One may assume that everything is relevant, and it’s true. But not always.

It is also the ability to choose what is relevant when and for whom that makes leadership such an interesting challenge.

When guiding a team’s growth, the selection between relevant and not relevant is what makes the task challenging enough. Where enough means that well-reflected decisions that allow for conscious risk-taking are still possible.

When such decisions contain much more information than a team can integrate and put into context, assessing risks becomes too difficult. As a result, what is being trained is betting under risky circumstances.

Conscious risk-taking on the other hand is there to decide on an approach, choose interventions, and then observe how these materialize. The aim isn’t to predict a result, it is to be able to understand why things didn’t happen as planned and assess if the existing knowledge would have allowed to predict such an outcome and how.