Good Sense
Business worships simplicity, but reality plays jazz. It’s messy, adaptive, alive — and it doesn’t care about your slide deck. Leaders who crave certainty end up over-managing what can’t be controlled. The ones who thrive learn to dance with complexity without losing rhythm. Good sense isn’t just logic; it’s wisdom with dirt under its nails.
Patterns I See
Binary thinking: Teams get trapped in either/or debates while the real opportunity lives in both/and.
Over-analysis: Leaders drown in data, mistaking information for insight.
Pattern blindness: People miss the signals because they’re too busy chasing the noise.
What Leaders Miss
Making sense isn’t about finding the answer — it’s about reading the terrain. Leaders are navigators, not engineers. You can’t blueprint your way through a storm; you can only interpret the wind.
Good sense comes from metabolizing complexity — taking in all the chaos, processing it, and responding with clarity and courage instead of panic. It’s embodied intelligence: seeing with your eyes, gut, and heart all at once.
Your job isn’t to simplify reality — it’s to stay present enough to see it whole.
Working With It
Stay curious under pressure. When everyone’s reacting, start observing. Pattern recognition begins with pause.
Map your blind spots. Use multiple senses — data, intuition, story, and symbol — to grasp what’s really happening.
Name the system, not just the symptom. Problems are rarely local; they’re relational.
Sense, then act. Wise leaders loop between reflection and movement — listening to what reality is saying before deciding what to do.
Questions Worth Asking
What’s actually happening beneath what’s happening?
What pattern keeps repeating that we keep renaming “new”?
What am I not noticing because it doesn’t fit my mental model?
Where might paradox be the point, not the problem?
Field Truth
Complexity isn’t chaos — it’s information waiting to be integrated.
Wisdom lives in those who can see the whole, feel the tension, and still move forward.
