Chapter 1How to Better Understand a Complex SituationTHE CHALLENGE
As a leader, you often need to get to the bottom of complicated issues that don’t have an obvious cause or conclusion. One week you’re trying to figure out why customers seem to prefer a competitor’s offering; the next, you need to root out the reason that your tech rollout has slowed to a crawl. And it’s often difficult to uncover what’s really going on, for a couple of reasons.
First, you can’t personally be everywhere at once. So to piece together a complete picture, you need your colleagues to tell you what they’re seeing and experiencing in their work—and, unfortunately, there’s a kind of gravitational distortion that skews information as it makes its way to the leader’s ears. In particular, research tells us that without direct encouragement, people tend to be wary of sharing bad news or difficult messages with their boss.
Then, even when important information does reach you, your brain subconsciously filters out some of it without you realizing. As we just learned, that’s because of the automatic prioritization process that your brain uses to manage cognitive load, and this selective attention mechanism is often helpful in filtering out irrelevant trivia. But it can also overzealously filter out useful information—so it really pays to understand how those filters work when you’re trying to get an accurate read on a situation. Here’s what you should know:
• Our brains tend to block out information that contradicts our existing point of view. We all zero in on evidence that confirms what we already believe, thanks to confirmation bias. When we’re forced to confront evidence that says we’re wrong, motivated reasoning can kick in, where our brain still finds ways to twist the information to fit with our existing beliefs (“Yeah, you see, that actually proves my point, because . . . I want it to”). And studies tell us that the more confident you are that you’re right, the more your brain tends to filter out contrary evidence.
• If we don’t have a strong initial view, we’ll tend to form one based on whatever data is easiest to wrap our heads around. We lean on information that happens to be close to hand—for example, because it’s in a publication we subscribe to. We give extra weight to something we heard recently, because it’s already fresh in our minds. And our brains are wired to find stories easy to remember, so a single anecdote can outweigh ten true-but-dull bits of data that point in the opposite direction. (Scientists refer to these findings as availability bias, recency bias, and narrative bias, respectively.)
• Then, however little information we have, we’ll be tempted to declare that it’s enough—rather than continuing to dig to understand deeper patterns. This is known as the illusion of information adequacy. One particular flavor of this is the way we often forget to set something we’ve just learned in a wider context—for example, by comparing it with averages or trends to see how unusual it is; this is known as base rate neglect.
So, what can we do to overcome these filters when we need to understand an issue? The answer is to adopt some information-gathering habits that deliberately widen our field of vision as leaders, so we can see more of what matters. It takes effort, but it’s worth it: Research shows these kinds of techniques really do improve executives’ chances of making sound judgments.
THE ROLE MODEL
Michael Roberts, Chief Marketing Officer at MetLife, is one of the most cognitively self-aware leaders I’ve met. He has an unusually clear grasp of what he knows and doesn’t know, and a knack for figuring out how to fill the information gaps he finds. He wasn’t born with that instinct, though. He says it really took shape in his twenties, when he made an unexpected career switch from opera singing into business. (Yes, you read that right.) Shifting track so dramatically meant putting in long hours to teach himself the language of markets, metrics, and management. “I had a lot to learn,” he says, “so I had to figure out how to process huge amounts of new knowledge in a way I could use right away.”
It was a steep learning curve, but it came with an unexpected upside. As Michael settled into his new field, he noticed that on several occasions his outsider’s eye allowed him to spot things his more seasoned colleagues missed. That was a surprise, and it made such an impression on him that he resolved to try to hold on to that rookie quality of open-mindedness and curiosity as much as possible—even as he grew into senior leadership.
And he’s done just that. He says, “I’ve got a lot of experience at this point in my career, and that’s helpful. But I’ve also developed a bunch of mental tricks that help me broaden and check my perspective whenever it matters, so I don’t get stuck in a single view of what’s going on. These tricks help me explore, sharpen, adjust—and let go when the evidence points in a different direction.”
He shares an example from his early days in a new role as Chief Marketing Officer, when he needed to work out what his top priority should be as CMO. For many newcomers to big corporate marketing jobs, he jokes, “the standard move is to propose a global brand refresh, take it to the board, and declare victory. That’s how CMOs often get applause.” But Michael held off, because he first wanted to understand what the company most needed from him. After some structured detective work, he discovered the priority was not at all what he expected. Rather than inventing a bold new vision, he urgently needed to fix the basics. “It turned out I needed to rebuild the marketing team’s fundamental capacity to deliver,” Michael says. “Figuring that out early on ended up being crucial to my success in the role.” Let’s understand what he did to uncover the real story.
Copyright © 2026 by Caroline Webb. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
