As a leader, there are many occasions when one has to keep the momentum up without knowing what one is doing. But what does this mean?

It is about getting started with an idea and having a sense of its importance. That is to have enough to leap and get started. That moment rarely is the moment when there is an official announcement! It starts way before, that is when an idea is there that makes one curious and establishes a desire.

The process then becomes to find oneself coming back to that idea and adding more and more to it until the desire has enough grounding to leap out of the mind and into action.

Somewhere in there, the team gets involved.

Some leaders will prefer a sense of knowing. They will describe the task with what they know and see that as a clear and sufficient indication. Sometimes, leaving what they don’t know in the hands of the team assuming that this is a sufficient way to delegate. On other occasions, they’ll be stepping into doing it together with the team assuming that this is helping them.

The desire to know makes it hard to step back and question the process as it happens or to take the time to assess what the process delivered. He may be very clear about the fact that there is learning happening on the journey. But he will prefer to see it as independent from his sense of knowing where the journey is going. It would feel like being without control of the situation.

That is when KPIs, OKRs, and other SMART goals just become abstract numbers instead of a way to measure progress or take a moment to see what has been achieved.

It can be hard for a leader to acknowledge, that he wasn’t clear about his idea himself. That he didn’t know what he was asking his team to achieve.