A theme in my work with leaders is "zooming out and zooming in." You zoom out to obtain a broader view, and you zoom in to perceive the details. You zoom out to consider alternative means of problem-solving, or whether a problem is worth your time and energy, or whether it's even a "problem" at all. You zoom in to narrow your field of vision, to focus your attention, and to make things happen.
This is easy to describe in the abstract and difficult to put into practice. It's hard to determine the right altitude in any given situation. It's hard to reach the right altitude once you've made that decision. And in the heat of the moment it can be hard to even remember that different altitudes exist. You mistakenly believe your immediate view is the only view, and you forget that you have a choice.
What helps? A starting point is reminding yourself that you do have a choice, that your current view is influenced but not dictated by situational factors, and that you have--and must exert--agency to select the altitude that will enable you to achieve your goals most effectively. In this effort haste and urgency are rarely your friends, which is one reason why the impulse to hurry should often be interpreted as a signal to slow down. [1]
But having paused to identify the right altitude, how do you get there? How do you zoom in and out as needed? There's no single step that works for everyone in all circumstances, but here are some practices to consider:
Zooming Out
Perspective
It's easy to get stuck at a low altitude when facing a challenge. Envisioning a set of circumstances other than your own and locating yourself in that environment can afford you an entirely new perspective. This is one reason to read history as well as fiction--the travails of others, real or imagined, can make your own difficulties pale in comparison. [2]
You can also transport yourself to a future when your current circumstances will likely feel less pressing or even irrelevant. Look out a week, a month, a year, a decade--what do you think your most significant concerns will be at that point in time? Read an obituary and remember that you're mortal. Or simply bear in mind that in five billion years our Sun will become a red giant and engulf the Earth entirely. [3]
Transcendence
You can be so intensely attached to your subjective experience that you operate under the illusion that you're the "center of the world." [4] This aspect of human psychology benefits the species--when the self is so highly esteemed, self-preservation is of paramount importance. But it also makes it harder to transcend the self, to reach outside and beyond yourself in order to connect with something larger. [5]
All spiritual traditions offer a path to transcendence, which is one of the most important functions of a belief structure. [6] Time in nature and exposure to meaningful works of art can also trigger a sense of awe and wonder. But don't wait for a special occasion, such as a holy day, or a museum visit, or a trip to the Grand Canyon. There is magic in the mundane, when we're willing to see it.
Humility
Faced with a given situation, you rapidly construct an "explanatory narrative"--a story that you rely upon to make sense of what's happening and take appropriate action in response. Under most circumstances, your narratives are sufficiently accurate to enable you to make good choices, but not always. This isn't a character flaw--it's a predictable cognitive bias.
When you're feeling stuck at a low altitude, it's helpful to adopt a stance that philosophers describe as "epistemic humility," a heightened awareness of the limitations of one's knowledge. More specifically, remember that your explanatory narrative at any given moment is based on incomplete data, and there's almost certainly more to the story. [7]
Zooming In
Feelings
This refers both to emotions and to literal feelings--the physiological sensations that often precede or accompany your conscious awareness of an emotional state. Feelings aren't always accurate or justified, of course, and in some circumstances they're reliably "noisy signals." But being more attuned to your emotions can help you determine what merits your attention in a given situation and reach the appropriate altitude.
To be very clear, emotions are not unerring guides to right action, but they serve as "discriminant hedonic amplifiers," in psychologist Victor Johnston's phrase, enabling us to identify potential opportunities and threats while filtering out less relevant data. [8] The key is cultivating a capacity for emotion regulation, improving your ability to sense, comprehend, articulate and express what you're feeling. [9]
Focus
To achieve their intended purpose, emotions act as "attention magnets" by interrupting conscious thought and making it difficult to think of anything else. [10] This is a "feature" for the species that contributed to our ancestors' survival, but as individuals we often experience it as a "bug." Having leveraged your feelings to drop down to the right altitude, the next step is filtering out distractions in order to stay there.
This entails the ability to focus for sustained periods of time. You can enhance your capacity for focused thought by pursuing a mindfulness practice, among other techniques. [11] But it's equally important to observe your working environment, identify sources of distraction, and mitigate them, even if just on a temporary basis. [12]
Progress
As the great management thinker Peter Drucker noted, "Efficiency is concerned with doing things right. Effectiveness is doing the right things." [13] Zooming out helps you identify "the right things," while zooming in helps you "do things right." But particularly when you're in a leadership role, zooming in is a costly expenditure of attention, so it's essential to ensure that your time spent at this altitude is productive.
A dilemma is that you may confuse motion with progress, particularly if you're a new leader who was only recently an individual contributor, or if you're leading at scale (or leading leaders) for the first time. [14] Early in your career, or in the initial stages of your company's development, there may have been little difference between motion and progress--you just needed to get busy and keep at it. But eventually progress isn't measured by how many fires you put out, but by how many smoke detectors you've installed. [15]
Footnotes
[1] The Importance of Slowing Down
[2] For example, in Two Years Before the Mast (1840), Richard Henry Dana recounts his time at sea as a common sailor in the 1830s. On a voyage from California to Boston they rounded Cape Horn during the coldest months of the year, and Dana and his fellow seamen had to climb the rigging in the middle of freezing storms to furl the sails:
When we got upon the yard, my hands were so numb that I could not have cast off the knot of the gasket to save my life. We both lay over the yard for a few seconds, beating our hands upon the sail, until we started the blood into our fingers' ends... Mittens, too, we wore on deck, but it would not do to go aloft with them on, for it was impossible to work with them, and, being wet and stiff, they might let a man slip overboard, for all the hold he could get upon a rope; so, we were obliged to work with bare hands, which, as well as our faces, were often cut with the hail-stones, which fell thick and large. [pages 284, 290]
Or consider The Naked and the Dead (1948) Norman Mailer's novel about a island campaign in the Pacific theater during World War II, a story informed by Mailer's own experiences as an Army private. At one point a platoon is tasked with wheeling a set of artillery guns through the jungle by hand at night:
They had reached that state of fatigue in which everything was hated. A man would slip in the mud and remain there, breathing hoarsely, having no will to get to his feet. That part of the column would halt, and wait numbly for the soldier to join them... And they would labor forward a few more yards and halt. In the darkness, distance had no meaning, nor did time. The heat had left their bodies; they shivered and trembled in the damp night, and everything about them was sodden and pappy; they stank, but no longer with animal smells; their clothing was plastered with the foul muck of the jungle mud... [pages 138-39]
[3] Why the Sun Won't Become a Black Hole (Sara Frazier, NASA, 2019)
[4] We're Not the Center of the World (But We Think We Are)
[5] My favorite resource on transcendence is Character Strengths and Virtues, the 2004 volume by psychologists Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman that encompasses the research underlying the Values in Action Survey of Character Strengths. (See chapters 23-27.) In the VIA framework the overarching virtue of transcendence can be achieved through many different paths: appreciation of beauty, gratitude, hope, humor and spirituality:
At first glance, our final grouping of character strengths seems mixed, but the common theme running through these strengths of transcendence is that each allows individuals to forge connections to the larger universe and thereby provide meaning to their lives. Almost all of the positive traits in our classification reach outside the individual--character, after all, is social in nature--but in the case of the transcendence strengths, the reaching goes beyond other people per se to embrace all or part of the larger universe. [page 519]
[6] "A compelling reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship...is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things...then you will never have enough... Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly... Worship power--you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart--you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. The insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful--it is that they are unconscious. They are default-settings... And the so-called 'real world' will not discourage you from operating on your default-settings, because the so-called 'real world' of men and money and power hums merrily along on the fuel of fear and anger and frustration and craving and the worship of self." This Is Water, David Foster Wallace (2005)
[7] Seeing What Isn't There (The Importance of Missing Data)
[8] Why We Feel: The Science of Human Emotions, page 156 (Victor Johnston, 2000)
[10] To Stay Focused, Manage Your Emotions
[11] Don't Just Do Something, Sit There! (Mindfulness for Busy People)
[12] How to Think (More on Open Space and Deep Work) and The Most Productive People Know Who to Ignore
[13] Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices, page 44 (Peter Drucker, 1974 /1993)
[14] Confusing Motion with Progress
[15] The Problem with Fighting Fires
Photos: Night sky by GPA Photo Archive. Magnifying glass by Flood G.
