fact that the
great leaders of history were often effective managers who
got the process right. We remember Mohandas Gandhi,
Martin Luther King Jr., and Nelson Mandela for their gal-
vanizing speeches, heroic self-sacrifice, and the millions of
people they inspired. But serious biographies of great leaders
show they understood the importance of process. In meeting
after meeting, over months and years, they poured time and
energy into managing the movements and organizations that
amplified their impact on the world.
For example, we might have never heard King’s “I Have a
Dream” speech if he hadn’t spent weeks beforehand forging
a coalition of six fractious civil rights groups and organizing
what became the March on Washington.
19
In short, if many
of the great leaders had not been effective managers, we
wouldn’t know their names today. They succeeded because
they got the process right. Doing things in the right way is
usually the best way and often the only way to do the right
thing.
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What Are the Net, Net Consequences?
29
The basic task, for men and women facing gray area prob-
lems, is managerial. It is working on process. This means
trying to put aside initial feelings and intuitions about what
the right answer is and focusing instead about how to work
with and through other people to develop an answer.
Process does slow things down. But this is an advantage,
not a drawback. It reduces the danger of quick decisions made
in isolation. Time lets you and others think, listen, disagree,
and rethink. It can let unconventional options emerge. Time
lets people work together and carefully imagine second- and
third-order consequences. And time lets initial, emotional
reactions subside. Gray area issues demand patience, care, and
diligence—and these are often critical, given the challenge of
grasping the net, net consequences in gray area situations.
Get the Right People in the Room
A crucial part of getting the process right is having the
right people, with the right experience and expertise, fully
involved. Who are these people? The answer, of course, var-
ies from situation to situation. Some gray area problems have
to be decided quickly. If time is short and the stakes are low,
the right process is a brief, candid conversation with a sensible
colleague. At the other end of the spectrum, there are gray
area issues like the one Aaron Feuerstein faced, with layers of
complex strategic, organizational, and human issues. These
problems require a wide range of judgment and experience.
Who belongs in the room, when you are dealing with a
really complex gray area issue? Obviously, you want people
you know and trust. You need the views of individuals who
are honest, take their responsibilities seriously, and have the
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Managing in the Gray
30
right background for the kind of problem you face. And,
when you are trying to understand the net, net consequences
in a complex situation, you need people with a “feel” for how
things work in your organization and in the world.
An instinct for what may really be going on in complex
situations is a practical talent. Imagine, for example, an expe-
rienced neonatal nurse, working late at night in an intensive
care unit for premature infants. She looks over the monitors
that track the babies’ vital signs, and everything seems fine.
Then she looks at one of the infants, and his skin color seems
odd. Maybe it’s just the light, she thinks, but she feels some-
thing is off. She decides to alert the other staff, they exam-
ine the child, find a serious problem, and manage to save the
baby’s life. Imagine an experienced firefighter. He enters a
burning room with several other firefighters. Then he senses
something, tells his men to run from the room, and they
escape just before the floor collapses.
20
The nurse and the firefighter felt there was more to their
situations than met the eye, and they had developed this sense
through years of experience. Neither was relying on a rule or a
template. Both had knowledge and skills, but these were inter-
laced with practiced powers of observation and an aptitude for
discerning patterns within complexity.
21
Neither was a techni-
cian, and both took a humanist approach to their situations: they
relied on instincts honed by extensive, relevant, on-the-ground
experience. This helped them sense serious consequences when
others might have seen only complexity and uncertainty.
Such experts are actually all around us, but we usually don’t
realize it, because these everyday experts often don’t have the
standard degrees and résumés. Aaron Feuerstein had some
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What Are the Net, Net Consequences?
31
of these experts around him. His senior management team
had years of experience running the company, competing
hard for customers in the dog-eat-dog global textile mar-
ket and watching pennies in manufacturing. Over weeks or
months, they could have helped Feuerstein analyze and grasp
the all-in consequences of his options after the fire—in terms
of the competition, the company’s finances and economics,
alternative technologies, and the company’s legal obligations.
Unfortunately, Feuerstein overruled these experts when they
raised questions about his decision to rebuild the entire oper-
ation with state-of-the-art technology.
Pragmatic, everyday experts don’t have bright lights that
dispel all the gray. No one can do that. But, when you face a
gray area problem, these are the people you want to pull into
the process. And you find them by looking for them—ideally,
before the gray area problem lands on your desk. Look
around your organization and ask yourself: Who has a track
record of making prudent assessments in murky situations?
Who is good at framing or reframing situations in useful and
revealing ways? Who is willing to work on a team, learn from
others, and doesn’t need to be the star? Who has the trait Jane
Austen called “self-command”—so they are less likely to be
carried away by their own feelings or emotional contagions
spreading through a group?
22
These are the kind of people you
want in the room when you grapple with gray area problems.
Work on a Simple Decision Tree
How can you structure and focus your efforts, and the efforts
of everyone working with you, to understand the net, net conse-
quences? There is, of course, no single right approach, and much
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Managing in the Gray
32
depends on the specifics of situations. But, before you make a
final decision, you almost always have to take an important step.
You can describe the step in various ways—as looking at the big
picture, isolating critical trade-offs, recognizing the rock bottom
facts, or getting a view from the balcony—but these all amount
to the same thing. You need to clearly see what your basic options
are and the likely all-in consequences of each.
A valuable way to do this was sharply articulated more
than two hundred years ago by an obscure British minister,
but military commanders, merchants, and seafarers have
used versions of it since antiquity. The minister was Reverend
Thomas Bayes, who lived in rural England during the eigh-
teenth century. His approach has now evolved into sophisticated
decision-making theories and important areas of advanced
statistics, but his core insight is a remarkably simple and useful
way of distilling the net, net consequences of decisions.
Bayes directly addressed the two practical challenges to
understanding these consequences: none of us has a crys-
tal ball, and we do a poor job of thinking objectively. Bayes
knew this.
23
So he suggested that we stop trying to forecast
the future. Instead, he recommended that we see the future
as simply a range of possibilities.
To see what Bayes meant by this, imagine what he might
have said to Aaron Feuerstein: I have made my career as a
minister, and I understand personal tragedy. You and your
workers have suffered a catastrophic loss. I understand and
admire your urgent desire to help them and their families.
But you need to step back and really think through the many
possible consequences of your next steps. Because so much is
unknown and because you may be in the grip of powerful
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